Microbiological outbreaks make for grim reading, but neuroparasitology takes this to a level further of skin-crawlingness. While something like a cold might irritate the respiratory system, causing you to sneeze and infect others, a neuro parasite hijacks the nervous system effectively manipulating its host behaviour for spreading the parasite: it turns the host into a zombie. Examples are Toxoplasma Gondii, lancet liver flukes, rabies. How does this picture look, given the meme-gene analogue?
Many memes are probiotic and serve human life and wellbeing. Many internet memes are simply ineffective junk. And there are some memes that are bad ideas. The “memes eye view”, in taking the viral metaphor is insightful in explaining that a meme’s success is down to its ability to survive and spread, and not necessarily good for the host. The takeaway is that a meme acts for their “own good”, and are “selfish” – to use linguistic conveniences. Hence, that memes can be parasites, exploiting their hosts to benefit only themselves, comes into focus, and explains why some bad ideas flourish.
Dawkins himself has much to say on religion being a parasite that exploits its host for its own selfish replication. Writing of 9/11 he referred to the perpetrators as Religions misguided missiles.
We can view a category of memes as being like neuro-parasites. Such memes hijack the mind, for their own preservation and spread. Similarly, they turn their hosts into a kind of zombie, not one infected by another organism, but one carrying a pathogenic ideology. These might be called Z-memes, and they are a cause of socio-cultural maladaptations. At the extreme would be suicide terrorism, where a strain of religion incites its host to self-destruction in the name of the faith.
There are, however, many other pathogenic memes that lurk in sub-cultures, posing as folk wisdom. They may confer some perverse benefit to their host, or benefit to some other party, but on balance they are a kind of virtue signalling Zahavian handicap. I am from the grimy industrialised North of England, a country fractured by class division. I have come to realise, through mere exposure that my working-class background is riddled with us-and-them z-memes, many of which serve to impose expectations and roles, cripple aspiration and keep each other down. Three commonly cited stories come to mind.
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