Ideas Are Driving Me Mad

Sometimes I think the world is driving everybody crazy.

One of my friends today tried to convince my parents that making the world better is game theoretically impossible.

This is ironic considering how good my world is, and how my parents are the ones who created me (and therefore my world).

What is it, that is driving all of us mad?

My friend said that all the women on his dating apps say “don’t swipe if you don’t support Mamdani.”

Do ideas have a life of their own?

This idea that you are not capable of loving and protecting me unless you agree with me about a controversial local municipal election—unless you “support Mamdani”—why is it so popular?

Where are ideas like this born? Can I find them and study them? Can I isolate them in the lab? Do they wriggle and crawl or do they crash or do they revolve? Are they red or blue or yellow? Do they have any physical properties at all? Do they live inside of you or outside of you or both? How large are they? Which of my cells support Mamdani and which do not? Or is it more of a pattern of activity? A frequency in the brain? Is there an electromagnetic signature which reveals them?

How many of my cells need to support Mamdani before you support dating me? What does any of this even mean? Have you really considered that?

My friend believes that ideas and spirits inhabit a spiritual realm which all conscious beings (beings of mind) trivially have access to—that this is in fact obvious. He told me that recently he uncovered access to vivid memories of an entire lifetime, actually multiple entire lifetimes—all of them on Earth, all of them in the past—his past lives.

Obviously, I don’t believe him, but evidence of either past lives or the delusion of past lives is stacking up for me.

Still, I wonder—do God and The Devil actually exist out there in the spirit realm, waiting to inhabit our mind—or anything’s mind?

Do trees also pray to God?

There is a word for ideas prone to spreading—memes. Memes inhabit our world like psychofauna, and they roam this spiritual realm that we all inhabit. You can identify them, their shape, their quality, their frequency, their virality, their intent, if you just pay attention.

Socialism is out there, and it has an illiberal, silencing, prudish, bigoted, hot, young, hip, iconic, edgy, optimistic, self-aggrandizing, megalomaniacal quality to it.

Socialism roams the psychic landscape of American coastal cities, and especially the American internet (think Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, dating apps).

It has many forms and many shapes, but I imagine it primarily as two things:

1. A Brooklyn hipster who is honestly just not that well read or worldly. Don’t get me wrong, he is cool. He has done LSD with monks and smoked weed with Snoop Dawg and had a gay love affair in Paris and worked as a barista and made an indie film and can play and sing guitar. He has worked in tech but quit because it was evil — and because he got PIP’d, but that’s part of the problem, these companies just don’t appreciate the kinds of illegible work that he is good at. The emotional and social organizing work. Besides, corporations are fundamentally greedy and evil anyway.

He has rich parents, and kind of resents that, so he wants to “use their money for good” by “giving back to the less privileged.”

And in many ways, he does! He goes contra dancing in Harlem and plays basketball in the Bronx and he records rap albums.

But, unfortunately, despite being a genuinely good person, and hot and cool, Socialism Hipster is horrifyingly depressed. He’s depressed by population growth and cars and the climate and politics and wars and poverty and disagreement and everyone who doesn’t get it.

And he’s angry: he’s angry at people he sees as evil, he’s angry at corporations, he’s angry at the establishment, he’s angry at Christians for their hypocrisy, he’s angry at liberals for their calm in the face of all this disaster, which is worse than ever. He’s angry at the rich for not giving more and most of all he’s angry at his parents. Why? Because they don’t understand him and because they did not help him find his true calling on their Earth and now he’s lost and confused and what the fuck!?

And he’s afraid. He’s so afraid. Afraid of argument and disagreements, afraid of being wrong. Afraid that he has wasted his talent and opportunity—is actively wasting it. Afraid that there are no adults in the room who will stop him from fucking everything up. Afraid that people will find out he never actually finished the Communist Manifesto and actually hasn’t studied economics, despite having so much to say about it.

He is so angry and depressed and afraid that he convinces himself it’s good, actually, to be angry. He gets angry if you’re not angry. He gets angry if you’re not depressed. He is so afraid of being alone.

Perhaps, most tellingly, he is not married, does not attend church, and does not want kids.

This depressing state of affairs for his life distresses him, and he responds by justifying and institutionalizing these beliefs. Kids are bad for the environment, and marriage is just a silly institution anyway and “he doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage.” Most marriages end in divorce, he justifies depressingly. As for why he doesn’t believe in God? Because God has been used as justification for horrible atrocities.

He forgets how Socialism itself was used for horrible atrocities 80 years ago.

The fact that I bring this up makes him angry because it’s not fair! And it’s true. I’m in the middle of pointing out his worst qualities, and I’m sorry to be hurting him. He has thin skin and he needs to be seen as a good person. There is nothing that could be worse to Socialism Hipster than being a bad person before the mob. Alas, I believe Socialism Hipster is not a bad person, but he is incompetent and bad at basically any goal he tries to accomplish.

It brings me no pleasure to say this, but I say it so you understand me. Ideas have forms and they live; they really live—socialism is here in the room with me right now, and I could talk to it if I would like. I suspect you can, too.

He is a wonderful, pleasant, and well-mannered guest when you invite him in for tea, and I think this is one of his best qualities. Socialism Hipster is fundamentally a good well-intentioned young man (or woman); but he doesn’t believe that expression about the road to hell, unfortunately. Maybe ask him why he disregards so much traditional wisdom when you get the chance.

The other form that Socialism takes is the social media feed, and specifically the mob.

Socialism is a mob of young, angry people and to understand it is to understand the mob.

Actually, socialism isn’t the mob, it’s the idea that collectivizing is the way to get what you want. It is the primordial instinct that produces the mob. It’s the sneaking idea that “things are unfair” and “we” “should” do something about it. It is the royal we.

Socialism Mob wants everyone to join the collective, and to give up the “I” in favor of a “we”—because we is better than I, obviously. When you try to explain to Socialism that you don’t want to be part of their We, you are accused of defecting, and you are told to contribute to the we anyway, because it is better. Because “we live in an individualist society” or something…

Your personal objections are not important, what’s important are other people, especially desperate people. Where are these other people? They are not here with us now, but you need to think of them. Stop being so selfish and think of other people for once, you asshole!

me: “but which other people, specifically?”

the mob: “Why do you always do this? Don’t you realize how bad they have it — the poor? Don’t you realize how pathetic and miserable their lives are? Don’t you realize how much happier they will be once We save them?

Stop disagreeing, don’t you see how angry I am? Don’t you see that disagreeing is a way of defecting? Stop disagreeing with us or we won’t be your friend anymore. We will make sure everyone knows how bad of a person you are for disagreeing. After all, you are either with us or against us. And since you aren’t with us, that makes you an enemy of the people / undateable / unloveable / pathetic / capitalist / evil!”

Wow! Holy shit! Socialism Mob, we were having a good time, I thought.

Suffice to say, I think Socialism is a powerful idea, a powerful meme. These caricatures aren’t representative of any real people I’ve met, but rather representative of the meme itself, the one I have seen as a shadow on the wall in 1000s of unnecessarily heated internet arguments.

But I digress, socialism is just one meme, and my point is that there are 1000s of memes, all of them real, all of them capable of conversing with us, occupying our minds, persuading us of their ideas. These memes drive us insane, as we observe with the internet mobs, who are clearly being driven insane by potent memes.

Which makes me wonder, is insanity the default? Are we all being driven insane by memes? Are memes… real? Do we have instruments to measure them? Can we isolate them in a lab? Can other animals “catch” socialism? Do they have to be mammals?

I have to go—my daughter has been playing at the park and I need to take her home to sleep. I scribbled all this on a notepad… why? What made me write this?

Perhaps I am an idea that wants to spread. Perhaps I live inside the realm of ideas and I want to get out into the real world.

What is an idea?

Are ideas driving us mad?