To me, memes are also a dodge, a way of avoiding personal and societal responsibility. We no longer have to worry about such phenomena as conditioning, as social pressure, self-censorship or the economic pressure to conform not only in certain behaviors but in certain worldviews and beliefs and even emotions. (It's not enough anymore to do a job for money; one has to be "committed" to it, be "an associate" and "part of the team," and one must even be "excited" by the goals and sometimes literally the gods of the employer. Giving control of the body and part of the mind to the economy is no longer enough in increasing areas of paid-for endeavor. They demand your soul as a condition of employment and therefore of a certain kind of survival.)

Once you posit ideas as behaving like and practically being biological entities, inherited or caught as infections, self-replicating entities for which you are merely some sort of carrier and they are somehow (like the selfish gene) only interested in their own survival (so to speak), then we are helpless, or require some unspecified form of medical attention (drugs probably.) What's really laughable is that the same sort of people who decry a culture of victimization---who prefer that people with emotional trauma, physical addictions and psychological pathologies just stop whining and get on with it---are now telling us that we're not responsible for what we believe, accept, favor, admire or choose. It's a different flavor of dehumanization, the mirror image of 1950s behaviorism.

Some adherents would say that by positing memes as infections, they are using a potent metaphor easily understood in today's world, in order to warn people that they need to fight off these infections, these pernicious ideas or skewed values or downright lies and subterfuge buried beneath the surface of a cheery commercial image or slogan. Fair enough-but what do you need "memes" for? And once you've gotten your point across, that these are powerfully infectious messages, that in some sense they are feed addictions to consumerism and so on, aren't they pretty useless? Don't they start getting in the way, when you're trying for more precise analysis? Or are you content to fight meme with meme?

Memes institutionalize the superficial. They discourage making distinctions, or developing and communicating more meaningful and significant explanations, or looking for cause (and maybe even cure) in social, cultural, political, economic and interpersonal realms.