i wonder when and how societies will cease to be schocked by the darkness that lies within the human psyche.

we willfully ignore the violence and hatred and possibility for doing harm onto ourselves, the environment and others both physically and mentally, this thing that lies within ourselves, in the foolish belief that if we don't acknowledge it, maybe it goes away.

then this darkness spews out at the seams, in a fermented, repressed and sneaky manner. sometimes as memes, sometimes as sexism, sometimes as outright war. it mutates, it has a life of its own, and spreads like wildfire once it figures out the right buttons. just like memes.

pretending its not there doesnt help. pretending it shouldnt be there doesnt either. the best thing that i believe one can do is acknowledge that it is a part of the human psyche, because only then you can learn to recognise it before it spreads too much, first and foremost in ourselves. master it, lest it masters you.

but as long as we recognise harm to be only what other people do to themselves or onto others, like scared children that hope the bad things go away when you close your eyes, for all our technicall prowess, we will forever be, idiots.

memes catch on because they are far more scary than what lies in the emotional mirror. standard packetized bitesized pieces of emotion that go in front of our eyes to the giant /dev/null bucket in the sky. manageable. even the horrible ones, are far more manageable than the things you find out you are capable of, morally.

@mnin @Andrei Cociuba Your comments have taken this thread in a real interesting direction which resonates quite deeply with me. I grew up in an extremely privileged position, and being insulated from overt violence made it very easy to swallow the idea that violence is necessarily evil and that Western democracies are doing a good job mostly suppressing it. Obviously that's not an outlook that survives the real world for very long, and based on my own experiences over the past few years I entirely buy the idea that memes can help steer one's political philosophy. Personally I found myself at the edge of and nearly venturing down the NRx/alt-right rabbit hole, primed by a culture which valued, among other things, memes and free speech absolutism as a core value. Ultimately I was unable to handle the gender/race essentialism permeating that space and was forced to reevaluate the rest of my worldview which had led me to that point.

As of now I'm trying to break my conditioning, as it were, by reading more and longer-form works. But recently I've been feeling critical of that approach as well, as big-L Western Liberalism seems to overvalue knowledge by itself. Two questions I'm pondering, semi-connected.

1. The world is highly connected, perhaps to a far greater degree than a hundred years ago thanks to the Internet. What ought my threshold be to stop learning about who I'm connected to and actually act? What's the effective level of synthesis between awareness of my impact and action?
2. Violence is not inherently evil, and it also exists in far more forms and greater magnitude than I was once aware. Where in the world is bad violence being performed in my name, and how can I stop it? Would it be useful to break my instinctive distaste for violence and personally perform some kind of productive violence?

To bring it back to the original thread, I've found that memes tend to provide overly simple answers to those questions, especially on the right where said answers often depend on stereotypes. Competing memes also seem overly simple, though in a way I'm not really able to define. Yet I can't deny the impact all kinds of memes have had on my thinking. Propaganda is a good word for it.

Only very tangentially related, but I was tickled that Lucy Dacus mentioned memes when I went and read this interview from today. I think there's something to the way-of-being-today way she describes Twitter which partially explains how memes are especially effective in communities of very online young men. Again speaking personally, memes can essentially be a parroting of someone else's way-of-being-today without having a well-established identity of one's own.

The first question was about my inclination to learn for its own sake. Memes tend to amplify this as I can process them quickly and uncritically.

The second is about how globally connected we are even when we don't realize it. You mentioned food being connected with nationalism which got me thinking about how my coffee consumption contributes to exploitation of producers in Central/South America and Africa.