From Memes to Ideological War, and how to make it back again

There is an Internet meme going around social media about how social media works:

As I read the comments, there are the usual ones agreeing with the meme and relating personal experiences that match it. Further down the comment thread, someone starts to take it a step further, like: “Fruitists are *cancelled*”. Nothing surprising there. This is how memes work. It elicits personal identification and agreement, and it gets pushed further and become more radicalized.

Then an astute user made this comment: “This as an excellent example of how humor is used to bypass our memetic defenses by reducing a complex and nuanced problem to a metaphorical edge case in which an out-group strawman is clearly in the wrong. A similar example from the other camp could be constructed by:”

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This is, in a nutshell, a wonderful illustration of the paralysis of public interactions. From a little memetic joke, in no time at all, camps are formed, battle lines are drawn, and what is at stake is no longer enjoying fruit or reducing fruit waste. It is all about policing boundaries, sniffing out traitors, and competing for who is the biggest victim in order to gain power. We have arrived at an ideological holy war.

At the meantime, there is a simple next step:

Me: Fruit waste is waste, no matter what the fruit is. It is OK to think about wasted strawberries and it is also OK to think about wasted mangoes. Why don’t we all collaborate to reduce ALL fruit waste together? After all, the method you come up with reducing waste of one fruit may also apply to other fruits. I’m happy to share with you how I reduce mango waste too. Who knows, maybe that will help you find new strawberry waste reduction methods that you hadn’t thought of before.

Compared to fighting over who is more morally righteous because of our fruit preferences, and sabotaging each others’ progress, doesn’t this actually help solve our problems way more effectively?

By the way, pulling back the curtains a little to show you a method of thinking: what I have done here is called Hegelian dialectics. Take a position (called the “thesis”), say Mangoes. And another position that is against it (called the “antithesis”), say Strawberries. There is always a position called “synthesis” that includes both the two earlier positions and harmonizes them. Synthesis is how you move from ideological war with sworn enemies back to recognizing each other as valid human beings and start collaborating to achieve the new common goal.

But there is a caveat. When you are all in for ideological war, you only want to “WIN”. Or worse, you just want the other side to lose, no matter the cost. You certainly have already stopped caring if any fruit is wasted, even though you still pretend that you care in order to justify what you do. In such a mindset, you will twist any attempt toward synthesis into either this:

Or this:

Calling all fruit lovers who are sick of this endless ideological warfare: it is our duty to recognize this wilful self-delusion into senseless conflict. The only way to “win” in a civil ideological war when each side keeps upping the ante is when everything is burned to the ground. We need to recognize such tribal madness not just in those we call “enemies”, but also in ourselves and see how it takes two hands to clap. We should not tolerate such madness anymore. Let’s all start doing better.