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Trump won the 2024 US Presidential election, even winning the pocular vote. How is it possible that so many people voted against. what seems obvious to me, not only their own and but also the nations best interest?
While obvious to me, just as clearly Trump voters don't see it that way. But turns out, there are examples in nature of exactly this sort of behavior. There are at least two parasites that modify the behavior of their hosts, to the benefit of the parasite but against the interest of their host, even resulting in the deaths of their host.
So the idea is that a bundle of meme-like ideas has infected Trump voters, hijacking their behavior. Such a bundle of meme-like ideas has been called a memeplex. Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme as a portmanteau of 'memory' and 'gene', so memeplex is a similar portmanteau of 'meme' and 'complex'. I'm not sure who introduced the word memeplex but Susan Blakemore and Daniel Dennett have contributed much to these ideas.
Whether the Trumpism memeplex thrives or not going forward depends on whether it is beneficial to the memeoids (the voter/hosts) as in a symbiotic relationship or harmful to them as in a parasitic relationship. Time will tell.
Either way, I've found the label comforting somehow. The key is to recognize propagation of the memeplex has very ltitle if anything to do with whether the underlying ideas are true, or false, beneficial or not to the host, or indeed even moral not.
There is no morality as such, only enduring memeplexes which the infected hosts CALL morality. Hawkins has called religion a virus of the mind. Trumpism is similar, which perhaps explains why some 80% of which Christians voted for Trump.
The only thing that matters to the memeplex itself is that it propagates. Set aside any thoughts of good, bad, ugly, moral or whatever. Focus instead solely on whether it propagates. A more general theory may help understand which memeplexes grow and survive, but that theory isn't yet available.
That's it, really. Even so, I'll elaborate in the following.