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Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way? I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter? Doesn't the "contagion" model somewhat follow from Dawkins's original "meme" concept; not to mention previous thinkers like Bernays and McLuhan on mass communications?
I mean, this is probably an area where I'd agree that "the Woke are more correct than the mainstream," and that your moderate centrist (classical liberal) sort are way too dismissive of the potential importance of memetic hygiene.
There's three unpalatable implications arising from that model. One is you get a purity spiral/circular firing squad. The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
A third implication is that, in the absence of a meta meme of shunning competing memes (memetic hygiene), their meme is too weak to overcome competing memes. If ideas are infectious, and there's one Nazi at a table with nine other people then why doesn't the Nazi get infected with the non-Nazi meme? By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness. So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
A lot of the current angst in the left is that a table with one communist and nine people remains a table with one communist and nine people, which drives them crazy.
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This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
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I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
I think the belief that ideas spread that way is a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter. There are many things that people have done traditionally based on the belief that something is true.
The sharing of an idea is usually a prerequisite for its spread though, unless it's a particularly obvious idea.
The spreading and individual evaluation of ideas by informed citizens is supposed to be an ideological immune system, suppressing it does indeed allow you to install a fragile ideology that wouldn't survive immune response. Perhaps it's like a transplant in which suppressing the immune system is good and necessary, but "just suppress your immune system because it keeps hurting me" is also the kind of thing a disease would say.
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They're not wrong, but the actions they endorse, promote and undertake based on this run contrary to popular concepts like the "marketplace of ideas", "free speech" or "each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
I just realized an absolutely fantastic essay/blogpost title would be “Shoplifters In The Marketplace Of Ideas.”
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