> The issue is that people become incapable of interrogating why we enjoy what we enjoy. Thinking critically about something is somehow synonymous with a moral condemnation of that thing.
This is something I have been thinking about for many years. I am always introspecting and trying to understand why I am the way I am. Why do I enjoy what I enjoy. When making assessments I strictly separate moral judgements, from judgements of quality, and from personal taste. I find it very difficult to have meaningful conversations about even basic things, like books or movies, because most people don’t seem to even understand how to answer the question “why do you like it?”
If you tell somebody that they like pink bows because yadda yadda overconsumption capitalism socialism, that's a personal attack: you're co-opting their enjoyment and insisting they're involved with "the system". If you procede to tell them that you were criticizing "the system" and that they just don't understand that it's not a personal attack, that's another personal attack, because now you're calling them stupid. Trying to get agreement that these are objective observations is like saying "just agree that I'm right about you". Their only option to resist is to engage on the same "deep" level, at which point they've already lost and conceded that it's all about overconsumption capitalism socialism or at least some similar shit.
If you tell your opinion about the origin of someone's taste to that person, it's not a personal attack, it's just you being honest and open to discuss your opinions.
If that person takes that as an attack, it just shows how insecure they are about their taste.
Which, of course, would certainly lead to another difficult discussion :)
> We can — in fact, we must — interrogate the culture and society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it.
It's not optional, you see, it's a moral obligation for everybody who likes fluffy pink whatevers to "think critically about the ways that our consumption or our For You pages might be reflections of that deeply political and social world" ... this amounts to telling them, in general terms, that the reason they like the thing is political. It's a disingenuous "just asking questions" deal where the objective is to talk to them about Marx, like a JW doorstepping you to just ask you whether you've thought about Jesus.
It depends how far you dig. Let’s say there’s a movie you enjoy. First a person can describe how it made them feel overall. Then they can identify which characteristics and components of the film made them feel a certain way. What was it about those various aspects that caused those feelings? Which parts of the experience were the result of the craftsmanship of the work in question and which parts come from the eye of the beholder?
At that point you have to kind of stop digging. Repeatedly asking why will always lead to a psychological or biological explanation, which is too reductive to be relevant.
My take on this is that I don't need to examine my taste in movies that deeply. Unless I find it problematic for some reason, I can just let my taste be as it wills, enjoy what I enjoy. I watch movies to relax, to escape, to connect with people. I don't watch them to deeply analyze either myself or the field of cinema.
I do analyze other aspects of my life deeply. My diet, my fitness routines, my family, my relationships, my work, and other personal interests. But nobody has energy or time to analyze everything that they do, any thing that you do spend time analyzing is another thing that you don't.
So of you ask me why I liked a particular movie, maybe I'm just gonna say "because explosions go boom", and you shouldn't take that answer to mean that I'm incapable of critical thought. Let's just chill and watch a movie, then save the deep discussions for something else like our work, families, or recent discoveries in physics and medicine (personal interests of mine which I find far more interesting to discuss than cinema).
If you do like analyzing your taste in movies, that's great. And if you find other people who like it, that's great too. But it doesn't make you superior to or smarter than people who just watch the stories to relax and zone out for a bit.
If it's Ok for you to claim that your taste in movies has no deep roots beyond what's immediately accessible to your consciousness, it's also Ok for us to derive from that claim that you are, indeed in this instance, incapable of critical examination. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Now, if what you wanted to say is that you believe that this domain is not worthy of critical examination, then there would be several difficulties still:
- how to know what's worth of examination without examination?
- How could such a culturally influential industry be not worthy of critical examination?
- Aren't we naturally more resistant to examine what we suspect would yield unpleasant knowledge rather than what we suspect would be unworthy?
It’s not about understanding something trivial like taste in movies. It’s about understanding yourself. People are out there trying to solve the great mysteries of the universe, but they don’t even know themselves.
There are many paths to understanding yourself. My personal opinion is that analyzing why I like certain movies is one of the less effective paths because movies are such a cultural thing - the movies I like say less about me as a person and more about the culture I grew up in. That in itself could be worth analyzing but honestly I rarely watch movies, they're just not an important part of my life.
You're free to feel differently - maybe movies have a more important role in your life and upbringing, and genuinely are a good path towards understanding yourself.
However, don't make the classic mistake of assuming that what is effective for you is effective for everyone. And don't make the even more classic mistake of assuming that people who don't respond deeply the way you want them to are not capable of deep thought.
These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But they are also just exhausting if you consume (or produce) too many of them.
Most of the things being dissected and critically analysed here are popular precisely because they don't demand too much thought to engage with in the first place. Being forced to consider the political or philosophical root causes of your enjoyment of cat memes just turns them from cheap laughs into hard work and saps the enjoyment out of them. You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.
IMO it's good that there is a blog out there putting out these kinds of analyses, so that people can visit it when that's the kind of thing they're after, and not visit it when it's not. The problem is people either over-consuming this content themselves in a manner similar to doom-scrolling, or having the content forced on them by people who want to shoe-horn these topics into every conversation.
Individual water molecules don't do much thinking either, but fluid dynamics is still an interesting and useful subject of study.
If people seem to be putting considerable effort trying to understand such trivial things as memes, perhaps it's because they realize they are standing ankle deep in a rising flood and wish to avoid being swept away.
Maybe training your critical thoughts on mundane things helps to understand less mundane things, and give one the good habit of not letting alien ideas settle in unchallenged?
Like gym for the mind?
Ignorance is no more bliss than physical weakness is comfort.
Also, isn't critical thinking synonymous with forming one's own opinions? If most of our ideas and opinions are not really ours, then really, who are we?
>You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.
Ignorance is bliss. Keep smiling peasant, you don't want to risk your bliss by knowing that you're bound for the Soylent Green factory or that everybody in power and business plays you for a foul
This but unironically. In the movie no one was killed for the purpose of being turned into soylent green, they just used bodies of people who were dead anyway. I remember thinking that it's not such a big deal compared to all the other misery in that movie, and that ignorance was bliss in that respect.
I don't fully remember the movie anymore, but there were many other things that were much worse that actually happened on an ongoing basis and leading to people suffering. Like the poverty.
The massive waste of human lives that result from the extreme poverty displayed in the movie is indeed the worse regression imaginable, and the worse objection to the reverence of modernity, but we are so accustomed to it that we would all have forgotten the movie if not for the twist about cannibalism.
> Because we often lack the tools to challenge these structural problems at their root through collective action (...) we tend to interpret these structural problems through a purely individual, moralistic lens.
Isn't that the other way around? We lack those tools because we, as social apes, govern and influence each others via the shortcuts of feelings (symbols and morality are quicker than knowledge).
> it’s really that deep is a reader-supported publication so i can keep it ad-free and bullshit-free. consider becoming a paid subscriber to support! <3
Had to read this five times before I realized that it was just a poorly placed call to action, and not the quote itself. The quote follows right after, hah.
I’m on mobile, and it was confusing because of that. On desktop it’s a lot more visible that this is not the quote.
I enjoy the kind of analysis the author talks about, and also see the anti-intellectualism among younger folks. I too have felt disconnected from the many people who aren't interested in taking a deeper look into things.
But when posts like these are making the case for intellectualism I can't really blame people for finding it distasteful. The author gives a moral argument for why one should engage in critical analysis, but that's weak; there are far more morally just and productive things to do with one's limited time and effort than analyze TikTok trends, and also, people do just need some room for lighthearted fun. People don't engage with memes because they think it's righteous, so to say they shouldn't because that's righteous doesn't make a lot of sense.
I think the best argument to be made for looking deeper into things is that it's fun. Learning is fun, analyzing is fun, understanding how things work is fun. I particularly like this tweet from the post:
> "let people enjoy things" ok i enjoy critical analysis and being a hater
I believe the perception of so-called intellectualism as something relegated to those with the time, effort and convictions to engage with it does far more to repel people than attract them. The case may be that it helps fight consumerism and whatnot, but that should arise naturally as a result of curiosity; curiosity with a goal kinda misses the point of curiosity. So while I disagree with this:
> We can — in fact, we must — interrogate the culture and society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it. Otherwise, we submit to our own perceived powerlessness to make change.
I strongly agree with this:
> The way to resist anti-intellectualism is not to say that the “intellectuals” are a distinct, superior class of educated elites, but rather that we are all capable of becoming intellectuals ourselves, if we so choose.
If it’s any solace, deep rooted individualism is not surviving prosperity induced demographic collapse. The mindset has experienced a 75% drop in pair bonding and will not propagate into the future beyond 2070.
What is "prosperity induced" is the disappearance of the demographic bomb in wealthy-enough cultures.
But my understanding was that further limitations below the reproduction rate was more "recession induced" and a general acknowledgement of unsustainable "growth".
The "just let people enjoy things" trope always seems, to me, to be used when someone can tell that an argument is wrong but can't explain exactly why.
In this case, I think the author's rhetorical toolkit can be used to criticise pretty much anything. Women wearing pink bows today are doing it because of capitalist repression turning them into kids; yesterday, overly professional workplace attire was because capitalism wanted to make everyone homogeneous; tomorrow, any new trends in women's fashion will inevitably turn out to be caused by capitalism.
And yeah, capitalism is a big motivating force behind everything, but because it's behind everything you can use the same critique for anything. The casual observer can tell that this argument is bullshit, but can't quite explain why, and hence just wants to be allowed to enjoy things. Few people are willing to argue they should just be allowed to enjoy conflict diamonds or chattel slavery or anything which has genuine reasons to be attacked.
It is definitively lazy to ascribe to "capitalism" any cultural trend, because indeed that's always going to be a first order explanation for everything, but isn't that even more lazy to "just let people enjoy"?
Maybe there are higher order explanations, some even progressive (I'm not a big connoisseur of pink bow trends, but I suspect there is an element of mockery in there?)
Memes are well labeled. A semantic compression of an entire sentiment. The pinnacle of communication by compressed experiential and cultural context.
And humans like compressed communication, makes them feel warm fuzzy and agentic when they can take in a external-coded token and decompress it into a bunch of internal-coded tokens.
The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking, must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the individual is beaten down by “others” and forced to yield to the common opinion.
Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.
When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, the “inauthentic” self is identical with the “they” (das Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one’s true personality. It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself, who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of pólemos—the violence that is “father of all and king of all.” Struggle and conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power in the Nietzschean sense of the term.
I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.
Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it the romantic lie of which I just spoke.
-----------
René Girard – Deceit, Desire & the Novel
In The Past Recaptured Proust emphasizes that self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation. Proustian self-centeredness gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well; it is not one-sided egotism; it is an impulse in two contradictory directions which always ends by tearing the individual apart. To triumph over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.
This profound Self is also a universal Self. The dialectic of metaphysical pride alone can help us understand and accept Proust's attempt to reconcile the particular and universal. In the context of the romantic's mechanical opposition between Self and Others, such an attempt would be absurd.
This logical absurdity no doubt struck Proust and he occasionally gives up his attempt at reconciliation and slips back into the cliches of twentieth-century romanticism. In a few isolated passages of The Past Recaptured he declares that the work of art must permit us to grasp our "difef rences" and makes us delight in our "originality."
These scattered passages are the result of Proust's lack of a theoretic vocabulary. But the attempt at logical coherence is quickly swept away by inspiration. Proust knew that in describing his own youth he was describing ours as well. He knew that the true artist no longer has to choose between himself and Others. Because it is born of renunciation, great novelistic art loses nothing and regains everything.
But this renunciation is very painful. The novelist can write his novel only if he recognizes that his mediator is a person like himself. Marcel, for example, has to give up considering his beloved a monstrous divinity and seeing himself in the role of an eternal victim. He has to recognize that his beloved's lies are similar to his own.
This victory over a self-centeredness which is other-centered, this renunciation of fascination and hatred, is the crowning moment of novelistic creation. Therefore it can be found in all the great novelists. Every novelist sees his similarity to the fascinating Other through the voice of his hero. Mme de la Fayette recognizes her similarity to the women for whom love has been their undoing. Stendhal, the enemy of hypocrites, recognizes at the end of The Red and the Black that he is also a hypocrite. Dostoyevsky, in the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, gives up seeing himself alternately as a superhuman and as a subhuman. The novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse which
Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.
This is the meaning of Flaubert's famous cry: "Mme Bovary, c'est moil" Flaubert first conceived Mme Bovary as that despicable Other whom he had sworn to deal with.
> The issue is that people become incapable of interrogating why we enjoy what we enjoy. Thinking critically about something is somehow synonymous with a moral condemnation of that thing.
This is something I have been thinking about for many years. I am always introspecting and trying to understand why I am the way I am. Why do I enjoy what I enjoy. When making assessments I strictly separate moral judgements, from judgements of quality, and from personal taste. I find it very difficult to have meaningful conversations about even basic things, like books or movies, because most people don’t seem to even understand how to answer the question “why do you like it?”
If you tell somebody that they like pink bows because yadda yadda overconsumption capitalism socialism, that's a personal attack: you're co-opting their enjoyment and insisting they're involved with "the system". If you procede to tell them that you were criticizing "the system" and that they just don't understand that it's not a personal attack, that's another personal attack, because now you're calling them stupid. Trying to get agreement that these are objective observations is like saying "just agree that I'm right about you". Their only option to resist is to engage on the same "deep" level, at which point they've already lost and conceded that it's all about overconsumption capitalism socialism or at least some similar shit.
If you tell your opinion about the origin of someone's taste to that person, it's not a personal attack, it's just you being honest and open to discuss your opinions.
If that person takes that as an attack, it just shows how insecure they are about their taste.
Which, of course, would certainly lead to another difficult discussion :)
"why do you like this?" != telling someone why they like said thing, this is basically entirely off topic
> We can — in fact, we must — interrogate the culture and society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it.
It's not optional, you see, it's a moral obligation for everybody who likes fluffy pink whatevers to "think critically about the ways that our consumption or our For You pages might be reflections of that deeply political and social world" ... this amounts to telling them, in general terms, that the reason they like the thing is political. It's a disingenuous "just asking questions" deal where the objective is to talk to them about Marx, like a JW doorstepping you to just ask you whether you've thought about Jesus.
> most people don’t seem to even understand how to answer the question “why do you like it?”
And how do I answer this kind of question?
It depends how far you dig. Let’s say there’s a movie you enjoy. First a person can describe how it made them feel overall. Then they can identify which characteristics and components of the film made them feel a certain way. What was it about those various aspects that caused those feelings? Which parts of the experience were the result of the craftsmanship of the work in question and which parts come from the eye of the beholder?
At that point you have to kind of stop digging. Repeatedly asking why will always lead to a psychological or biological explanation, which is too reductive to be relevant.
My take on this is that I don't need to examine my taste in movies that deeply. Unless I find it problematic for some reason, I can just let my taste be as it wills, enjoy what I enjoy. I watch movies to relax, to escape, to connect with people. I don't watch them to deeply analyze either myself or the field of cinema.
I do analyze other aspects of my life deeply. My diet, my fitness routines, my family, my relationships, my work, and other personal interests. But nobody has energy or time to analyze everything that they do, any thing that you do spend time analyzing is another thing that you don't.
So of you ask me why I liked a particular movie, maybe I'm just gonna say "because explosions go boom", and you shouldn't take that answer to mean that I'm incapable of critical thought. Let's just chill and watch a movie, then save the deep discussions for something else like our work, families, or recent discoveries in physics and medicine (personal interests of mine which I find far more interesting to discuss than cinema).
If you do like analyzing your taste in movies, that's great. And if you find other people who like it, that's great too. But it doesn't make you superior to or smarter than people who just watch the stories to relax and zone out for a bit.
If it's Ok for you to claim that your taste in movies has no deep roots beyond what's immediately accessible to your consciousness, it's also Ok for us to derive from that claim that you are, indeed in this instance, incapable of critical examination. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Now, if what you wanted to say is that you believe that this domain is not worthy of critical examination, then there would be several difficulties still:
- how to know what's worth of examination without examination?
- How could such a culturally influential industry be not worthy of critical examination?
- Aren't we naturally more resistant to examine what we suspect would yield unpleasant knowledge rather than what we suspect would be unworthy?
It’s not about understanding something trivial like taste in movies. It’s about understanding yourself. People are out there trying to solve the great mysteries of the universe, but they don’t even know themselves.
There are many paths to understanding yourself. My personal opinion is that analyzing why I like certain movies is one of the less effective paths because movies are such a cultural thing - the movies I like say less about me as a person and more about the culture I grew up in. That in itself could be worth analyzing but honestly I rarely watch movies, they're just not an important part of my life.
You're free to feel differently - maybe movies have a more important role in your life and upbringing, and genuinely are a good path towards understanding yourself.
However, don't make the classic mistake of assuming that what is effective for you is effective for everyone. And don't make the even more classic mistake of assuming that people who don't respond deeply the way you want them to are not capable of deep thought.
These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But they are also just exhausting if you consume (or produce) too many of them.
Most of the things being dissected and critically analysed here are popular precisely because they don't demand too much thought to engage with in the first place. Being forced to consider the political or philosophical root causes of your enjoyment of cat memes just turns them from cheap laughs into hard work and saps the enjoyment out of them. You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.
IMO it's good that there is a blog out there putting out these kinds of analyses, so that people can visit it when that's the kind of thing they're after, and not visit it when it's not. The problem is people either over-consuming this content themselves in a manner similar to doom-scrolling, or having the content forced on them by people who want to shoe-horn these topics into every conversation.
Individual water molecules don't do much thinking either, but fluid dynamics is still an interesting and useful subject of study.
If people seem to be putting considerable effort trying to understand such trivial things as memes, perhaps it's because they realize they are standing ankle deep in a rising flood and wish to avoid being swept away.
Maybe training your critical thoughts on mundane things helps to understand less mundane things, and give one the good habit of not letting alien ideas settle in unchallenged?
Like gym for the mind? Ignorance is no more bliss than physical weakness is comfort.
Also, isn't critical thinking synonymous with forming one's own opinions? If most of our ideas and opinions are not really ours, then really, who are we?
>You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.
Ignorance is bliss. Keep smiling peasant, you don't want to risk your bliss by knowing that you're bound for the Soylent Green factory or that everybody in power and business plays you for a foul
This but unironically. In the movie no one was killed for the purpose of being turned into soylent green, they just used bodies of people who were dead anyway. I remember thinking that it's not such a big deal compared to all the other misery in that movie, and that ignorance was bliss in that respect.
I don't fully remember the movie anymore, but there were many other things that were much worse that actually happened on an ongoing basis and leading to people suffering. Like the poverty.
The massive waste of human lives that result from the extreme poverty displayed in the movie is indeed the worse regression imaginable, and the worse objection to the reverence of modernity, but we are so accustomed to it that we would all have forgotten the movie if not for the twist about cannibalism.
> Because we often lack the tools to challenge these structural problems at their root through collective action (...) we tend to interpret these structural problems through a purely individual, moralistic lens.
Isn't that the other way around? We lack those tools because we, as social apes, govern and influence each others via the shortcuts of feelings (symbols and morality are quicker than knowledge).
> Of the poor image, Steyerl wrote:
> it’s really that deep is a reader-supported publication so i can keep it ad-free and bullshit-free. consider becoming a paid subscriber to support! <3
Had to read this five times before I realized that it was just a poorly placed call to action, and not the quote itself. The quote follows right after, hah.
I’m on mobile, and it was confusing because of that. On desktop it’s a lot more visible that this is not the quote.
I enjoy the kind of analysis the author talks about, and also see the anti-intellectualism among younger folks. I too have felt disconnected from the many people who aren't interested in taking a deeper look into things.
But when posts like these are making the case for intellectualism I can't really blame people for finding it distasteful. The author gives a moral argument for why one should engage in critical analysis, but that's weak; there are far more morally just and productive things to do with one's limited time and effort than analyze TikTok trends, and also, people do just need some room for lighthearted fun. People don't engage with memes because they think it's righteous, so to say they shouldn't because that's righteous doesn't make a lot of sense.
I think the best argument to be made for looking deeper into things is that it's fun. Learning is fun, analyzing is fun, understanding how things work is fun. I particularly like this tweet from the post:
> "let people enjoy things" ok i enjoy critical analysis and being a hater
I believe the perception of so-called intellectualism as something relegated to those with the time, effort and convictions to engage with it does far more to repel people than attract them. The case may be that it helps fight consumerism and whatnot, but that should arise naturally as a result of curiosity; curiosity with a goal kinda misses the point of curiosity. So while I disagree with this:
> We can — in fact, we must — interrogate the culture and society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it. Otherwise, we submit to our own perceived powerlessness to make change.
I strongly agree with this:
> The way to resist anti-intellectualism is not to say that the “intellectuals” are a distinct, superior class of educated elites, but rather that we are all capable of becoming intellectuals ourselves, if we so choose.
If it’s any solace, deep rooted individualism is not surviving prosperity induced demographic collapse. The mindset has experienced a 75% drop in pair bonding and will not propagate into the future beyond 2070.
What is "prosperity induced" is the disappearance of the demographic bomb in wealthy-enough cultures.
But my understanding was that further limitations below the reproduction rate was more "recession induced" and a general acknowledgement of unsustainable "growth".
I like trains
The "just let people enjoy things" trope always seems, to me, to be used when someone can tell that an argument is wrong but can't explain exactly why.
In this case, I think the author's rhetorical toolkit can be used to criticise pretty much anything. Women wearing pink bows today are doing it because of capitalist repression turning them into kids; yesterday, overly professional workplace attire was because capitalism wanted to make everyone homogeneous; tomorrow, any new trends in women's fashion will inevitably turn out to be caused by capitalism.
And yeah, capitalism is a big motivating force behind everything, but because it's behind everything you can use the same critique for anything. The casual observer can tell that this argument is bullshit, but can't quite explain why, and hence just wants to be allowed to enjoy things. Few people are willing to argue they should just be allowed to enjoy conflict diamonds or chattel slavery or anything which has genuine reasons to be attacked.
It is definitively lazy to ascribe to "capitalism" any cultural trend, because indeed that's always going to be a first order explanation for everything, but isn't that even more lazy to "just let people enjoy"?
Maybe there are higher order explanations, some even progressive (I'm not a big connoisseur of pink bow trends, but I suspect there is an element of mockery in there?)
Memes are well labeled. A semantic compression of an entire sentiment. The pinnacle of communication by compressed experiential and cultural context.
And humans like compressed communication, makes them feel warm fuzzy and agentic when they can take in a external-coded token and decompress it into a bunch of internal-coded tokens.
René Girard – The One By Whome Scandal Comes
The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking, must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the individual is beaten down by “others” and forced to yield to the common opinion.
Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.
When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, the “inauthentic” self is identical with the “they” (das Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one’s true personality. It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself, who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of pólemos—the violence that is “father of all and king of all.” Struggle and conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power in the Nietzschean sense of the term.
I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.
Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it the romantic lie of which I just spoke.
-----------
René Girard – Deceit, Desire & the Novel
In The Past Recaptured Proust emphasizes that self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation. Proustian self-centeredness gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well; it is not one-sided egotism; it is an impulse in two contradictory directions which always ends by tearing the individual apart. To triumph over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.
This profound Self is also a universal Self. The dialectic of metaphysical pride alone can help us understand and accept Proust's attempt to reconcile the particular and universal. In the context of the romantic's mechanical opposition between Self and Others, such an attempt would be absurd.
This logical absurdity no doubt struck Proust and he occasionally gives up his attempt at reconciliation and slips back into the cliches of twentieth-century romanticism. In a few isolated passages of The Past Recaptured he declares that the work of art must permit us to grasp our "difef rences" and makes us delight in our "originality."
These scattered passages are the result of Proust's lack of a theoretic vocabulary. But the attempt at logical coherence is quickly swept away by inspiration. Proust knew that in describing his own youth he was describing ours as well. He knew that the true artist no longer has to choose between himself and Others. Because it is born of renunciation, great novelistic art loses nothing and regains everything.
But this renunciation is very painful. The novelist can write his novel only if he recognizes that his mediator is a person like himself. Marcel, for example, has to give up considering his beloved a monstrous divinity and seeing himself in the role of an eternal victim. He has to recognize that his beloved's lies are similar to his own.
This victory over a self-centeredness which is other-centered, this renunciation of fascination and hatred, is the crowning moment of novelistic creation. Therefore it can be found in all the great novelists. Every novelist sees his similarity to the fascinating Other through the voice of his hero. Mme de la Fayette recognizes her similarity to the women for whom love has been their undoing. Stendhal, the enemy of hypocrites, recognizes at the end of The Red and the Black that he is also a hypocrite. Dostoyevsky, in the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, gives up seeing himself alternately as a superhuman and as a subhuman. The novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse which Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.
This is the meaning of Flaubert's famous cry: "Mme Bovary, c'est moil" Flaubert first conceived Mme Bovary as that despicable Other whom he had sworn to deal with.