Via Metafilter, could something like this work? (There’s some potentially objectionable language in there for those who are sensitive to that kind of thing.)
I’m not sure how effective a video like this would really be, but I like where it’s going. Increase your own good memes for a better, healthier, more productive you. A sensible idea. I wonder if we don’t need something like this on a global scale.
I mean, isn’t the War on Terror ultimately a memetic war? The self-replicating extremist Islamic ideas of worldwide Jihad and restoration of the Caliphate are up against the self-replicating Western ideas of political and religious liberty, equality of the sexes, etc. Or, depending on your ideological frame of mind (that is to say, your memes) the self-replicating Western ideas of hegemony and imperialism are up against the self-replicating developing-world ideas of cultural identity and independence.
Which ideas will win out? Those that are morally superior? Probably not. At least not because they’re morally superior. Those that are most viable? That’s more likely, but it depends on what you mean by “viable.” Memetic theory tells us that memes (like the selfish genes of Richard Dawkins’ book of the same name) win out based on their ability to reproduce themselves. From a meme standpoint, a typical chain-letter pyramid scam is more viable than, say, a marketing campaign to raise AIDs awareness. Celebrity gossip and urban legends have a lot more going for them memetically than boring (but useful) information about things like safety, nutrition, sound investment strategies, etc.
So from that standpoint, who’s got the better memes (going back to that first dichotomy) — the West with our individual liberty and separation of church and state, or the Islamic extremists with their certainty of glorious victory and paradise for the heroic martyrs? Both sets of ideas are pretty compelling and have an excellent record of reproducing themselves. A problem for the West is that some of our memes have evolved variations at odds with the original ideas. Tolerance of individuals — which is essential to guaranteeing individual liberty and dignity — has evolved into tolerance of cultures — which perversely means not speaking out against societies that deny individual liberty and dignity to their citizens. This is how supporters of feminism, gay rights, and religious diversity can sometimes find themselves unable to criticize (or worse yet, effectively “on the same side” as) radical Islamists who want to create a society in which people who care about those issues would be permanently silenced (interesting reading here, here, and here).
From a memetic standpoint, this could be disastrous. If it isn’t careful, the tolerance meme is going to reproduce
itself out of existence. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, amongst the large majority of believers who are neither terrorists nor extremists, there are well-established self-replicating ideas in place about how Muslims ought to stick together and never oppose other Muslims. So while the Western meme-set is evolving antidotes to itself, the extremist Islamic meme-set is free to grow unhindered.
Ultimately, the fact that the West is militarily superior might not matter that much. Our memes can lose to their memes if theirs spread to us and we begin to reproduce them ourselves (which seems extremely unlikely on a large scale, although there have been fictional attempts to portray such a world) or if ours continue to evolve away from being in opposition to theirs, which is what has happened to some extent with the tolerance meme.
Of course, there are many different ways this conflict of memes could be resolved. The cultural tolerance meme is an active variation, but it isn’t the only one out there, and it’s in competition with other views. And the side with the best weapons could win out memetically simply by eliminating enough of the enemy to make sure that there are few if any left to reproduce their memes — think of it as an apocalyptic version of Taranto’s Roe Effect.
Another possible resolution to the meme war involves what Jerry Pournelle calls our cultural weapons of mass destruction. The thinking there is that Western popular culture contains even more potent memes than extremist ideology. We know that our popular culture contains more potent memes than our own ideologies, which is why more people tune into Desperate Housewives than read PowerLine and Daily KOS combined. In Pournelle’s model, Western pop culture can act as a kind of Trojan horse, bringing less viscerally exciting ideas like individual liberty along for the ride with all the flash and sex.
Western television, movies, and pop music then become a sort of global version of the video we started with — a tool for reprogramming its consumers with beneficial memes. Again, I don’t know if it could work, but it sure sounds like a better choice than the alternatives.