(A bit of satire for my Social Media Awareness series)
Memes.
To most people under the age of 22, a meme is simply word art conveying some clever, philosophical, or trendy idea that may or may not include a photo of an animal, landscape, or cartoon.
But memes aren’t just a bunch of cute little animal photos with some comment about the curtains or the loopy dog in the background.
Memes are coercive persuasion at its most sinister level.
They infiltrate the psyche of a society, guide it toward a new belief system, and prime it for total domination.
In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe the trending ideas that crisscross a people group. To him memes were mostly a way for a society to preserve itself and carry its character into the next generation.
But what if instead of preserving the cultural significance of a civilization, the worldview of a particular people group could be shifted, transformed, and even erased.
What if their thinking could be bent to serve a new purpose?
Memes are a deceptive form of mind control and an effective course of action to take over the world.
They’re friendly.
They’re non-violent.
They’re trendy.
If done correctly, a meme can prevent an individual from ever becoming who he/she is meant to be. Through its subtlety, the meme can serve as the perfect vehicle into a society’s subconscious. These trendy scraps of history can go from being signs along the road to being the needle on a person’s compass pointing him/her to a way of life that inhibits personal thought and dictates their life choices for them.
You see, all of these funny videos, catchy stories, pictures, phrases, and popular shows feed into a new worldview.
It’s subtle and deceptive.
It’s like a kind of a numbing agent for morality.
Things you once thought were bad, now don’t seem so terrible. Beliefs you once held as absolute, you now shy away from. Priorities shift. Thinking changes, and before you know it, you’re a different person than you thought you would be.
You never even saw it transpire.
It just happened.
It embezzled you away, through a picture here and a video there.
Taking over the world through memes is a slow process, but it’s one that is guaranteed to make the takeover effective and irreversible. Once you’ve changed a people group’s worldview, it’s hard for them to even comprehend what’s happening.
One warning though–there will be people who resist this type of mind control.
The emails, pictures, and stories will stop with them. They don’t forward, share, or retweet just anything.
They know who they are, what their purpose is, and where they’re headed.
They can be problematic if pressed, so it’s best to make them as comfortable as possible and even keep them out of the mainstream of data. They will often insulate themselves and do this for you. Their numbers are few, but don’t ever underestimate them. There’s a strength in their weakness that cannot be mastered.
Now get out there, and man your memes and take over a mind!
