Why are memes so effective with the Right?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ah, yes. November. Time is steadily ticking away as we get ready to enter the death phase of the northern hemisphere’s seasonal cold period. I’ve been chipping away at yard work, cutting back roses and sages and flowering bushes so that they may grow with gusto in Spring. In between clipping and chopping I’ve been taking breaks watching the NFL’s RedZone, enjoying the constant pinging of my bucket with rapid fire dopamine hits of big plays, touchdowns, and fools gettin’ blown the “F” out.

And then it dawned on me. Us humans really, really respond well to tightly packaged messages that produce a highlight reel of emotions and imagery. We’re built for imagery more than language, as language is a recent evolutionary development. We’re built for memes.

In my former life as a military man, it wasn’t uncommon for the fellas to share memes with one another over our unclassified and classified systems. It became so pervasive and problematic we had to block large swaths of the Internet, give classes on malware, and reiterate standards of professionalism that didn’t include sharing pictures of a woman ass in air with a bull balls deep in her pooper. For whatever reason operators found that sort of thing hilarious, and preferred surfing porno sites over finishing their online training blocks.

Go figure.

Anyway. Here I am watching the NFL and it dawned on me there’s a synergy between the brain and imagery where simple images with simple messages seemingly find far more fertile ground in the Conservative mind than the Liberal one. It’s such a well-known phenomenon amongst Rightists that “the Left can’t meme” has become a meme itself.

So. Now my poor attempt at memetics, which is nothing more than woo. I admit it. It’s woo, but I have a working woo theory. It’s one part Law of Attraction (I told you this is woo), one part psychology (still woo), and one part atheistic pessimism.

Ok, we know mass psychology is a thing. Marketers and political operatives had this figured out years ago. But what is consciousness? Does it manifest at the quantum level? Well. Here's my best guess: Consciousness is itself an energy field. We're all just energy and forces at the quantum level. Every human being's brain is tapping into that field, and that's what you are; your subjective state is essentially the universe's imagination of you. Thoughts have literal, physical (whatever that means at the quantum level) power and can alter the way that quantum particles arrange themselves -- this is unproven scientifically, of course, but this is my woo, and through things like the observer's effect we literally affect one another by simply observing one another.

The effect is more powerful, if more people are thinking the same thing, and believing in the same inevitability; so, when you spread a meme, specifically, a meme that contains a specific prediction, you're literally affecting timelines and altering the course of the future. The more the meme is spread around, the more power it will have. This is what a collective will power is - it's the collective consciousness impacting reality. This is what the Law of Attraction is, a mind virus that becomes more potent as more and more people are infected until reality is bent to the collective's will.

So, what is the modern meme, really, today? Back in the day people used sigils for all sorts of stuff. A sigil is literally just a symbol, that contains the "will" of its creator, which was imposed on others through religion, magic, whatever woo-y way people did woo back in the day. But, in its most basic purpose, the sigil was a clever manipulator loaded with connotations, moods, and ideas which when people would see it, would reflect their own thoughts and actions onto it, and from it. It was an information exchange meant to manipulate people and to be manipulated by people. Modern sigils are nothing more than corporate brands and logos control a person's emotions and thoughts through symbolism. Throughout recorded human history humans have used sigils to connect, very deeply, to their existential realities, however dim and muddled they may have been. They used this kind of branding to express themselves from an ancient, evolutionary era, where imagery is THE most powerful form of communication to the human psyche.

One sec as I watch more football and try to bridge the gap between what's bouncing around my dome and why memes are so goddamn effective on dim people, or for more practical purposes - Trumplicans.

[Some Schmo]

Memes are simple - they work on simple minded people. A meme won't work if it's too complex; therefore, they rarely say anything meaningful or convey literal truth.

People are more loyal and useful when they don't think too much for themselves. This is how religions thrive, and that's why the GOP base persists. People will absorb a comfortable lie way faster than an unpalatable truth.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Aight. Finishing up my thought.

Memes themselves are typically an “idea, behavior, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person... often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon”. They are NOT the pictures you see that are the vehicles for these memes. Those are modern day sigils. Memes require their own sigil or branding to create a subconscious link in the minds of people and the idea, or meme, that requires spreading by the creator. The pictures you see spread around Facebook by your Boomer uncle or grandma are just the sigils acting as unifying symbols of the memes exposing the Right’s civnat nu Republicanism - a sort of nationalism blended with anarchist capitalism underpinned by ideas of family, God, and country.

These sigils strike at the heart of our evolutionary fallibility as humans because nature spent billions of years encoding our central nervous systems to react to visual stimuli, not wordy treatises and manifestos. Our brains are meant to see something, assess it in a split second, and then generate an emotional response that’ll generate a physical response. In fact, one of the memes that’s floating around alt-right circles is that when the Left creates a meme (or more accurately a sigil), they tend to put too many words in it, thus making it ineffective because people aren’t going to read it.

In other words, memes that are spread through simple sigils, something that can be assessed and felt within a second or two, is most effective with people who are wired in a such a way where abstract reasoning and asymmetrical thinking are lacking. Why does Trump do so well with the Right? He speaks like them. He thinks like them. He reasons like them. He isn’t playing 4d chess, he’s truly wired in a way that people understand. And when he speaks in memes, they get it. When he creates daily magical sigils through Twitter, they get it, are acted upon, and in turn act upon it - hence so many insane replies and retweets.

Memes are shorthand for thinking, and their sigils are shorthand for communicating. This is why they do so well on the Right, because they don’t require anything beyond instant recognition, confirmation bias, and ease of transference. I think memes and their sigils are the modern equivalent of religious incantations or rites, and a cross. Trumplicans are cultists, whether they understand that or not is irrelevant, and enjoy the bond a religious community used to offer - identity, commonality, symbolism, miraculous artifacts, and divine worship. Our long history of religions and the use of sigils has been replaced by politics manifested through memes and crap posting on social media - crusades, jihads, divine war, all of it is now quickly waged on Facebook by grandpa, without the downside of death or dismemberment.

- Doc

[subgenius]

The irony found in posters who thrive on snark but also want to denigrate memes is not lost. Memes, though simple, are not exclusive for the simple minded. The "one liner" is hardly a phenomenon. The left seeks to dismiss it only because they are mostly lousy at it...but yet they still attempt it. Perhaps your thought experiment should focus on why pseudo-intellectual arrogance is incapable of meme-ing.
Since you profess to be so smart, perhaps you forgot about incongruity theory spiced with brevity.
But yeah, Youngman, Dangerfield, Wright, Francis, Carr, and even Hedberg...all simpletons in your book, now that's funny.

[Gadianton]

The left seeks to dismiss it only because they are mostly lousy at it

I don't think you're right about this, subgenius. Let's go back to Dr. Cam's OP title: Why are memes so effective with the Right?

The question is why the Right is so easily influenced by memes, not why they are so good at creating them. I mean, seriously, are you going to argue that being easily influenced by a witty one-liner or creative image is the hallmark of personal enlightenment?

I'm about laughing here out loud thinking about that. Subgenius and Ajax bragging about how easily they've been brainwashed by creative sound-bytes. lol. seriously dude.

But what about meme creation? Are certain right-wingers masters at creating witty sayings and quirky images such that they effectively brainwash their peers?

I'd say, no.

While it is true that Trump is sustained by memes, even he isn't a master at creating them. I extend "meme" to cover any kind of sound-byte intended to go viral for the sake of gaining allegiance (as I believe Subgenius does also). Trump tries to "go viral" all the time, and fails. It's others in the background doing the heavy lifting for him. For instance, this whole thing about the Whitehouse declaring victory over coronavirus was meant as a publicity stunt to go viral, and it failed. Sure, people agree with it, but they aren't rallying behind it anymore than they already were. "Fire Fauci" is a reasonably good one. Is that good for you Subgenius? When a crowd chants "Fire Fauci" do you feel hopelessly persuaded that Fauci must be fired? If you do, then I guess you're right, it's a great meme but you're a fool. If you don't, then you're not a fool, but the meme failed. So it looks as if you've put yourself into a fork.

Trump didn't make that one up, the one about Fauci. His base kind of looks over what he does and circles around certain aspects of it, and some of these just materialize.

So, is his base creative?

Let me ask you this: are the billions of music listeners out there "creative" because they decided that Despecito is the greatest song of all time?

Certainly, somebody out there has created a meme and influenced somebody on the Right, and so that person must be creative.

The first "memes" the Right clinged to came in the form of simple-minded emails. I got one of these in the 90's, when I was by default a Republican (and a BYU econ grad who believed in free markets, unlike today's conservatives), and I thought it was mildly clever and forwarded it to a Democrat neighbor who got totally pissed off at me for it.

Those were driven in part by the simple messages and artwork, and in part by this incredible idea of "pass this to whoever you know and lets see how many times it goes around the world". Techno-tard conservatives thought it was really cool that an email could pass through so many ship ports. What was this "email" thing anyway?

Who knows who did the first artwork for those kinds of memes, because 20 years later, older conservatives still circulate modified versions of these original emails from decades ago. Per subgenius, it's a great mental feat to be continually reinforced in your life philosophy by decades of recycled emails.

But the NextGen memes are a little different. The ones really influencing Republicans today come from free-speech websites 4chan and 8chan. The creativity here isn't from the minds of staunch republicans, but the minds of repressed and angry teenagers looking to cause trouble. They're going for maximal shock value: it's a big competition in the land of free speech as to who can say the most outrageous things. So these counter-culture teenagers one day are posting anti-semitic stuff that's cold and cruel -- how do you top that? Well, perhaps with some child porn? How about a red room? And then, the same brains inventing these social shockers come up with political stunts; one of which got lucky and went viral - QAnon. Are you taking credit for this stuff, subgenius? Are your EV ministers the inventors? Tell us more, if so!

These memes, the results of unbridled free-speech and trolling, loosely connect with the right-wing narrative and start integrating as God-like inspiration. Now there are Congress-persons who believe QAnon is real. There are Congress-persons who have used 4Chan anti-Semite images to promote themselves: Don't let Soros keep winning!

The creativity credit goes to the underground trolling inventors without real commitment to anything in the world. The "easily influenced" credit goes to the Republican party. Sure, it's a win-win scenario in a lot of ways, if you want to brag about that. If you're looking for the prequel to 1984, look no further. You're inventing it. But the lingering question is if you can control it, and I don't think you can. Once you put the dictatorship in place, we'll see if all the right-wing grandkids are benefiting. Already, a right-wing family in my neighborhood just benefited by losing their 8-year-old kid to coronavirus. The parents are (were) rabid Trump supporters on Facebook, anti-mask and all the rest, and came down with it and passed it to all their kids, who tested negative, originally. But, you probably don't have anyone you care about, so who cares? Let the fire burn and laugh yourself to the grave watching it.

[canpakes]

** eloquently articulates subs’ self-own **

Alternately, if scrolling is difficult for the intended recipient:

[subgenius]

The left seeks to dismiss it only because they are mostly lousy at it

INSERT WORDY AFFIRMATION-VIA-EXAMPLE HERE

Yeah, brevity is most effective on dumb people...thanks for being long winded with your condescension, so refreshing, and so much better than a punchline.

I can only guess that you completely sidestepped the point whereas, to you and Doc, "effective" means stupid because that's all it could mean, to you and Doc.

[Moksha]

Some years back, conservatives became stoked on memes when they read, "I can has Cheezburger?"

[Gadianton]

I didn't say "stupid", subs, I said "easily influenced".

Cam wondered why the religious right is so easily influenced. He didn't wonder why they were "so good at creating memes". It is you who sidestepped.

As my long-winded response showed, the religious right isn't that great at creating memes. They are good at being suckered by them. A good friend of mine -- who I mentioned in another post -- at one time had a NASA scholarship. He is one of those individual who a) sucks at creating his own memes b) is easily influenced by memes c) has a high native intelligence.

[canpakes]

INSERT WORDY AFFIRMATION-VIA-EXAMPLE HERE

Yeah, brevity is most effective on dumb people...thanks for being long winded with your condescension, so refreshing, and so much better than a punchline.

Then, credit goes to Gad for trying not to pander to your base capabilities, but he was apparently too optimistic.