Dealing with Collateral Damage from Memetic Warfare

Nobody loves unnecessarily alienating people with offensive jokes more than I do.

It is a harsh but simple fact that kinetic warfare always involves collateral damage. Anywhere wars are fought, cities are destroyed, civilians are killed, and ecosystems are torn apart.

While every reasonable person recognizes that collateral damage is a terrible externality that should be minimized, it is almost impossible to avoid entirely. The question then becomes “how much collateral damage is acceptable when trying to achieve a military objective?”

It’s important to understand that the same principle applies to memetic warfare.

When it comes to the Great Meme War, collateral damage can be thought of as all the harm inflicted onto others that results from the battle between different ideological factions competing for influence within a population.

Collateral damage of this sort could take the form of psychological harm, the spread of misinformation, or the warping of people’s perceptions.

When news outlets or political influencers knowingly spread blatant lies to their viewers, they might gain a short-term memetic advantage, but they create a significant amount of collateral damage in the form of poisoning the minds of their viewers with false information.

For example, if I tell people who regard me as a trustworthy source of information that Democrats are all pedophiles who worship Satan and practice human sacrifice, I will likely be able to energize my audience into voting against them, thus achieving a clear memetic advantage by securing positions of political power.

But my audience will then have to live their day-to-day lives believing that their Democrat neighbors are Satan worshipers, which will inevitably lead to a variety of social ills for them and the communities they live in.

By another token, if I platform someone who advocates for normalizing certain types of relations between adults and children, I might be providing valuable memetic information to my viewers by giving them an insight into how someone like that thinks, but at the same time, I might be normalizing the questioning of what should be a dogmatically accepted taboo, and that in and of itself is a form of memetic collateral damage.

How much collateral damage am I willing to cause

Many low-IQ critics of mine claim that me having discussions with people who could be described as ideologically extreme causes a significant amount of collateral damage that I should be avoiding.

I don’t doubt that when I have a friendly conversation with one of the leading intellectual figures within the Christian Nationalist movement, there is some number of people who will end up becoming convinced by his ideas to implement blasphemy laws to censor free speech if it challenges a would-be theocratic government.

But I am confident that the number of people who will be turned off by the desire to censor speech will be far greater. In other words, the combatant-to-civilian death ratio falls within an acceptable range for me to proceed with having the conversation.

Another criticism I get is that I call people I disagree with “autistic” far too much.

To be honest, this is probably true. I don’t call people autistic because I think they’re stupid or because I am trying to insult them. I call people autistic when I believe their approach to an idea resembles that of a autistic person.

Because I agree with people like renowned neuroscientist Iain McGhilcrist that our modern culture has become functionally autistic in many ways, I am perfectly willing to draw attention to that fact by making a lot of jokes about autism, even if they are imprecise and offensive (as good jokes often are).

But I am well-aware of the memetic collateral damage this could cause.

I have no doubt that some people who are themselves autistic (or have family members who are autistic) have been completely turned off to anything else I have to say because I use the term too much. This means that more important ideas I might have are not getting out because of my choice of words.

There is no clear way to determine if the collateral damage that I am causing by doing this is acceptable in the long-run, but because of my status as wielder of dark humor, I have made the decision for myself that it is.

Only God will know if I am correct in the final analysis.