Rational and Anti-Rational Memes

Definition

A meme (a culturally replicating idea) survives across generations through one of two fundamentally different strategies. A rational meme relies on recipients' critical faculties: it gets adopted because people, thinking it through, judge it useful, true, or beneficial — and it therefore has to actually be good under changing, unpredictable scrutiny to keep spreading. An anti-rational meme survives by disabling those same critical faculties — through fear, taboo, entrenched shame, or "because I say so" — so that it is enacted and passed on without ever being evaluated on its merits. A static society is one dominated by anti-rational memes, whose child-rearing and customs exist to suppress the individual creativity that would otherwise generate variation and change; a dynamic society is dominated by rational memes and can sustain rapid, cumulative improvement.

In the Book

Deutsch develops the mechanism through the evolution of jokes (via Isaac Asimov's story "Jokester"): amusing stories retold with small, unintentional variations undergo variation and selection, and the versions that spread best are the funniest — a meme evolving by genuinely being good at its job. He contrasts this with static societies, exemplified by primitive and pre-Enlightenment cultures, which suppress deviation not primarily through punishment but by raising children whose sense of self is invested entirely in conformity — "Because I say so" passed down as a complete, if unbelieved, explanation. He traces the Black Death's spread of the flagellant cult and pogroms as anti-rational memes exploiting a genuine crisis, and identifies present-day gender-stereotyping and rote educational practices as anti-rational memes still operating inside an otherwise dynamic Western culture, which he describes as being in an unstable transitional state — not fully static, not fully dynamic — where the two meme types actively undermine each other's replication.

Why It Matters

This gives a mechanistic test for whether an idea, institution, or practice is likely to be true and beneficial versus merely self-perpetuating: does it survive by inviting scrutiny and continuing to look good under it, or does it survive by making scrutiny costly, shameful, or unthinkable? The test applies equally to political ideologies, corporate culture, family rules, and internet-native narratives, and it explains why suppressing criticism is not a neutral act — it is specifically how bad ideas persist that could not survive being examined.