Political Memes

We really don't like weird people. In fact, the bible (both OT and NT) has an awful lot of commandments and parables about how it's wrong to turn away the foreigner (or assault them). This is to say, the problem to instinctively throw rocks at strangers has been around for a while.

I'm not an evolutionary biology expert, but keeping tribes of humans separated into small groups (of a hundred or so) is an effective way to keep plagues from spreading across the globe like COVID-19 did and wiping out large chunks of the population. If one tribe is killed off by the black death then the other tribes remain.

And so we may have some way-old instincts to consider oddballs as dangerous. An accent, or the wrong color skin, or strange customs, or swearing to the wrong god all are signs that someone is a direct threat to you and your tribe. A long time ago it really was a matter of life and death.

In the last few thousand years livestock made us more rugged, and in the last couple of centuries, post-germ-theory disease control works as a rockin' substitute (when we budget for it). But we haven't had time to evolve, and still have the pre-history programming that weird people are dangerous.

And the very rich can hire think-tanks full of psychologists and marketers to spin propaganda to utilize this prejudice to distract people away from their abuses of power, also to quash any notions of systems other than unregulated capitalism, also to encourage the notion that rich people earned their riches and deserve to rule the rest of us plebes.

Actually, that's a big deal. Way more money goes into psychology to control people and keep them vaping and glued to social media than ever went to treating mental illness or just providing therapy for the middle class. Billionaires these days have access to literal mass mind control.