The Anti-Meme

- Everything you've ever done is to avoid pain: drugs, sarcasm, keeping everyone at arm’s length...
- As opposed to everyone else who goes looking for pain like it's buried treasure?
House, M.D.

Shortly before Easter this year, I took some time off from work and social media to reflect on my future. One of the things I ended up pondering was the Christian idea of God’s love. It was all I heard while attending Catholic mass in Budapest that week. As a Christian, raised Catholic, I had always taken the concept for granted. And yet, despite this love, God will also crush us—and he often does. How do we reconcile the two?

Eventually, despite my efforts to avoid it, work caught up with me. Easter arrived, and my social media feed was inundated with posts from fellow Christians celebrating Christ’s Resurrection. But as the posts rolled, I noticed how few took the time to reflect on what a profound, and even absurd, event that was. Instead, a lot of them began to look very familiar: Christ the genius who crushed his enemies; Christ the anti-Jew; Christ the right-winger who crushed his enemies. They were, in other words, memes. Some were even memes referencing the Easter memeing itself.

This was nothing new; I’ve posted similarly good-hearted memes myself before. But since I had just published an essay on how social media incentives are subtly reverse-engineering us, especially when it comes to men, I started wondering: how is social media affecting our ability to understand stories?

My thoughts drifted to one of my favorite TV characters that I grew up watching: Dr. Gregory House.

House, M.D. is often interpreted as a cautionary tale about how much pain a person can cause themselves in an attempt to avoid it. But the main character, a genius “diagnostician” who solves cases while mocking and manipulating everyone around him, is already in pain when the show starts. His stubbornness had led to a dangerous medical procedure that saved his life but left him with chronic pain and a limp. Everything he does during the show, including becoming heavily addicted to Vicodin, is an attempt to negate his pain.

House’s problem is not purely physical. At various points throughout the show, it’s implied that his leg pain, like most chronic pains, is mainly psychological. He forgets about it when a medical “puzzle” interests him; his colleagues often swap his meds with sugar pills without him noticing, and he even spends a season of the show painkiller-free while dating his romantic interest, “Dr. Cuddy”, only to feel the pain again the morning after she breaks up with him.

House’s real problem in the show is his refusal to make himself vulnerable. He secretly craves intimacy while keeping people at arm’s length. Because he’s brilliant, he’s able to rationalize this behavior into a seemingly coherent ethic. It’s not that he avoids intimacy because he fears pain, but rather that everyone who doesn’t, particularly those who attach any meaning to it, are idiots or hypocrites, or both.

Gregory House is a misanthrope and proud atheist. His philosophical critique of Christianity, which he repeats throughout the show, is textbook Richard Dawkins’ New Atheism. So it is fitting that the term “meme” was first coined by Dawkins himself in the 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe the concept of “cultural transmission,” given that House is a great show to watch for grasping the phenomenon of online memes as a whole.

As I pointed out in the previous chapter, “because online confrontations lack the threat of physical violence, the only way to escalate [one] is to engage in forms of feminine violence.” House’s personality is essentially a meme: he mocks everyone around him and constantly escalates confrontations to debunk their beliefs, but because he’s a sick doctor debating (mostly) dying patients, it never gets physical. The basic formula of the show itself is a meme, too: dying patient with quasi-religious morality shows up, atheist doctor saves their life, patient is forced to question their traditional beliefs. Rinse and repeat.

To be fair to House’s writers of the show, there are some genuine moments of critical self-reflection. And as noted, the main lesson of the show is pretty clear: living like House produces nothing but misery. But if you’ve ever come across a Dr. House meme online, you probably noticed that it didn’t reflect the pain the man was in. Why? The reason for this is the same reason why the Resurrection posts on Easter wouldn’t reflect the profound suffering at the heart of the story of Jesus Christ, instead favoring the “us vs. them” ideological framework.

Memes are to art what ideology is to religion. A key component of most art endeavors is to look inward: to open ourselves up to, among other things, our pain and suffering. But social media, which constantly incentivizes disagreement, requires us to look outward: to identify other people’s weaknesses. Online memes as a whole are a complex phenomenon, but their main purpose is simple: to detect the logical fallacies in our opponents’ beliefs and expose them through irony or sarcasm. Even if an attempt to go “deeper” than that is made, it still forces one to manifest it with a layer of irony.

With the incentives reversed, the subjects of online memes tend to inevitably be anti-heroes, if not outright villains: Dr. House, the Joker, Patrick Bateman, etc. Bateman might have been “cool”, but he was a psychopath who drove himself to madness. House is undoubtedly hilarious, but he spreads misery everywhere and ends up essentially committing suicide. Yet when these characters are meme’d, they are strictly portrayed as “fun”.

None of this is to say that memes are useless, but how is an art form with the primary function of ridiculing our opponents supposed to understand storytelling? Do we really want to be agents of chaos?

In one of my favorite scenes from House, from an episode titled “House vs. God”, House’s best friend Wilson accuses him of fearing the existence of God because it’d mean that he wouldn’t be in control. “If a supreme being exists, he can squash you any time he wants,” to which House replies with a grin: “He knows where to find me.” But God has already found him, only House can’t see it because he has chosen the path of the anti-hero.

We grow up admiring all sorts of fictional and historical heroes, and dream to one day be like them: a man who fights the dragon to rescue the princess; a knight who faces a whole army to save his kingdom; an underdog athlete who wins against all odds. As we grow up, we realize those dreams were fantasies. Or were they? There are no dragons in the real world, but there are plenty of monsters to fight. Not all of us have the opportunity to single-handedly defeat an empire, but there are ways to show defiance in the face of tyranny. Being online itself, if done right, can be one.

The reason we often abandon our childhood dreams is not because life doesn’t hand us the opportunities; it’s because, as we grow up, we learn about pain. As kids, we might feel scared at the sight of a dragon or feel sad about the hero suffering a personal loss on his path to victory. But we don’t understand it. We only remember their triumphs at the end, not the fear they had to overcome. Even young girls who read romances often give up on an adult relationship when it gets tough, failing to realize their dream couple went through a similar phase. Like House, we tend to negate pain as adults.

“Why do you need to negate everything?” asks an exhausted Cuddy during one of House’s rare moments of vulnerability. “I don’t know,” he answers, before they share their first kiss.

The reason House doesn’t know is for the same reason memes can never be art. His philosophy prevents him from recognizing suffering as necessary to achieve fulfillment, just as social media’s incentives prevent us from looking within our souls. No wonder people online are now under the illusion that Artificial Intelligence can create art.

As Dr. Cuddy explains to an intoxicated House before ending their relationship: “Pain happens when you care.” If we care about our culture, we ought to welcome suffering back into our lives. It doesn’t mean we should seek it out or actively try to produce it. It means that when it finds us, we should muster the courage to accept it and transform it. “For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. If the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated,” writes Jung. Only by returning to traditional storytelling will we be able to rediscover life’s most precious treasures—one by one, until the Final Resurrection.

Mark Granza is the founding editor and publisher of IM—1776. He can be followed @markgranza.