 Some people tell me that I should take a break from creating dank memes, get off my phone, and just look at the world around me. And keep on trying to tell them, seeing is for meming. So if you haven't watched this thunk episode on populism, it's about seven solid minutes of interesting analysis on a global political phenomenon and its implications. And it ends with this throwaway line that I didn't even write into the script. Would you punch a Nazi in the face? Given how much of the discussion about that episode thus far has been a response to that question alone, I've figured that we should talk about it in earnest. The question is a snarky reference to the on-camera punching of white nationalist and advocate for racial purity, Richard Spencer, as he was attributing President Trump's victory in the election to the campaign work of his merry band of racists. Spencer has claimed not to be a Nazi, but if it looks like a duck, hiles like a duck, and advocates for racial cleansing like a duck. The event has become a serious talking point with vehement opinions on all sides of the issue. Tribalism, politics, PC culture, free speech, morality, racism. This was practically engineered in a lab to go viral, which is actually part of what I wanted to talk about. You've probably heard the word mean before, most frequently used to refer to these dank images, which are posted and reposted all over the internet. Funny or nonsensical pictures, which all express a common pattern or theme. However, the word mean, as originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, has a much broader definition than just silly internet picture, one which is based on Dawkins' innovative way of thinking about evolutionary genetics. We're used to looking at individual creatures as sort of the base level unit of consideration in biology, like a tree or a dog. Get a bunch of those units together and you have a pack of dogs. Look inside one and you have the organs of a dog or the cells and DNA of a dog. Dawkins suggested that we might instead use a different base level unit of consideration, that of genes. In this view, individual creatures are really just vehicles for DNA to drive around and all the myriad interactions between life on earth are really just different ways of genes competing evolutionarily. So you have gene A and gene B. They both rat themselves in cells, organize those cells into organs, organize those organs into creatures, maybe organize those creatures into groups and when everything is said and done, you have a pride of lions fighting a pack of hyenas. Of course, the individual creature's view is still a valid way of looking at things. But in the selfish gene view, this is just an instance of the continuous competition for limited resources between A and B. They're both just self-replicating genetic patterns shaped by their environment and by each other. But if A's better at getting those resources than B, then B dies out and A gets to replicate further. That's super cool by itself. But Dawkins applied a similar model to the interactions between concepts or ideas, treating them as self-replicating patterns of thought competing for mental resources. Normally, we think of humans as individual creatures, arguing for their beliefs or sharing pictures that they think are funny. But in the selfish meme view, humans are just vehicles for competing ideas. From this perspective, concepts, including Scumbag Steve and Philoseraptor, use humans to spread themselves, harnessing brains and language in the internet to replicate and command the greatest share of mental resources that they can. But it's not just internet memes that can be viewed this way. The same basic thing happens with ideologies, worldviews, cultures, superstitions, politics, religions, anything and everything that people think about or believe. They're all in some sense competing for a limited amount of brain space. The mechanisms of that competition include things like advertising, media, and conversation. But also, every single ideologically motivated conflict in the entire history of the world, from the Cold War to the Holocaust to the Crusades to the war on terrorism, can all be chalked up to the same phenomenon. Memes competing at the group level. When you consider that many people are willing to give their lives to ensure the survival of certain ideas against other ones, like capitalism versus communism or one religion over another, it's a compelling way to look at the world. Sometimes that struggle is just posting funny pictures on Facebook. Sometimes it involves tanks and bombs. But here's the rub. For many people, regardless of how inane or potentially harmful Spencer's ideas are, there's something categorically wrong about attacking those ideas by attacking him. In this view, he can call for oppressive racist political policies or racial cleansing all day long. He might even motivate others to perform physically harmful activities. But so long as he hasn't punched anyone himself, he shouldn't get punched. This position implicitly treats memes and their preferred vehicles, like speech or media, as being somehow fundamentally different than physical acts, specifically physical acts of violence. The suggestion is that there's some sort of indisputable boundary between words and ideas and behavior. Memes can motivate people to do certain things, sure, but they're never to be regarded as agents of any sort of real change by themselves. This is a popular view, especially in the US where the American cultural narrative is saturated with the importance of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, which were both severely restricted by the British government in the colonies. In fact, the very first right granted in the Bill of Rights is the freedom for citizens to engage in various forms of meme expression, unmolested by any sort of legal interference. But funnily enough, if you look at the legal history of the First Amendment, as early as 1796, it becomes self-evident that the relationship between memes, expression, and behavior was never really that straightforward. Supreme Court opinions have gone back and forth over the years, but the flowchart today for whether certain speech is or isn't protected is definitely more nuanced than is it speech, yes, no. There are several good reasons that we've qualified the First Amendment legally. Part of that evolution has been due to new forms of technology and communication, but part of it is due to a more nuanced understanding that, as much as we'd like to believe so, concepts aren't harmless or inert. For example, most people agree that defamation laws are necessary legal defenses against the use of memes to cause someone harm. We recognize that it's totally possible to seriously damage someone's reputation or their business by deliberately spreading untrue claims about them. The statements themselves are just words and ideas, right? It's not like the person who's inventing and disseminating them is the one who's firing that person for something they didn't do or shunning them or lynching them or whatever other negative consequences happen. But we still appreciate that by creating and expressing those ideas, the author is willfully inflicting harm on their target with them. The same principle holds for pretty much any reasonable limitation of speech, incitement to violence, shouting fire in a crowded theater, intellectual property rights. If ideas and expression of them couldn't affect anything by themselves, none of these laws would be necessary, but they are. And telling me, you may be arrested and jailed for breaking those laws. The government may exercise force over your person for wielding memes in a harmful or irresponsible way. The legal history of the First Amendment is just a convenient way of illustrating what I'm getting at here. The authors of the US Constitution recognize that there's something important about being able to express ideas that might be unpopular or damaging to those in power. That principle is still totally valid. It's important for new ideas, even unpopular or offensive ones, to be heard and debated and considered. That's the only way that we can improve the landscape of available memes so the best ones can prosper. But, as our understanding has evolved over time, we've realized that concepts and speech can't be totally isolated from their effects, and spreading them isn't a totally innocent activity. If you think about it, there's no shortage of evidence that ideas are more than powerless abstractions. I mean, if your heart rate has ever gone up just because someone you're attracted to has shown some interest, you've felt the power that pure concepts have to affect the physical world. Now, to be absolutely clear, none of this means that you should punch Nazis, or that the guy who punched Spencer was in the right. None of this implies that freedoms of speech and expression aren't important. They're definitely important. But naive or simplistic positions like anyone should be able to say anything in any context without consequence don't account for the complicated effects that ideas can have just by existing. Or that, at least for human beings, memes have real power and that at some point physical retaliation against them might well be called for. At least that's the meme that's pulling my strings right now. What about you? Do you think that Dawkins' meme view has merit? When do you think an idea becomes a substantial enough threat to warrant a physical response? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to ball up, subscribe, and don't stop thunking.