If you want insight into our culture, pay attention to memes. No kidding: talk of memes has become a thing in the digital era, but “mimetic” behavior isn’t a digital phenomenon: it’s a human one. When people say “and I oop” or repeat the same dance over and over on TikTok, they’re doing more than just messing around. They’re living out one of the most basic human impulses. If the Right is going to win on this front, we have to understand memes.
How Memes Work
The word “meme” itself comes from an ancient Greek concept: mimēsis. It means “imitation,” and a mimēma, or “something that is imitated,” is a meme. This is what the philosophers Plato and Aristotle thought lay behind all artistic production and culture-making. “The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood,” writes Aristotle in his Poetics, and he goes on to explain how basic kinds of imitation like games and lessons develop into elaborate forms of imitation like theatre.
This fundamental truth has been at the heart of how we understand art and society in the West. From the poet Philip Sidney in the age of Shakespeare, to the philosopher René Girard in the modern day, mimetic theory has informed some of our civilizations’ most incisive cultural commentary. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” wrote Girard in “Generative Scapegoating. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
If you’ve ever heard me or anyone else nattering on about how important it is for conservatives to understand and care about art and culture, this is why. When we make art, we’re not just painting pretty pictures or saying nice words. We’re trying to represent something spiritual by imitating it and so conveying it: those pictures and words are trying to get at an internal feeling or experience which others will grasp and experience themselves. Shakespeare himself described it as holding “the mirror up to nature,” which gets it about right. When good art hits you with a really accurate portrayal—an effective imitation of some reality—it compels you to feel something, to reproduce within yourself what the artist is expressing.
It’s a powerful tool, and it can be used for more than just self-expression: it can be used for influence and control. When something is repeated and reproduced enough, it prompts that deep human impulse of imitation and catches on—it goes viral. This is what happens when a song plays on the radio so much that it gets in your head even if you hate it: by the sheer power of mimēsis, it worms its way into your brain and forces you to imitate some small part of the culture, to reproduce it within your own self.
This brings us to memes, in the current digital sense. A meme is mimēsis distilled, like the “crack” form of cocaine: an endless repetition that finds its way into your own patterns of thought whether you like it or not. Ever find yourself saying “lol” out loud, or thinking “sad panda!” in response to something genuinely tragic? If so, then your online experience has memed its way into your head, even if you don’t know exactly the origin of the meme or endorse all its assumptions.
Therapy and Manhood
When a meme gets popular, or has a resurgence, it says something about what’s on people’s minds. You can almost feel them rippling like waves across the surface of social media, or watch them pass from hand to hand overhead like a beach ball at a rock concert. That’s what happened this week with the “men need therapy” meme, which had a bit of a moment this past July and has now appeared in the world’s bloodstream again.
This time the particular mutation is: “why do men do x instead of go to therapy?” “why do men start podcasts instead of going to therapy,” asked @flossybabyjay, virally. Or “why do men start going to the gym instead of therapy,”wondered @custardloaf. It seems silly to analyze something so apparently frivolous, but it’s not: these weird little verbal tics emerge out of deep, gut-level attitudes about the world. They’re worth examining in detail.
In this case, we can start with the answers to these questions: why do so many men prefer to go to the gym than to therapy? What’s with all those podcasts, anyway? Well for one thing, men are (gasp) different from women. Most good therapists will tell you that perpetual counseling with no defined endpoint is bad for anyone, but men in particular tend to be goal-oriented. We like going out and doing stuff, and we like to have a target that tells us when the stuff is done.
So the state of simply “being in therapy”—as opposed to “doing therapy” to resolve a particular issue—is unlikely to fly with men as a sales pitch. But on a deeper level, for many men, taking on new projects is itself a form of therapy. In response to the question about working out, one lifter wrote: “I started lifting with a friend a few years ago and I had no idea he was depressed. A few months ago he told [me] that lifting every day with me saved his life.” Any man who has ever processed his feelings by going out and building something, or writing a novel, or basically making anything, will understand that experience: it’s kind of a guy thing to resolve your more intense feelings by getting active rather than talking at length.
None of which is particularly a knock on therapy itself, which can be totally helpful for men under some circumstances—soldiers suffering from PTSD, for example, or guys who had abusive parents. That in itself is part of what makes it so wrongheaded to cast therapy as some cure-all which can “fix” men, as opposed to all the other things like weightlifting and podcasting which are just “tactics” to “avoid dealing with things.” If you talk about therapy that way, you make it into something most guys are going to shun at all costs.
Why wouldn’t they? If you’re going to belittle all the good and manly stuff we do like it’s some kind of childish evasion ritual rather than, you know, the stuff civilizations are built on—and if you’re going to contrast therapy to building, using tools, working out, making art, and all the other stuff we love to contribute to the world—then I’m sorry, but we’re going to tell you to pound sand. I can think of nothing more likely to scare a dude away from therapy (perhaps at exactly the moment when it might be life-saving) than to present it as the thing that will deflate all his manly energies and just let him have a good cry.
This, I believe, is the heart of the matter and the core of the meme: it’s not actually about getting men to go to therapy when they need it or inviting them to become more emotionally aware. It’s not about helping or healing men at all. It’s about identifying manhood itself as something that needs fixing, and therapy as a cure you absolutely 100% need if you have the terrible disease of being a man. Dig down into the logic of the meme and you’ll find an ugly little hostility squirming like some kind of angry bug: “why don’t men go to therapy” quite simply means “men are bad.”
How and Why to Win at Memes
I present this little rant as an object lesson in how to read and understand what goes on in the culture, and an argument for paying attention where doing so might seem a little foolish at first. It’s not foolish, actually, to scroll Twitter once in a while and parse the video game references or movie quotes that are really generating traffic today. It’s a way of discerning how people feel and are making each other feel—and what we are inviting one another to want or aspire toward.
This, for what it’s worth, is exactly why places like the Daily Wire are so important. You don’t save the world just by writing laws: you save it by making memes. Good memes, and good art, and internet videos or podcasts of your own that can really catch on and speak to people, the way all art and indeed all culture does. We who write and speak at DW are not just trying to convince people here, though of course I think we present some pretty good arguments for our points of view. We are trying to get under people’s skin and implant there something more wholesome than the toxicity of the Left.
A final word in response to what I imagine will be a major objection: isn’t what I’m talking about just brainwashing or indoctrination? No, I answer: it’s half or more than half of our humanity. The fact that leftists use art and culture to so hideously sicken Americans—children especially—has left us with Orwellian concerns about what it means to persuade someone using more than just facts and logic.
But the truth of the matter is, though people do learn and grow intellectually, they also get won over emotionally, in their hearts. It has been very rightly said that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” That’s exactly true, and a crucial observation. But it’s also the case that people’s feelings are facts, and in order to operate effectively in the world you have to take facts about how people feel and how they operate emotionally into account. To really persuade them, you have to ingrain in them the intuitions that prepare them to receive logic in a good and noble frame of mind.
Plato made exactly that argument in his Laws: before children can use reason, they hear nursery rhymes. Before we ever walk into a lecture hall, we see movies and sing songs. And today, as Plato couldn’t have known but might have predicted, we make memes. We ought to take care how we do so, because—to paraphrase another Greek, Archimedes—give me a meme and a place to stand, and I will move the world.
Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.