Governed by the Memes
Capital Thinking • Issue #723 • View online
What we have in the wilds of Fairfield County, Connecticut (and I suspect in every exurb in the country), is a large population of wealthy people who for a variety of reasons want to live closer to nature, but are scared to death of nature! … the memes that infect our brains about the risky parts of nature, memes like Lyme disease! or rabies! or coyotes!.
It’s not that these aren’t actual dangers.
Lyme disease is a real thing and a real risk. So is rabies. So are coyotes.
But our social lives aren’t governed by the actual risks of the real-life things. They’re governed by the memes.
They’re governed by the metagames.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Here’s the most powerful animal on our farm — a deer tick, well embedded, gorging itself on human blood.
Of course, it’s not the tick itself that is so powerful, but the Lyme disease it can transmit, caused by a spirochete bacterium named Borrellia burgdorferi, pictured below.
As you probably know, Lyme is a terrible disease, difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat once established.
Once transferred via tick saliva, the wormlike burgdorferi bacteria quickly spread throughout the human host, particularly into joints, the heart and the brain. From there, the bacteria cause symptoms including intense arthritic pain, palsy and paralysis, loss of memory and extreme fatigue.
Our immune systems typically fail to create the necessary antibodies to fight the infection, due to both the antibody-suppressing qualities of tick saliva and the antibody-hiding qualities of burgdorferi.
And in a process still not entirely clear but suspected to be connected to an autoimmune failure spurred by burgdorferi, these crippling symptoms can persist for years, even after all of the bacteria have been killed through aggressive therapy.
This is a potent parasite, and if you’ve lived for any length of time in Connecticut, you surely know at least one family that has been hit hard by a tick-borne disease.
But Lyme disease isn’t the reason that the deer tick is the most powerful animal on our farm.
No, it’s not Lyme disease. It’s Lyme disease!.
Huh?
Lyme disease is a physiological ailment caused by bacteria and injected into your body by ticks.
Lyme disease! is a mental ailment caused by words and injected into your mind by humans.
Lyme disease!
It is the IDEA of Lyme disease. It’s the mental construction of a world where Lyme disease and the bloodthirsty deer ticks and the grotesque burgdorferi bacteria are EVERYWHERE, an omnipresent threat to you and your children.
Lyme disease! is an infectious meme, in the true and powerful meaning of the word, not the ha-ha cartoonized meaning that we see every day on social media.
Memes are self-sustaining ideas that live in the human brain. They are as alive as any bacteria or virus, and they infect every aspect of our social lives.
What do I mean?
I mean that families infected with the meme of Lyme disease! don’t allow their children to hike or play in our woods.
I mean that the meme-infected next door neighbors have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to wall off — literally wall off, including river barriers — their 20+ acres from all animal life that can’t fly.
I mean that we have been sued — literally sued — by meme-infected parents who thought their child might have “caught rabies” (not Lyme, but close enough) from petting our dog some hours after the dog found a dead raccoon. No, I’m not making this up.
And just wait. I can promise you that I’ll get “well, actually” emails from meme-infected readers of this note.
What we have in the wilds of Fairfield County, Connecticut (and I suspect in every exurb in the country), is a large population of wealthy people who for a variety of reasons want to live closer to nature, but are scared to death of nature! … the memes that infect our brains about the risky parts of nature, memes like Lyme disease! or rabies! or coyotes!.
It’s not that these aren’t actual dangers. Lyme disease is a real thing and a real risk.
So is rabies. So are coyotes.
But our social lives aren’t governed by the actual risks of the real-life things.
They’re governed by the memes.
They’re governed by the metagames.