Memetic Evolution and Progressivism

How communications technology destroys the world.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of memetics, I’d recommend reading the wikipedia article before this post.

There are two broad ways for memes to transmit: horizontal/viral and vertical/mitochondrial. Horizontal/viral is peer-to-peer (extreme example: antinatalism. Almost no one gets their antinatalism from their parents), vertical/mitochondrial is from parent to child, or previous generation to next generation (extreme example: Haredi Judaism. Almost every Haredi Jew is the children of Haredi Jews). Most memes have elements of both; for instance the vast majority of Muslims are Muslim because their parents were, but Islam is also a proselytizing religion. The balance between these two modes of transmission has important implications for the content of a meme.

Over time, mostly-mitochondrial memes tend to evolve to become symbiotic with the people they inhabit, like mitochondria, and for the same reason: they depend on the reproduction of those people/communities to spread. That means they tend to produce societies that can reproduce themselves, feed themselves, and are strong enough to defend themselves from (or conquer) other, competing societies with distinct memeplexes. In other words, functional societies. Mitochondrial memeplexes that produce highly dysfunctional people or societies get selected out and go extinct (see: the Shakers, an antinatalist Christian sect in the US).

The Amish memeplex is overwhelmingly mitochondrial; almost no one converts to Amishness. Its success is dependent on the success of the Amish.

Much like actual viruses, viral memeplexes have no need to help their hosts, because they spread among unrelated people rather than parent to child. Principally viral memes will happily stop you from reproducing (trans ideology), convince you to go to war with far stronger opponents (Nazism), or starve you to death (Xhosa cattle killing). Smallpox doesn’t care about you and neither does LGBT ideology; both are just using you to spread to their next host. Principally viral memeplexes don’t optimize for functional people or societies, they optimize for virulence/transmissibility. Because there are tradeoffs between virulence and functionality, where more virulence means less functionality or vice versa, extremely viral memes evolve towards creating ever more dysfunctional people/societies.

Antinatalism is worse for you (from a Darwinian perspective) then Ebola, and for much the same reason: its success has nothing to do with your success.

Just as viruses can become more virulent by simply increasing viral multiplication (Delta variant of COVID), causing coughing or sneezing (most respiratory viruses), creating diarrhea (cholera), or altering behavior to favor viral spread (the flu), there are many ways for memes to become more virulent. The most obvious is to sound good to people. This might sound OK, but just as food optimized for tasting good (highly processed junk food) or drugs optimized for feeling good (fentanyl) are not good for you, ideas optimized for sounding good are not likely to be good for you. Hijacking and appealing to basic human urges like tribalism (Nazism) or envy (communism) will sound great to a lot of people, but are ultimately disastrous. But there are other ways to be virulent as well: intolerance towards competing memeplexes (eg early Christianity vs paganism, or Wokeness vs Classical Liberalism) to crush competitors rather than convince them, or optimizing for taking over institutions that have the “cultural high ground” (education, academia, journalism, entertainment, social media) can both increase virulence without making the memeplex more convincing. Sometimes, multiple elements of a memeplex will work together to make the whole thing more virulent without becoming more convincing; consider the Progressive mantra to “Trust the Experts'' or “Trust the Science.” By themselves, these are not particularly virulent memes; “Trust your Priest,” or “Have Faith” have historically been much more convincing. But when combined with the overwhelming dominance of academia and the credentialing apparatus by the Left, these memes make the whole leftist memeplex more virulent. 

We are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. Just because something seems good to us does not mean it is good for us.

The memetic environment of the preindustrial past generally favored mitochondrial transmission over viral transmission because communication between peers was slow. It took centuries for Christianity to take over the Roman Empire, and a big chunk of that was through sheer natural increase (mitochondrial). This meant that memeplexes had to be at least somewhat mitochondrial to last long, because they simply couldn’t transmit quickly enough to survive if they destroyed their hosts, no matter how virulent they were. Technological advances like the printing press, telegraph, radio, universal literacy, television, the internet, and social media have massively sped up communication and interconnection, favoring viral memeplexes. Thanks to social media, anyone in the world who is literate in English and has an internet connection can now transmit memes to billions of other people. It’s the memetic equivalent of a 19th century urban slum with no sewers or sanitation. 

The epidemiological equivalent of social media. Just as social media led to Wokeness, unsanitary urban slums led to repeated outbreaks of horrific infectious diseases.

This explains the link between social media and the Great Awokening: the memetic environment created by social media massively empowered viral memes, leading to “wokeness,” the most recent incarnation of progressivism and an incredibly virulent and dysfunctional memeplex that has taken over the world. The other checks on viral memes getting too dysfunctional, intergroup conflict and Malthusian constraints, are also effectively gone due to nuclear weapons and the industrial revolution. This is why Christian heresies very similar to modern Progressivism (Shakers, Cathars, Bogomils, Fifth Monarchists, Diggers) are common throughout European history, but nothing like Progressivism ever really took off until the environment became much more favorable to viral memes.

Putting it all together, a memetic environment with more or less free competition which strongly favors viral over mitochondrial transmission and in which Malthusian and conflict constraints are removed (like that of the United States from the destruction of speech codes in the ~1960s to the rise of political correctness in the ~1990s) will lead to the development of an extremely virulent viral memeplex that renders its hosts utterly dysfunctional and eventually destroys them as it optimizes for ever more virulence at the expense of its hosts’ functionality. Today, this is the memeplex known as Progressivism or Wokeness, an ideology that valorizes and promotes every form of human dysfunction, from criminality to stupidity to mental illness to sterility to obesity. For some examples of dysfunction on both an individual and societal level, see what trans ideology does to people, or a graph of global TFRs, or what’s happened to San Francisco over the past couple decades. The collapse of civilization, or possibly the extinction of humanity, are the inevitable result of free speech + lots of food + social media. 

The results of runaway Progressivism in a city that brain-drained the entire world. What do you think it will do to your community?

You thought I was kidding about extinction? One third of American Gen Z IDs as LGBT, and that number is only going up. Given that straight sex is necessary to reproduce and TFR is already well below replacement, this is not good.

Seriously! Even India went below replacement fertility in 2021. Out of First World, anglophone, strongly-internet-connected countries, only Israel is above replacement thanks to its large highly religious population.

I can see two possible solutions (without the replacement of humanity by machines, which is a different risk). One is to go full Ted Kaczynski and restore the past memetic environment by destroying modern technology, which has obvious problems in terms of both feasibility and desirability. The other is a modern Church, one that intentionally slows down the process of memetic evolution, probably via (formal or informal) blasphemy or heresy laws. If the idea of heresy/blasphemy laws disturbs you (it should, at least a little), consider that Progressivism already has them. De jure in most of the world (hate speech laws), de facto in the US (try posting the mainstream position on gay marriage from twenty years ago under your own name, and see what happens to your employability. Do it too loudly and you’ll also get kicked off social media and lose access to basic services like payment processors). Because the most intolerant wins, Classical Liberalism is not a stable state and will always get beaten by a less tolerant memeplex. In Weimar Germany, this was Nazism. In the Anglosphere, and thus almost the entire world, it’s Progressivism. There are two reasons why Progressivism’s own blasphemy/heresy codes don’t stop the ever increasing virulence and dysfunctionality of the Progressive memeplex. The first is that Progressivism’s blasphemy codes only point in one direction: “no friends to the Right, no enemies to the Left,” and so being more Progressive than society is generally acceptable. Contrast this with, for instance, Stalin, who attacked those both left and right of him and thus froze Soviet ideological evolution. The second is that Progressivism is open, decentralized, and highly mutable. Anyone can be a Progressive and come up with new ideas that radicalize the memeplex further. That means what’s considered Progressive shifts constantly and ever more rapidly (look at the shift on trans ideology over the past decade; from “basically ignored” to “openly promoted in public schools and you get canceled if you object”), allowing for constantly increasing virulence/dysfunctionality. There’s no “scripture” (Torah, Talmud, Bible, Koran) to anchor the memeplex, nor is there a Pope (Catholicism) or Caliph (early Islam) or General Secretary (Communism) who can say “this far, and no further,” which makes Progressivism incredibly unstable. To save ourselves we need a new societal ideology, a new memeplex that occupies the role Progressivism does today that is relatively stable (perfect stability is both impossible and undesirable), creates functional people/societies, and is capable of preserving itself. We Need a New Religion.

Related Reading: 

Evolutionistx’s original post on mitochondrial memes.

Roko Mijik’s twitter thread comparing feminism to a hostile, self-assembling super intelligence. 

Spandrell on needing a new religion.