Unseizable

Memetic Hygiene

Contents

  1. What is a meme?
  2. Why "hygiene"?
  3. Memes you didn't choose are running your decisions
  4. What does memetic hygiene look like in practice?
  5. Audit your models
  6. Curate inputs by quality, not volume
  7. Distinguish thick from thin desires
  8. Test with distance
  9. What questions does this raise?
  10. Sources
  11. Further reading

What is a meme?

Not the internet kind. The original.

Richard Dawkins coined "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a unit of cultural transmission — an idea, behaviour, or pattern that spreads from person to person through imitation. Tunes, catchphrases, fashions, decision heuristics, ways of reacting to setbacks — all memes. They replicate by jumping from brain to brain, and like genes, they are subject to selection: the ones that spread most effectively survive, regardless of whether they serve their hosts well.

"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Susan Blackmore extended this in The Meme Machine (1999), arguing that humans co-evolved to become "meme machines" — brains designed not just for the benefit of human genes, but as selective imitation devices optimised for copying, varying, and selecting cultural patterns.

Why "hygiene"?

The metaphor is deliberate. Physical hygiene is the practice of keeping pathogens out of your body. Memetic hygiene is the practice of auditing which patterns running in your mind are actually useful — producing results that compound in the direction you want — and which are just consuming resources.

The parallel runs deeper than analogy:

  • You are constantly exposed. Just as you breathe in microorganisms without choosing to, you absorb behavioural patterns from everyone you interact with. The chameleon effect means your brain copies the postures, mannerisms, and decision patterns of those around you — automatically, without awareness or consent.

  • Not all exposure is harmful. Most memes are neutral or beneficial, just as most microorganisms are harmless. The goal isn't total isolation — it's selective exposure.

  • Some memes are genuinely dangerous. Daniel Dennett argued in his TED talk "Dangerous Memes" that ideas can hijack brains the way parasites hijack ants. "A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness" — meaning useless ideas can spread precisely because they are infectious, not because they serve anyone well. Note that a meme doesn't need to be false to be dangerous — a factually correct belief that directs your energy toward things you can't control is just as parasitic as a false one.

  • Prevention is easier than cure. Once a meme is deeply embedded — once a decision heuristic has become a System 1 default — it is very hard to replace. Catching it at the point of exposure is far easier than extracting it later.

Memes you didn't choose are running your decisions

Here's the uncomfortable part. Most of the memes shaping your daily life were not consciously chosen. They were absorbed from:

  • Family — the first and most powerful memetic environment. The Kresy case study and Hungarian surname study show how family-transmitted memes persist across generations and political systems.
  • Peers — Christakis and Fowler's research shows behaviours spread through social networks to three degrees of separation. Your friend's friend's friend influences your behaviour.
  • Media — the people you follow, read, and listen to function as role models whether or not you think of them that way. Their mimetic desires become yours through repeated exposure.
  • Culture — the ambient norms of your workplace, city, and era. These operate as background memes: invisible precisely because everyone around you shares them.

Kahneman's System 1 runs on heuristics — informal rules of thumb learned from experience and observation. These heuristics feel like "just the way I think," but they were installed by your memetic environment. If you never examine where they came from, you're running software you didn't write and never audited for usefulness. The question isn't whether these heuristics are "true" — it's whether they're producing results that compound in your life.

What does memetic hygiene look like in practice?

It's not about fact-checking your beliefs. It's about systems administration — deciding which processes deserve CPU time based on whether they produce useful output.

Audit your models

Who are the five people whose behaviour you observe most frequently? Not who you'd name if asked "who are your role models?" — but who actually occupies your attention day to day. These are your primary meme sources, and their patterns are becoming yours whether you intend it or not.

Girard's framework of external and internal mediation helps here. External mediators — people far enough from your world that you can learn from them without rivalry — are the safest source of productive memes. Internal mediators — peers competing for the same things — are where mimetic influence most easily turns toxic.

Curate inputs by quality, not volume

The issue isn't how much information you consume. It's the quality of the behavioural patterns embedded in it. One hour with someone who models long-term thinking, tolerance for discomfort, and strategic awareness installs different heuristics than one hour with someone who models reactivity, short-termism, and status anxiety.

Warren Buffett: "It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction."

Charlie Munger: "I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart."

Distinguish thick from thin desires

Luke Burgis's framework from Wanting (2021): are the desires you're pursuing thick (anchored in deep experience and perennial values) or thin (mimetically absorbed from whoever happens to be salient right now)?

Thin desires change with your media diet. Thick desires survive changes of environment. If a desire disappears when you stop following someone, it was thin — not "false," just not useful to you. It was someone else's heuristic running on your hardware. Memetic hygiene means building a life around thick desires and recognising thin ones before they consume your energy.

Test with distance

When you're uncertain whether a desire or decision pattern is authentically yours, create distance from the suspected source. Stop consuming their content for a month. See what remains. The patterns that persist are closer to yours. The ones that fade were borrowed.

What questions does this raise?

  • How do I know which of my habits were consciously chosen versus absorbed from my environment? — If you can't trace a habit to a deliberate decision, it's likely memetic.
  • What happens if I change the people I spend the most time around? — Social contagion research predicts your behaviour will shift to match the new environment within months.
  • Is there a way to adopt good memes from role models without absorbing bad ones? — Selective exposure combined with Girard's external mediation: learn from people far enough away that you absorb their operating system without entering their competitive space.
  • How do successful families transmit their mindset across generations? — Through the same memetic channels: modelling dispositions that children absorb into their System 1 before they're old enough to question them.
  • Can I deliberately reprogram my automatic decisions? — Yes, but it requires changing the inputs. New heuristics require new models.

Sources

Further reading