Bad ideas need a host to carry and spread them, those hosts are called idiots.
Bad ideas don't die of natural causes - they replicate. Like a virus looking for a host, toxic concepts leap from one generation to the next.
Welcome to leadprompt.sh // executing leadership from the root. I’m your host, John Collins.
In his seminal 1976 work on genetics, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins sought a term to describe the cultural equivalent of a biological gene, an entity that replicates, mutates, and evolves as it spreads. He defined the word "meme" for the first time like so:
"We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. [...] I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme."
But what exactly does that look like in practice? Dawkins went on to explain:
"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
While Professor Dawkins provided benign examples of memes, they are also a vector for harm.
Why do bad concepts become memes?
If I wanted to be direct, I would say bad concepts become cultural memes because idiots carry them around and spread them to other idiots. The movie Idiocracy portrayed this brilliantly, depicting a future where those with lower intelligence breed like rabbits while high-IQ professionals abstain from reproduction. You should seek out that movie, it's great. The idiots not only spread their genes to their offspring but also their memes, ultimately leading to an Idiocracy being formed when they become the majority.
But in the professional world, the hosts of bad ideas aren't always actual idiots. Often, they are smart people infected by highly contagious ideas driven by the Dunning-Kruger effect - that dangerous peak of false confidence.
In tech, these bad memes look like cargo-culting a massive FAANG-style microservices architecture when you only have a few hundred users, or blindly copying a toxic management practice just because "that's how it was done at the last company." The idea looks shiny, it leaps from brain to brain via imitation, and suddenly your architecture or your culture is a mess.
What can leaders do?
If, like me, you are leading a team of software engineers, you are unlikely to be heading towards a literal Idiocracy anytime soon. However, you will spot the same mistakes being repeated, especially if you have worked in multiple companies.
I often wonder if, as an industry, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Are those bad memes stronger than the good ones?
I believe if we all studied history, it would cure the infection. The antidote to a bad meme isn't just raw intelligence; it's historical context. When a developer says, "We should rewrite our entire stack in the newest language," the engineering historian says, "Let's look at the case studies of the last three companies that actually tried that."
We need to study not just the history of countries and civilisations, but the history of our industries, our technologies, our competition, and our failed architectures.
The best of us are historians in our given fields.
The rest of us are destined to repeat the same mistakes our predecessors made.
Beware of bad meme vectors, AKA the idiots.
Talk to you next time.
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File details: 5.8 MB MP3, 4 mins 18 secs duration.
Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com
