The Meme’s-Eye View of Strategic Communication: A Case Study of Social Movements from a Memetic Perspective

ABSTRACT

The article argues that a memetic approach, or meme’s-eye view, could help bring together the strategic management view and the CCO-school. ‘Memes’ are understood as a second-order concept, i.e., as a reference to ‘memory traces’ in people’s minds and anchor-point of joint or collective intentionality. This view, it is argued, permits the conceptualization of communication as a resource. To illustrate, two cases are analyzed: 1) the Montagsdemos in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with its core meme Wir sind das Volk (We are the people); 2) the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ and the QAnon movement with its ‘Save the Children'-meme’. The analysis illustrates how memes endure and resurface in new and different environments. In conclusion, the article proposes that the shift to memetic population dynamics allows strategic communication-researchers to reformulate often unanswerable questions (“What does the strategic actor want?”) into more operationalizable ones (“What memes are launched? How are they constructed?”).

Introduction

In the strategic management-perspective developed by Zerfass et al. (2018), strategic communication is understood as a means to an end. On a proximate level, the end is that organizations attain their self-proclaimed goals; the ultimate end is for the organization to prevail and survive. Communication is strategic when it is “substantial for the survival and sustained success of an entity” (2018, p. 493), and organizations survive and thrive, amongst other reasons, by successfully engaging in conversations of strategic significance (2018, p. 493). Viewing communication as a resource against the background of limited means and decision-making under risk, the discipline of strategic communication should study how communicative resources can be applied purposefully, and as effectively and efficiently as possible, i.e., strategically. The communication constitutes organization-perspective (CCO), in contrast, does not view organizations as ‘using’ communication, i.e., wielding it as some kind of tool. As is indicated by their name, the branches of the perspective (Schoeneborn et al., 2014) suggest that ‘organization’ itself is the result of communicative interactions: organizations are constituted by communication. The main question of the paradigm, which in recent years has been adopted by many in the discipline, is not how organizations use communication as a resource in the struggle for survival and success. It is “how organization happens in communication” (Schoeneborn, Kuhn, & Kärreman, 2019, p. 475). Organizations are viewed as processes rather than entities. A specific organization is the temporary attainment of the state of ‘organizationality’ (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015), which emerges as a result of ‘flows’ of communication (McPhee & Zaug, 2009) in fluid social collectives.

A common ground for the strategic management-perspective and the CCO-school?

Although both the strategic management-school and the CCO-perspective center on communication, current theory-building in the discipline treats them as mutually exclusive. Our contribution challenges this polar view by offering a third, perhaps unifying approach. The third perspective is the so-called meme’s-eye view, an idea that goes back to the works of Richard Dawkins (2009), Daniel Dennett (1990) and Susan Blackmore (2000), amongst others.

The meme’s-eye view acknowledges, like CCO, that organizations emerge because of communication – in a way. It emphasizes, however, that organizations do not simply happen to emerge out of free-wheeling communication in unpredictable ways, or that the problems encountered by organizations are unique and random, as the CCO-school sometimes seems to suggest. Just as emphasized by the strategic management-perspective, the communication that makes organizationality happen takes place against the background of competition and risk, and it draws on resources that are limited: loosely speaking ideas; strictly speaking memes. Similar to genes in a metaphorical way, memes are only available, and indeed are what they are, because they have contributed to the success and survival of earlier organizationality.

In our view, the meme’s-eye view of communication could bring together strategic communication as proposed by Zerfass et al. on one hand, CCO on the other, in a consilient way. To bring the two views closer is not only a matter of disciplinary harmony, but essential for overcoming the respective limitations of each approach. The strategic management-perspective, admittedly, is sometimes limited by its focus on the strategic actor and an instrumental view of communication. This tends to mask out some of the more interesting questions of ‘how does it work, really’; it also tends to lock the discipline into the reproduction of practitioner discourse. The CCO-school, on the other hand, originated in organizational communication, and tends to mask out the very issues that make strategic communication strategic. To study ‘how organization happens in communication’ is legitimate, but it is doubtful whether it is enough to carry a discipline that sees its raison d’être in a strategic perspective.

The CCO-school is right, then, in devoting attention to the how-question. Strategic communication should not become a discipline of grey and sterile management concepts. As Peter Drucker allegedly said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast...”, it would be foolish to disconnect the discipline from the rich, colorful, and nuanced world of cultural studies, history of ideas, history, anthropology, etc. At the same time, the strategic school is right in viewing strategic communication against a background of prevailing against competition under conditions of risk and limited resources, as that is what ‘strategic’ is about.

The memetic view is well-suited to bringing the two schools together, as it is a theory of cultural evolution with ‘struggle’ built into it. Karl Weick, one of the intellectual predecessors of CCO, already offered an evolutionarily inspired organization theory based on the socio-cultural works of Donald Campbell¹ (1960), and centered on variation, selection, and retention (Weick, 1979; Weick et al., 2005). We are confident, thus, that there is compatibility here.

The argument in a nutshell

The argument goes like this: In a world of limited resources, every collective, be it an organization, partial organization or ‘organizationality’, necessarily faces challenges. Societies, be they bands or tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, national states, or empires, are always subject to pressures, internal and external. As for external pressures, humans have proven to be remarkably adaptive and have settled in every corner of the planet’s landmass except Antarctica. As for internal pressures, human collectives are oftentimes riddled with strife, as individuals pursue their own agenda, vie for power. At the same time, human collectives are not simply aggregations of individuals who are only in the cooperation as far as it suits their agenda. In contrast to the other great apes, advanced cooperation is homo sapiens’ success recipe, and not only because we realize due to higher intelligence that cooperation is smarter – cooperation, to a degree, is built into our minds.

Communication is one way of dealing with internal as well as external pressures, i.e., regulating collectivity. Communication, to be more precise, represents the interface where the joint intentionality of ad hoc-groups or the collective intentionality of cultural collectives, the forms, and patterns of cooperation, are adjusted to adapt to the environment. McPhee and Zaug’s ‘four flows’ (McPhee & Zaug, 2009) conceptualize a similar idea, as indeed does Social Systems Theory going back to Niklas Luhmann and Talcott Parsons.

Social theory has a tendency to suggest that human societies are unfathomably complex because the human is an unfathomably complex, deeply political creature. However, to define the human as the ‘political animal’ only leads into circularity when it comes to explaining the political nature of seemingly everything in human affairs. Evolutionary psychology, in contrast, maintains that the number of political issues is limited, and ultimately determined by the make-up of our species (Seiffert-Brockmann, 2018): a highly cooperative, almost eusocial species that nevertheless reproduces individually, collectives that span several generations, extremely long childhood, etc. It is the make-up of the species – “90% chimp and 10% bee”, in Jonathan Haidt’s formula (Haidt, 2012) – that shape what Griskevicius and Kenrick (2013) dub ‘fundamental motives.’

Memes or assemblages of memes, memeplexes, to conclude the argument, are ultimately variations of solutions to long-standing evolutionary problems already faced by our ancestors, albeit in a vastly different environment. While that is obvious with memeplexes that make up cultural practices central to the collective – its religion, perhaps, or its warrior code –, it is perhaps less obvious for the many small and trivial ones (Dawkins’s early examples for memes include catchy tunes and ways of shaping vases). It should be seen, however, that producing and reproducing a sense of belonging, in a way 'grooming' (Dunbar, 2017), is one of the great problems of a collective. As the authors all live abroad, we can attest that ‘belonging’ requires familiarity with the host country’s many and varied cultural references – which take years to acquire even if one learns the language rather quickly.

Communication as a resource

What the meme’s-eye view offers, thus, is a way of conceptualizing communication as a resource, a figure of thought central to strategic management theory. Taken together with CCO, the resource-view of communication goes from abstract and sterile to concrete and nuanced, however. The underlying idea is that the more powerful forms of communication work primarily by ‘activating’ pre-existing memes, or inserting, in virus-like fashion, a small new element into well-working meme assemblages, memeplexes. In other words, powerful communication is powerful because it ‘uses’, triggers, activates memes; memes, in turn, are what they are because they resonate with ‘memory traces’ (Giddens, 1984) shared by many people.

The strategic aspect lies in the fact, to be clear, that the pool of memes relevant to a given challenge is limited. Powerful, positive memories shared by many cannot yet be created at will. The German National Football Team can draw on the collective memory of four World Championships, the Dutch cannot. In that way, it is not communication per se that is a limited resource. The memory traces, and the ways they can be activated, the anchor-points of shared attention, are a limited, strategic resource. From a strategic point of view, this resource has to be carefully husbanded, as its employment always changes it, runs the risk of ‘burning’ or ‘spoiling’ the resource.

Disposition

To argue our case, we begin with a conceptualization of memes in relation to evolutionary psychology and the mind sciences. After that, in the second section of the article, we discuss two concrete social movements: the Montagsdemos in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) and the QAnon conspiracy narrative. The Montagsdemos and QAnon are not organizations in a strict sense, of course. They are ‘partial organizations’, i.e., “forms of order, between the organized and the non-organized” (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011, p. 84). Our minimal condition is that they display organizationality, a “decided order” (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015). What we wish to illustrate, first and foremost, is how memes endure over generations. The peaceful revolution in East Germany became known through its slogan Wir sind das Volk – a meme that since then has resurfaced repeatedly. Likewise, the QAnon narrative of conspiracy references memory traces of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, with fears of ritual child abuse at its center (Hughes, 2017). It does so by reclaiming the slogan ‘Save the Children’ – a rallying cry universal to mammals, if ever there was one. The article concludes with a discussion of a way forward.

Memes and the meme’s-eye view: the memetic perspective

For us, as a working definition which draws on the work of many memeticists, the definition criteria of a meme are the following:

1. Memes are references to memory traces in human minds.

2. To speak of a meme in the narrow sense, it is necessary that the memory traces in question ‘overlap’ in the minds of a large proportion of the focal group, i.e., memes are underpinned by shared memories created by joint attention (focal group means: a family or an organization can have idiosyncratic memes that would not be considered memes on societal level).

3. Memes are the vehicles that signify the overlap, i.e., they not only reference shared memory but are shareable ‘anchoring points.’

4. As memes can be disseminated by an agents’ action, are ‘transferable’ in socio-cultural interaction, they can serve as an in-group signal to others, can be adopted by others who want to signal the same – in that way, they are ‘docking points.’

5. In an even narrower sense, memes are informational ‘storage units’ that provide regulative and coordinative instructions, i.e., memes in concert with other memes modulate behavior.

Memes vs. internet memes

Our use of the term meme goes back to Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene originally published in 1976 and the works of other early memeticists; it differs from the contemporary notion of ‘internet memes.’ Although superficially similar, memes and ‘internet memes’ (Winkler & Seiffert-Brockmann, 2019) are not the same breed. Wiggins points out that Dawkins’ idea and the colloquial term share only two characteristics: (1) both require human attention, and therefore need to be interesting, emotionally arousing, etc. and (2) humans need “to be able to reproduce them without much difficulty” (Wiggins, 2019, p. 9).

Originally, Dawkins ‘invented’ memes to convey “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins, 2009, p. 192). To Dawkins, memes could be anything, “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (p. 192). What interested Dawkins was the analogy to genes: “Just as… genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 2009, 1929). Heylighen and Chielens emphasize the very same aspect, when they define a meme as “a cultural replicator; a unit of imitation or communication” (Heylighen and Chielens, 2009, p. 3205). Interestingly, they offer a similar but slightly different account of memes as second-order constructs referencing memory traces. For Heylighen and Chielens, simpler, memes can be understood “as a formation pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory.” (p. 3205)

Perhaps because of Dawkins’s early examples of “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases”, memetics has suffered from a preoccupation with the spread of new and potentially pathological ideas; the talk is of thought contagion (Lynch, 1996), viruses of the mind (Brodie, 1996; Dawkins, 1993), idea viruses (Godin, 2001), infectious ideas (Saad, 2020). Similarly, Heylighen and Chielens write: “Memes differ in their degree of fitness, i.e. adaptedness to the socio‐cultural environment in which they propagate. Fitter memes will be more successful in being communicated, ‘infecting’ more individuals, thus spreading over a larger population” (Heylighen & Chielens, 2009, p. 3205).

Our working definition reflects the element of infection but complements it with a stronger emphasis on the other element mentioned by Heylighen and Chielens: the existing socio-cultural environment. If one looks at a typically primate-problem, a new technique for cracking open a coconut, innovation-focused accounts would place the greatest emphasison how new behavior-modifying ‘code’ spreads as individuals watch each other, imitating the new technique. Our account, in contrast, also draws attention to the underlying requirement for interest in the technique: the shared memory of unsuccessfully struggling with a particularly tough nut to crack. Hence, as Wiggins puts it, memes referencing memory traces “support the individuals in the enactment or performance of acts based on expected social interactions within a social system and may be active or dormant” (Wiggins, 2019, p. 64).

Memes as a consilient, second-order concept

The memetic perspective attempts to theorize complex processes that social theory and evolutionary psychology have struggled to understand, in their individual ways, for a considerable while: processes of socio-cultural evolution. Evolutionary psychology has been critical however, not only about individual solutions offered by social theorists but about the general way social theory goes about its business, the so-called Standard Social Sciences Model (SSSM). The SSSM, evolutionary psychologists maintain, not only over-emphasizes nurture over nature, but fails to distinguish between merely semantic and truly material concepts. The ideal that evolutionary psychology holds against the SSSM is consilience (Nothhaft, 2016; Wilson, 1998), i.e., concepts should not only have explanatory power but should be reducible – at least in principle, and with due concern for effects of emergence – to more fundamental concepts. Biology should be consilient with chemistry, chemistry with physics. If a medication works in clinical practice, there should be an explanation of its efficacy on biochemical level; otherwise, it is a placebo. To put it drastically: when Hegel, in Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, proposed a Weltgeist, he should have explained how the world spirit ‘works’ on material level, of what particles or waves it consists, how it propagates.

Adherence to the ideal of consilience, in our case, means that merely defining the concept of memes is not enough. Memetic theory cannot only propose the existence of memes but must tell us where the memes are. It must locate memes in the same way as molecular genetics located genes. So, where are the memes in our conceptualization? Our answer, memory traces, is admittedly inspired by ideas Anthony Giddens offers in The Constitution of Society (1984), but ultimately rests on an appreciation of homo sapiens’ cognitive apparatus and its evolved sociality. To be more precise, the relation of memes and memory traces is the following: Memes, as they are a second-order concept, do not reside anywhere. Talk of memes can be consilient, nevertheless, because memes reference memory traces (Giddens, 1984) that reside in peoples’ heads, and because humans are capable of ‘joint intentionality’, even ‘collective intentionality’ (Tomasello, 2014). It is here that memetic theory and evolutionary psychology meet.

Memory traces are first-order concepts, we would argue, because the mind sciences have advanced to a point where we can safely say that memory has a material basis, in the forms of neural networks in the brains of people. It is possible, albeit only coarsely, to determine whether a memetic stimulus ‘means something’ to a given individual. Whether a picture of a Montagsdemo or the slogan Wir sind das Volk triggers painful memories and heightens arousal cannot only be determined by questioning, but also measured psychophysiologically to a degree – amongst other approaches by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Memory traces and joint intentionality

To repeat: Dawkins’ gene’s-eye view rests on a material basis; genes are storage units that transport genetic information on molecular level in DNA. In the meme’s-eye view, memes cannot be similarly materially located; they are second-order concepts. Thus, in a consilient view, it is imperative not to take the gene-meme-analogy too far.

It is equally important, however, not to trivialize. When conceptualizing memes as ‘referring’ to memory traces, memes must not be simply understood as located in individual agents’ memories. The problem with first-order memetics is that it tends to conflate memes and memory traces. When Heylighen and Chielens define memes as “a formation pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory”, one could conclude that the meme is the memory. Copying-and-pasting of memory appears plausible for catchy tunes, but it quickly breaks down when matters become more complex. Susan Blackmore (2000) recognized the subtleties rather early, as she discusses Grant’s three-fold distinction from the very early ‘memetic lexicon’, namely a) memotypes, i.e., the meme in the memory of individuals; b) mediotypes, i.e., the meme expressed in a material medium; c) sociotypes, i.e., the community who holds the meme in its memory (cited in Blackmore, 2000, p. 60). Ultimately, however, Blackmore dismisses any attempt to materially pinpoint memes suggested by Grant, Dennett, and others: “ … I shall use the term ‘meme’ indiscriminately to refer to memetic information in any of its many forms; including ideas, the brain structures that instantiate those ideas, the behaviours these brain structures produce, and their versions in books, recipes, maps and written music” (Blackmore, 2000, p. 62).

The problem with pragmatic definitions, despite their heuristic value, is that they relinquish any claim to consilience. In contrast, in our working definition, memes are co-constructs enabled by the human capacity for shared attention and joint intentionality. An idiosyncratic idea entertained only by myself is not a meme, as it lacks the sociotypical element. Memes exist not at the intersection, in other words, but as the intersection of multiple individual minds (brains or brain states, if one prefers a biologized view). The meme is the essence, or overlap, that binds together individual memories in a meaningful way, ‘anchors’ them. On a personal level, people may associate the Montagsdemos with many slogans; perhaps with slogans they had on their own signs. Wir sind das Volk, however, is the slogan that everyone associates, is the meme. That the associations will be overlapping but slightly different in cognitive and affective ‘content’ is a characteristic of memes as opposed to genes that cannot and should not be defined away. Dawkins went too far, we would argue, in insisting that memes are replicators. Memes do not replicate; they are integrated into pre-existing structures in an imitative way. Interestingly, newer computer-simulations of meme diffusion, like the work of Van Overwalle and Heylighen (2006), reflect this by simulating active reinterpretation. This, of course, moves meme adoption very close to non-transmissive, dynamic-transactional notions of ‘communication.’

The biological fundament that makes memes ‘work’ could be equally well captured with the word ‘learning’, admittedly, but non-evolutionary accounts tend to underappreciate how special the human species is in that respect. Due to the relatively good long-term memory of homo sapiens and its way of life as a quasi-eusocial species with several generations living together in one collective, memes – just as genes – can prevail over generations. Grandchildren learn in the laps of grandparents, for good or for worse. It takes 15 to 20 years before humans are considered grown up and capable of making up their own minds; before that, they are considered ‘impressionable’, by and large rightly so. Due to our use of symbolic language and other forms of symbolic expression to regulate our collectivity, memes can even endure, in artefacts, when the chain of life was broken. Again, this is a feature of human sociality that the CCO perspective, especially in its Montreal branch (Cooren, 2004; Kuhn, 2008), captures exceedingly well already. What it does not capture, or shies away from capturing, is the element of struggle, the population dynamics. Some memes are fitter for the given socio-cultural environment than others. Of the many ways in which human collectivity can be organized, in principle, many were eliminated over the course of the millennia because their particular organizationality did not cope well with the particular environment – which includes, at least sometimes, the presence of other collectives.

Memes and memeplexes

As geneticists realized that phenotypic gene-effects are cumulative and interactive, interest in genetics has shifted away from single genes (or alleles) and towards the genome. The cases where one gene controls one phenotypic trait are rare. Similarly, one should perhaps place less emphasis on single memes, and more on interlocking meme-complexes, or memeplexes (Dawkins, 2009; Dennett, 1990).

Memeplexes can be understood as assemblages of interlocking memes with instructions that code how their hosts should behave and act in relation to the world, other memes or memeplexes. It is on the level of memeplexes, really, that memes struggle against other memes, memeplexes against other memeplexes – the parallel to biological multi-level selection is obvious, of course.

The classic memeplex-example is organized religion; a topic which has become a favourite with evolutionary psychologists (Dunbar, 2022). Religions may be understood as assemblages of rules and rituals which not only contain instructions on how to worship the deity, but normally also encode in what ways to treat one’s fellow believers differently from non-believers: Who can you shake hands, share food or trade with, who can you murder with impunity? With very few exceptions (Buddhism and Judaism come to mind), the remaining great religions also contain code that ensures that the religion will spread and grow in competition with others. In the early days of a faith, turning adherents into proselytizers is the most important way of doing so. Later, when religions are established, i.e., entwined with the state, it is sufficient to make sure that parents pass their faith onto their children.

As a matter of convenience, memetics tends to describe the rules religions are made of in verbal form: Do not eat pork! Give generously to the poor! Cover your head! In reality, ‘instructions’ take the shape of neural networks, which after years and years of reproduction make certain behaviors repulsive and others attractive. The most important aspect about memeplexes as ‘code’ is not the form. Memes are not ‘executed’ as lines of code are executed by a parser. Memes modulate behaviors in competition with other memes.

Thus, already on the memeplex-level, the memes working together in a memeplex can be more or less mutually supportive or at odds with each other. The same holds true on the level of the mind, as people have competing values, ideas, and ideals. At the end of the day, environment always comes into play, furthermore, as some minds or mind-configurations may be better adapted to prevailing circumstances than others. If we narrow our view to memeplexes that lead to organizationality, we can speak of more or less successful blueprints for organizations as well. We can also speak of more and less resilient blueprints, i.e., blueprints that may not be as effective in terms of organizational performance, but far more effective in terms of long-term organizational cohesion. Organizations, once deconstructed on meme-level, are necessarily imperfect and messy social constructs – just as organisms are when deconstructed on the gene-level. Weeks and Galunic (2003), in their theory of the firm, very clearly identify the dynamics at hand:

If managers are more interested in furthering their own career than coming to the aid of their organization, they may be expected to reproduce memes they interpret as furthering that self-interest. The organization, its routines, its cultural distribution, will reflect that.

(p. 1327)

The passage illustrates the Darwinian element, i.e., the population dynamics-perspective, that distinguishes memetics from mainstream history of ideas or cultural studies. While one can and should research discourses and genealogies, the overriding question for strategic communication is how, when, and where (in time and space) memes modulate the behavior of individual organizational agents, and how and to what degree that behavior impacts the organizations’ chance of survival and success. Evolutionary psychology has clearly shown that human cooperation, due to our biology (Hamilton, 1964), is fragile. The human being is conflicted in exactly the way Weeks and Galunic point out. All of us know that cooperation is good, but most of us cannot resist thinking, at times, that it would be even better if everyone else cooperated altruistically while I reap egoistic benefit. It is against this background, the agent in focus wanting to benefit from others’ cooperation, that the ‘furthering that self-interest’ should be read here.

Strategic communication from the meme’s-eye point of view

We argued earlier that perhaps due to Dawkins’ early examples, the term meme has become very much associated with witty ‘internet memes.’ Internet memes, for us, are shareable text-image-combinations² that might refer to an underlying meme (the ‘internet meme’ in Grant’s terminology would be a mediotype) which, in turn, refers to memory traces (a memotype) shared in a community (sociotype). Conflating memes and internet memes is problematic, as the abundance of funny variations on the same theme may lead to the impression that powerful memes and successful memeplexes can be created or ‘designed’ at will. With internet memes, once again, the emphasis is on the new and creative element that gets shared and goes viral (Jenkins et al., 2013). The question why this internet meme is shared and not another one, recedes into the background. The result, we fear, is a Darwinian illusion on the same level as the intuition that a creature as awe-inspiring as an osprey (or an ant, or an earthworm) cannot be the result of a random process – it must be designed. Similarly, millions of funny pictures are posted and shared daily; only very few resonate deeply and widely enough to become memes.

From a strategic communication perspective, we would argue, more emphasis should be placed on how the small new element interacts with the large body of existing, old elements; in analogy, the new variation of an allele in a well-working genome. Powerful memes and successful memeplexes, we maintain, cannot be created at will. Even the most visionary leader of a new enterprise relies on cultural DNA that encodes how an accountant should behave. Except for those on regime-, religion- and ideology-level, creative minds and strategic communicators mostly create new ways of referencing old memes. Put differently, they try to insert small alterations into well-working, sound, robust memeplexes. Neo-institutional thought (for an overview Sandhu, 2009) has long emphasized the centrality of organizations imitating each other.

Memes and the meme’s-eye view as heuristic or material concepts: a final remark

Is the meme’s-eye view a mere heuristic or do we propose that it captures how the world really is? Are memes as real as cars, or are they on the same level as Hegel’s Weltgeist – resonant perhaps, but not real? Dawkins, who originally conceptualized the idea of memes, realized early that the gene-meme-analogy in the notorious chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene had its limitations. Early memeticists adopted the meme’s-eye view, perhaps taken by its elegance, whilst deferring answers to key questions – questions such as what does ‘imitation’ or ‘replication’ really mean? The argument ran: Genes build organic survival machines to create copies of themselves; memes build organizations to achieve the same – kind of … further research is necessary. The suggestion launched memes and the meme’s-eye view in one bundle, leaving it open which part was material and which heuristic.

The difference is, of course, that Dawkins does suggest that the world is run by genes. Once one adopts the gene’s-eye view, that it is the gene or genome that really matters in the larger scheme of things, seemingly puzzling questions find a straightforward answer. How can it be that deadly diseases that kill their carrier are inheritable? They should have eradicated themselves a long time ago. The answer is that a disease that kills its bearer in a later stage of life, after procreating, can endure. From the gene’s-eye, the meaning of life is not health and happiness; passing on the gene is.

To be very clear, we do not suggest that the world is really run by memes, or that organizations are merely survival machines of ideas. Adopting the meme’s-eye view remains a heuristic, a device to shift the emphasis from the strategic communication actor to the availability of ideas. The meme’s-eye view is on the same level, in principle, as Weeks and Galunic (2003) who conceptualize ‘organizations that have us’ in their theory of the cultural evolution of the firm. What is not merely a heuristic, however, is the talk of memes as a second-order concept resting on memory traces as a first-order, material concept. Memes are real, we would propose, to the degree that human memory and joint or collective intentionality are real. If one accepts the view that the success recipe of the species lies in flexible, highly adaptive collectivity, memes are a way to understand systematically how this flexible collectivity is regulated, what the code of regulation is. If one furthermore accepts that some agents sit at the regulation levers while others do not, we can understand the process as strategic, furthermore.

Case studies

In the following chapter we examine memes further by discussing two cases. First, the Montagsdemos or ‘Monday Demonstrations’ of 1989 that arguably led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Of particular interest here is how different groups subsequently adopted the phrase Wir sind das Volk for ideologically quite different, in the end far more limited purposes – in a way, ‘burning it’. Secondly, we present a critical reading of the Satanic Panic that arose in the United States and Canada in the early 1980s and lasted to the late 1990s. Here we want to show how a moral panic and its key memes found their ways into the contemporary conspiracy theory movement QAnon, which, it will be noted, draws very cleverly on fundamental motives.

Case study #1: Wir sind das Volk and Montagsdemos

The main motivation of the original Montagsdemos that started in Leipzig in 1989 was a sense of disillusionment with the East German state. The ‘Monday demonstrations’, which perhaps are the single most important cause for the fall of the Berlin Wall, did not emerge because of hashtags or viral videos. The Montagsdemos rested on strong and secret ties between disaffected individuals who shared a common understanding; they agreed on the need for political and social change.

The original Montagsdemos

The hub of the network that launched the original Montagsdemos was St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, where the pastor, Christian Führer, facilitated a joint intentionality: to voice opposition to the authoritarian policies of the GDR. The protests were long in coming. From about 1975 to the dissolution of the state in 1990, political and social repression in East Germany steadily intensified; by means of an historically unprecedented network of IMs (informelle Mitarbeiter, informers), the secret police, or Stasi (Staatssicherheit, state security) kept tabs on everyone. Though the average citizen experienced a tightening of the screws only closer to 1989 (Braun, 2009; Lohmann, 1994), socialism had been failing to deliver for quite a while, and the state had to deal with the ensuing dissatisfaction. Lohmann cites “poor economic performance and extensive political repression” as fundamental reasons for the “widespread dissatisfaction with the East German regime, while the public revelation of this discontent was by and large effectively suppressed” (p. 57). While redress of grievances was certainly a key motivation for the Montagsdemos, truth and openness of the state towards the people was regarded as the minimal condition.

For us, the interesting thing about Montagsdemos is that they did not disappear after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, of the 29 original Montagsdemos, i.e., demonstrations connected to the GDR regime, only ten occurred between October 1989 and March 1990. During 1990 and stretching into 1991, there were at least 19 more. In the coming years, the central idea that underpinned the demonstrations – peaceful, solidaric protest in the face of unsatisfactory states of affairs and repression – was adopted by other causes and movements, some, as we will see, ideologically quite far away. This indicates how deeply the meme ingrained itself in the German psyche after 1989. Especially in the federal states of former East Germany; Montagsdemos became a strategic communication resource.

Montagsdemos and Wir sind das Volk in 2004, 2010, 2019

To better understand how memes are repurposed, we take a closer look at the Montagsdemos that resurfaced in 2004, and the continuing utilization of Wir sind das Volk in other contexts, notably in 2010, and again in 2019.

By 2004, nationwide unemployment in reunified Germany was 10.5%, yet in the federal states of the former GDR the figure was almost twice as high − 20.1% (Patton, 2017, p. 483). The so-called Hartz-IV reforms – named after the Volkswagen manager Peter Hartz, who developed the initiative – constituted a comprehensive neoliberal economic reform of the hitherto quite generous social welfare system in the united Germany. As social welfare cuts mainly affected the unemployed in the economically devastated countryside of the former East, it is perhaps not surprising that Anti-Hartz-IV protests dusted off Wir sind das Volk. As shown in Figure 1, the phrase adorns a hand painted sign that proclaims: “We are the people, Mr. Schröder, Out with Hartz IV!” The message is directed at German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder whose social-democratic government introduced the reforms (Pergande, 2018). News reports at the time emphasized that most demonstrations occurred in the former East, implying a conceptual link to the origins of the phrase from the Montagsdemos that began in 1989 (Patton, 2017). The involvement of Christian Führer, the pastor at the center of the initial meetings in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche, added credibility to the renewed Montagsdemos.

Figure 1. Demonstrators in Magdeburg using the Wir sind das Volk (We are the people) to demand that Chancellor Schröder end the Hartz-IV reforms (Source: Der Spiegel, 10.08.2004).

In 1989 and 2004, Wir sind das Volk represented the defiance of people who leaned towards the notion of a solidaric state. By the mid-2010s, the meme was once again adopted by a movement known as Pegida. Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlands) emerged in response to the influx of refugees into Germany; it ostensibly stood for “the preservation and protection” of Judeo-Christian culture (Patton, 2017, p. 488). A decade later, Wir sind das Volk had crossed the border to Austria and was utilized by a movement protesting COVID-19 social distancing and other restrictions. Figure 2 depicts a masked man holding up a printed placard with the slogan marching in Vienna, Austria. It will be noted that the context is defiance in the face of the state and an establishment that, ostensibly, does not represent the people anymore.

Figure 2. Wir sind das Volk has crossed borders. Again recontextualized, during protests against COVID-restrictions in Vienna, Austria. (Source: Der Standard, 21.11.2021).

Figure 3 shows a Google Trends search of the phrase Wir sind das Volk in the years 2004 to 2022 with spikes in 2004 and 2008. The surprising lack of a similar surge during the COVID-19 pandemic likely has a simple explanation. It seems reasonable that in 2004 and 2008, Google and similar search engines offered people the chance to access information as needed. However, by 2020, the interactivity of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and others, with its user-generated perspectives, became a more attractive option to access information than search-engine-optimized information seeking. By contrast, similar phrases such as ‘nous sommes les peuple’ (French for ‘we are the people’) resulted in zero data, worldwide or solely looking at France, during the same period.

Figure 3. Google Trends search of Wir sind das Volk (We are the People) from 2004 to 2022.

Case study #2: QAnon: a new conspiracism with pre-digital structural traces

If the core affective content of the Montagsdemos and Wir sind das Volk lay in defiance, the emotional leitmotif in our second case, the case of Satanic Panic and QAnon, is the combination of fear and revulsion associated in many human cultures with embodiments of the quintessentially evil.

The Satanic Panic of the early 1980s to the late 1990s

Satanic panics or equivalent moral panics are not uncommon in human history. Between 1450 and about 1750, Europe experienced repeated waves of witch hunts. Experts estimate that in Europe and Colonial America alone about 100,000 people, mostly women, fell victim to sudden, fear-induced breakdowns of public reason catalyzed by religious superstition and, sometimes, by the church (Levack, 2013). Hughes (2017, p. 696) maintains, nevertheless, that the US’s Satanic Panic of the late 20th century remains remarkable: “ (…) the panic’s long duration, high volume of cases, and level of media attention were unique to the United States and produced an unrivaled national hysteria.” It is interesting to note here that some of the over 12,000 investigations resulted in lengthy sentences for child carers indicted of abuse – often due to shambolic investigation practices which, in turn, led to a considerable number of reversals afterwards. At the same time, modern law enforcement agencies did not find one single shred of evidence for systematic, large-scale satanic ritual abuse (SRA).

While there were important events that put satanism on the agenda in the 1970s – the murders by the Manson family and a string of other ritualistically inspired serial killers, the movie The Exorcist (1973), the popularization of satanic churches like Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan –, experts generally date the beginning of the moral panic proper to the early 1980s. Perhaps the key event was the publication of a book titled Michelle Remembers, co-written by Canadian psychoanalyst Lawrence Pazder and his former patient (but later, wife) Michelle Smith (Victor, 1993). The book became a bestseller and earned Pazder lucrative contracts as an expert advisor as the panic spread across the nation and around the world. It relates how the psychologist and his patient successively, session by session, uncovered Michelle’s repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse by secret cults. Michelle Smith’s first abuse allegedly happened at the age of five at the hands of her mother; her ‘career’ in the satanic church culminated in a final ritual of 81 days length in which Satan him- or herself was summoned. Since its initial publication in 1980, the narrative has been debunked. Not only is the approach used by Pazder, recovered memory therapy, thoroughly discredited. Journalists and investigators have been unable to corroborate key facts in Michelle Smith’s narrative, e.g., there is no gap of 81 days in her record of school attendance.

The most prominent investigation by law enforcement agencies associated with the Satanic Panic is the McMartin preschool case. On September 8, 1983, the police department in Manhattan Bay, California, sent a letter to approximately 200 families with children attending the preschool founded by Virginia McMartin near Los Angeles (Ramsland, 2004). While suspicion of child abuse should of course be taken seriously, in its suggestiveness, the letter reads like it was penned by a conspiracy theorist not a public authority.

Dear Parent: The following procedure is obviously an unpleasant one, but to protect the rights of your children as well as the rights of the accused, this inquiry is necessary for a complete investigation. Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the pre-school. We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation. Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of ‘taking the child’s temperature’. Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing.

(Ramsland, 2004)

The McMartin preschool case illustrates how seriously authorities took allegations of satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s; the letter indicates how heated and judgmental the climate already was, and how suggestive police practice creates self-fulfilling prophecies. Beginning in 1983, the McMartin investigations resulted in one of the longest criminal trials in US legal history; charges were dropped, finally, in 1990. During the investigations, the authorities made extraordinary efforts to follow up on even the most bizarre allegations: “The FBI, as well as state and local law-enforcement agents, closed down the daycare and began an extensive search for evidence, which included a futile dig for secret tunnels and animal remains beneath the school” (Hughes, 2017, p. 691). Unlike other cases, the two McMartin trials returned no convictions.

Family-related facilities like daycare centers were not the only target during the Satanic Panic. Proctor & Gamble, producers of family- and baby-related products, endured a harrowing legal battle from 1985 onwards defending against bizarre claims that its executives were using profits to support the worship of Satan. In fact, as recently as 2007, after decades, Proctor & Gamble were still involved in lawsuits dating back to the Satanic Panic (Yuhas, 2021). In 1991, the company even decided to change its logo due to claims their previous logo displayed satanic references.

Satanic Panic 21: Pizzagate and QAnon

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s petered out in the late 1990s, not only because of lack of interest, but also due to clear-headedness of investigative journalists and other experts who began to scrutinize the evidence and started to question the practices of authorities, political, legal, and medical.

However, while the panic ebbed, the meme did not die (Lavin, 2020). A quarter century later, in 2016, during the presidential elections that saw Hillary Clinton pitched against Donald Trump, an armed man drove to Washington, D.C. and fired three shots at a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. The man had been spurred by online rumors gathering momentum on the sidelines of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, especially after the email hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The rumors revolved around a plot that involved high-ranking Democratic politicians, including Clinton, in the covert sex-trafficking of children; codewords in Podesta’s emails allegedly referred to the nefarious business. Specifically, the rumors said that children were held in the (non-existent) basement of the pizzeria, which served as a kind of clearinghouse for the activities of satanic pedophiles. On being arrested without any harm done, the gunman stated that he intended to see for himself, and to save the children, if possible.

Since the events of 2016, which were not limited to the shooting but also involved hate storms against Comet Ping Pong and allegations against its owner, conspiracy theories about a global child abuse system have become central to the so-called QAnon movement. The term QAnon refers to an anonymous poster on internet forums such as 4chan or 8chan (a so-called ‘anon’) who claims to have acquired Q-clearance, de facto the highest security clearance in the U.S. Department of Energy but also a common trope in popular culture. Central to QAnon’s tenets is the conviction that a secret network of elite individuals colludes in the trafficking, ritual sacrifice, and cannibalization of children. The group claims that the primary architects of this insidious, pedophilic regime stem from politically left-leaning areas such as Hollywood, higher education, and above all Democrat politicians. While Pizzagate centered on Hillary Clinton’s involvement, QAnon targeted a broader range of celebrities such as businessmen George Soros and Bill Gates or talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. Donald Trump, in contrast, is seen as waging a war against this cabal. ‘Draining the swamp’ is seen as difficult, however, because the pedophilic-satanic cabal is intertwined with the Deep State. Today, despite various attempts to debunk QAnon’s claims, “references to the QAnon conspiracy theory – which began on 4chan – are increasingly prominent in US party politics” (Colley and Moore, 2020, p. 26).

QAnon’s connection to the earlier Satanic Panic lies first and foremost in the activation of one of the emotionally most powerful memeplexes, the embodiment of everything quintessentially evil in the figure of Satan. QAnon is as much about Satan as the Satanic Panic was. Moreover, the moral panic as well as the conspiracy theory centers on one of the most fundamental motives: care for family and, especially, one’s vulnerable children. Consequently, to anchor the fear and revulsion on a more visible level, QAnon adopted the phrase ‘Save the Children’ or, alternatively ‘Save our Children’, which was also in circulation during the early days of the Satanic Panic (Beck, 2015; Romano, 2021). Figures 4 and 5 show demonstrators with the phrase on their signs. A Google Trends search of two terms, ‘Save the Children’ and the QAnon code phrase ‘wwg1wga’ (where one of us goes, we will go together) demonstrates a clear surge in YouTube searches around the time of Trump’s announcement for his presidential run and subsequent presidency. Figure 6 shows these peaks in searches in the corresponding years.

Figure 4. A rally in Keene, New Hampshire, with a protester holding up a sign bearing the QAnon-related hashtag #Saveourchildren. (Source: New York Times, 28.09.2020).

Figure 5. QAnon demonstrators with signs reproducing the claims of ritualized sexual abuse that were common during the Satanic Panic of 1980-1990. (Source: WYSO/BBC World Service, 19.05.2021).

Figure 6. Google Trends comparative search of ‘Save the children’ and ‘wwg1wga’, or ‘where we go one, we go all’, a slogan associated with QAnon.

Differences: mainstream vs. fringe

Despite the continuity, there are also important differences. Perhaps the most important is that the Satanic Panic in the 1980s was spread, aided, and abetted by mainstream media. Although the claim was that large groups of satanists were gathering right in society’s midst, institutions were not yet seen as fully corrupted; authorities responded with diligence to parents’ concerns. QAnon, in contrast, portrays itself as in defiance of the Deep State, which itself has largely become the embodiment of evil. Utilizing fringe media which did not exist in the 1980s, QAnon’s raison d’être is to break the stranglehold of a mainstream media hush-up.

Discussion

The case narratives illustrate how key memes of successful movements resurface in similar yet different contexts, i.e., how memes endure. The recent protests of anti-vaxxers had very little to do with the original Montagsdemos as a historical and political event, except that the protesters attempted to reconnect to the defiance of 1989. That is the point, however. The question whether Hartz-IV protesters, Pegida or protesters against Covid-restrictions are ‘really’ the legitimate heirs of the brave citizens of 1989 is irrelevant from the meme’s-eye view. From the meme’s-eye view, the key issue is in how many cases the reference to the memory traces of 1989 resonated with the present, leading to the adoption of the meme. Presumably, many of the original protesters will have been angry about the adoption of Wir sind das Volk by ideologically quite different movements. Similarly, ‘Save the Children’ links legitimate parental concerns with an assortment of fringe beliefs (see Wiggins, 2023, for an analysis of the conspiratorial political discourse on 4Chan’s/pol-board). Whether that is desirable can be debated, but the meme’s-eye view is not a moral perspective but one of population dynamics. Although studying the genealogy of a meme or memeplex is important to understand its mechanisms, it should not be misunderstood as trying to fathom which use of the meme is authentic. For those who adopt it, the meme is authentic enough, apparently.

Memes as coping mechanisms

The issue becomes clearer when one compares the two cases and asks, against the background of the general understanding that communication regulates collectivity, why memes are adopted.

The obvious difference between the US Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the Montagsdemo-movement is that in the GDR, the people’s grievances were real. While East Germans enjoyed relative prosperity in comparison with citizens of other socialist regimes, political repression was a grim reality. Estimations of the number of politically motivated executions, of torture, incarceration or other harm vary considerably (Borbe, 2010), but measured against the ideals of a liberal democracy, tens of thousands suffered unjustly. In contrast, despite more than 12,000 cases investigated by the authorities, no evidence for the core grievance of the Satanic Panic, i.e., a massive cabal of satanic child-abuse going on in the very midst of suburban society, was ever found. The real grievance was caused by the panic, in fact; it lies in the unjust treatment of the unfortunate, innocent individuals caught up in the witch hunt.

The question ‘why did the meme endure’ is easily answered in the case of the Montagsdemos: the very real everyday grievances kept it going. At least prima facie, it is not so easily answered in the case of the Satanic Panic. We would argue, however, that the underlying logic is the same. Memeplexes do not necessarily succeed because they strictly tally with reality; in many cases, they succeed because they offer convincing, powerful coping mechanisms. Gabora’s classic memetic study (Gabora, 1995), an early computer modelling study of cultural diffusion, focused on exactly that aspect, i.e., memes as ‘blueprints’ for problem-solving behavior.

In the case of the Montagsdemos, protesters had to find a coping mechanism for the personal strains of standing up against an oppressive apparatus that ‘disappeared’ people as much as any other totalitarian regime; Christian Führer and his associates needed to turn fear of the security forces into defiance, a sense of individual isolation into unity, while at the same time preserving peaceful protests. Although the term ‘Volk’ (people) is perhaps slightly tainted by the Nazi regime, it remains a powerful marker of solidarity in German language; court orders in Germany are issued ‘im Namen des Volkes’, i.e., in the name of the people. The use of the slogan occurred as early as the first Montagsdemos in 1989. In its earlier version, Wir sind ein Volk with emphasis on unity³, it was printed on leaflets handed out by the Arbeitskreis Gerechtigkeit (Taskforce Justice) during the perhaps decisive event on October 9, 1989, to encourage peaceful, non-confrontative protest (see IFM-Archiv Sachsen e.V., 2010 for the original leaflet). Figure 7 shows a postage stamp with St. Nicholas Church and the phrase in late 1989 or early 1990 (Beck, 2015; Romano, 2021).

Figure 7. Wir sind das Volk (We are the people) offical postage stamp 1990. (Source: Wikimedia, 30.06.2006).

As for the Satanic Panic, it is obvious that Michelle Remembers capitalized on parents’ fears that their children would suffer abuse in childcare. But why did the panic endure, almost a decade, despite no evidence for the core? Once again, we suggest the memeplex succeeded because it offered the best coping mechanism available. In this case, however, it was not the coping mechanism that appealed to the largest number of individuals; it was the one that appealed to the most deeply affected. Thus, the meme endured and propagated not because it referenced a real political grievance, but because it externalized a personal grievance and triggered the most violent reactions and the shrillest calls to redress it.

The issue to cope with was a fundamental motive: care for family. During the early 1980s, the ideal of the nuclear family was still very much traditional: the wife cared for the children, the husband went to work. However, realities were increasingly at odds with the traditional ideal. Without any comment on cause and effect, dual-income households became more and more common during the boom. That women with children entered the job market was not always for reasons of self-fulfillment but motivated by economic necessity. One can perhaps assume, therefore, that at least with some parents, the most traditional and religious families, there was a sense of guilt about falling short of the idyllic ideal, i.e., failing one’s children. Moreover, the unpreparedness of the US welfare system – lack of maternity leave, a national healthcare system, inadequate partial or full unemployment support – must have strained families to the breaking point. It is not surprising, therefore, that anxieties and aggressions were externalized and projected onto the one figure that always signified the ultimate evil, Satan (de Young, 1997). Measured against the population, it initially only happened in a minute number of cases, but due to the epidemic-like quality of moral panic, a small number of primary cases is sufficient to set off many secondary cases. Amongst the parents who read the police department’s highly suggestive letter, there will inevitably be some who detect suspicious signs. With mass sensationalism and the usual freeriding of actors who use the opportunity to settle personal grievances, a witch hunt is never far away.

Old memes, deep memes

Earlier we argued that memetic theory should place less emphasis on the circulation of the new and more emphasis on how the new connects and reinterprets the old. The Satanic Panic obviously referred to one of the oldest, most deeply ingrained memes in Christian culture: Satan, the embodiment of the quintessentially evil. Already during the European witch hunts, one of the key ideas was that Satan worked in secrecy to undermine society, with the word ‘undermining’ already carrying the connotation of the subterranean modus operandi that made the FBI dig for tunnels under McMartin preschool. In the past, however, Satan’s agents were often found, conveniently, at the fringes of society: the elderly living alone, the mentally unstable, or individuals born with deformities. The modern reinterpretation suggested that Satan had not been idle during the previous centuries, successfully worming his way from the fringes into the center. In the 1980s, Satan had upped his game and was operating under the very noses of the middle class, in preschools and other educational institutions – especially ones, presumably, that challenged traditional ways at home with progressive ideas. In 2016, Donald Trump ran on a ticket that took Satan’s success another step further. Trump suggested the quintessential corruption of the political establishment: evil had taken over the reins of society. It is interesting to note here that the QAnon-version reflects the same concern for the corruption of children, only updated and aligned with the realities of who really raises children: in 1980s it was the preschools, in the 2010s it was the talk show hosts. Corruption of the young, it will be noted, is the accusation that got Socrates sentenced to death almost 2,500 years ago.

Strategic or not?

Ostensibly, QAnon goes back to an anonymous poster who acquired Q-clearance during Trump’s presidency and now regularly ‘drops’ secret information from the inner circles of power to enlighten followers about how things really are. Experts doubt that QAnon is in any privileged position or indeed that it is a single person. What is certain is that there is an inner circle of actors who disseminate inflammatory information that keeps the movement going. QAnon is a dynamic and fluid partial organization, thus, but it has a strategic core.

From a classical strategic perspective, the questions would be a) what QAnon wants; b) to what degree it achieves what it wants. With a covert movement like QAnon, this is unanswerable. Viewed from the meme’s-eye point of view, these questions do not become irrelevant, but they are asked in a different way: a) what memes does QAnon launch; b) how do they propagate and to what degree do they resonate, in media proximately, but ultimately in people’s minds. Between a) and b), one can ask a third question, furthermore: c) how are the memes and memeplexes that QAnon launches constructed, why are they ‘fitter’ for certain contexts than others? Almost all conspiracy theories are built in a way to be almost impossible to disprove, for example. Evidence that disproves the conspiracy only shows how deep the conspiracy really is. How that is achieved concretely, how specific memes interact in a resilient memeplex that defends itself against attack, is not a trivial question, and one of great interest for strategic communication.

Conclusion: the meme’s-eye view, social theory and evolutionary psychology

It is a source of confidence for us that the major building blocks of the meme’s-eye view are already accepted in social theory, can be derived from it (Wiggins & Bowers, 2015). Giddens and Pearson (1998, p. 77) note that, “society only has form, and that form only has effects on people, insofar as structure is produced and reproduced in what people do.” In The Constitution of Society, Giddens remarks that “social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have ‘structures’ but rather exhibit ‘structural properties’ and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents” (1984, p. 17).

Congruence with motifs in the works of one’s favorite social theorist is reassuring, but agreement with luminaries constitutes circumstantial evidence at best. If memetic theory predicted what memes would be adopted by a given social movement long before the movement knows, the theory would be testable – but that is not the case. The weak spot of our cases is that they constitute potentially circular post-hoc reconstructions. And it is certainly true that there is circularity: If things had been otherwise – if the rallying cry of the Montagsdemos had been, say, Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht –, we would certainly have found a plausible explanation for this alternative state.

It is interesting to note, here, that Darwinian evolution is regularly subjected to the same critique of circularity (as is strategy, by the way). Critics argue that the concept of ‘fitness’ is meaningless because whatever happens to be around is deemed a survivor of the struggle, is deemed ‘fit’. Similarly, when strategy theorists see a successful business, success is attributed to strategy. Unsuccessful business? Lack of strategy!

That is a misunderstanding of the concept of fitness, however. The question why the Montagsdemos adopted the slogan Wir sind das Volk remains meaningful because the conditions that Christian Führer and the other demonstrators faced are known or knowable, in principle. That our hypothetical movement chose Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht does not mean that it was the best choice; maybe Wir sind das Volk would have been better. The misunderstanding lies in the assumption that ‘fit’ means best, while it only means ‘good enough’ given the circumstances and the competition.

It is here that the strategic perspective and the question ‘how organization happens in communication’ can join hands. Evolutionary psychology (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997) has drawn our attention to the fact that our minds, just as our bodies, have evolved by natural selection, via small variations that either give an advantage or not, from what was there before. The memetic perspective helps to see that human collectives and organizationalities are cobbled together in a similar way. As collectives adapt to changing environments, previously successful memes and memeplexes are varied, the new variations tried out. One should not take the comparison too far, of course, as cultural evolution is much faster, much more flexible. However, the fact that the actors who suggest variations may do so purposefully, and may even lay claim to being strategic, does not detract from the reality that memes and memeplexes must prove themselves ‘out there’: either they connect to and resonate with memory traces in people’s heads, or they fall flat.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Donald Campbell, interestingly, proposed the idea of ‘mnemons’ himself. See: Campbell, D. (1974), Evolutionary epistemology, in P. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp 413–463), Open Court Publishing. Similarly, Charles Lumsden and Edward Wilson suggested the concept of ‘culturgens’ already in 1981. See: Wilson, E. (1981), Genes, mind, and culture: The coevolutionary process, Harvard University Press. Dawkins considered the term ‘mimemes’, emphasizing imitation, but decided in favor of the monosyllabic meme as it sounded like gene. See: Dawkins, R. (2009), The selfish gene (30th anniversary ed.), Oxford University Press.

² Cognitive load theory builds upon earlier research areas leading to support for a dual-coding theory, i.e., the assumption that the mind processes textual and image-based information along different channels. Given that memes usually utilize verbal and visual components, it is interesting to note that Paivio (2006) theorizes internal cognitive systems processing logogens and imagens; word and image units, respectively. Dual-coding theory gives us a hint why memes that combine verbal and visual forms resonate with people of differing ideologies, over time and in differing contexts. See: Paivio, A. (1986). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. Oxford University Press.

³ The indefinite article ein places the emphasis on unity (We are one people) and originally admonished protesters not to forget that the SED regime was not a foreign occupier but a German government. The slogan also can be interpreted as hinting at reunification with West Germany. The definite article das sounds far more defiant: We are the people. Claiming to be das Volk implies not only unity but lays claim to the source of power, indicating that the government lost its legitimacy as it ceased to be a valid representation of the people.