We use memes to substitute for thinking when we get into complex and stressful situations. Therein is a serious problem, of course, because, like drugs, we have become addicted to memes. They never question anything that the group supports. It never seems to occur to them that the group could be wrong. When I hear casual conversation or when I hear spirited indignation and a call for action, mostly what I hear are memes talking.
Politicians use memes for political control.
See my page on Politics for more on political control. A great difficulty related to memes is the problem of distinguishing a meme from intuition . When something happens to me and I have to make a quick decision, I may have an internal voice that tells me to take a certain action. I think it is very difficult to know. In the last analysis, we see only what we are prepared to see, what we have been taught to see.