The Invisible String: How Memes Control Your Soul

Sumber: dokpri

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a critically acclaimed 2013 action-adventure game first developed by Kojima Productions, which later changed to Platinum Games due to production issues. This game continues the serious theme familiar from the Metal Gear series, following the story of Raiden, a cyborg soldier who battles corrupt private armies and confronts his violent past to redefine justice in a world driven by war and power. Yet, later in the game, you met this cyborg ninja named Monsoon, who unironically said

“Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: memes. The DNA of the soul.”

Reactions from most are around the line of confusion and laughter, unable to grasp the absurdity of the line, yet the idea of memes continues to resurface throughout the game. Hideo Kojima, the writer and a respected figure in the industry,  said the notion of “memes” are the integral themes of the story in an interview regarding the game (2011). “The things we see on the internet? What does that have to do with anything?” The confusion may stem from crossed wires of meaning, the lost sense of “meme” that still holds the strings of our being.

Memes: The DNA of the Soul

Memes today are commonly referred to as an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or a genre of items that is spread widely online, especially through social media (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). If we use this definition to interpret the quote from Monsoon, the intent of the message may be lost in the translation, so we need to use the original meaning of the word.

“Meme”, first coined by Richard Dawkins in the book “The Selfish Gene” (1976), means an idea, knowledge, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Dawkins describes memes shaping our culture like genes are to life. Memes try to reproduce and spread from person to person by a process which can be called imitation. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, culture is dictated by the most successful memes. This means the mechanic of information transfer mimics Darwin's evolution theory, where the memes will adapt in certain conditions and the ideas of those who spread the most are the ones regarded as the best.

The dangerous of memes are shown At the end of the game. You are going to meet American senator Steven Armstrong,  a politician who believes that society has become weak because people no longer think for themselves and just follow whatever ideas are fed to them. People in that universe are constantly groomed by the media, making what they spout sound like gospel. To prove his point, Armstrong secretly bombed an American airbase in Pakistan and portrayed it as a terrorist attack by a Pakistani terrorist group. In near second after the photos on the accident leak, the whole internet and media spreading the fake news, and calling for wars. Even though the accident is built with lies and yet it's American blood spilt by Americans, people instantly believe the framing from the media. Senator Armstrong weaponises memes to spread the narrative he sees fit, making them more popular memes than the actual truth. The game and its story may just be a fiction, but for some of you the situation can feel familiar. Memes are not just another thing from fiction, but it’s a real thing that can affect you and the system that holds the world today.

Wisdom of the Crowd

The concept of the wisdom of crowds was first popularized by New Yorker writer James Surowiecki in his 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds”, which coined the idea that when a group of people make decisions independently, the aggregation of those decisions can produce the optimal solution, especially in the areas of problem-solving, decision-making, innovating, and predicting. Even though most individuals may guess incorrectly, their errors tend to differ in direction, canceling each other's error out and making the aggregate guess surprisingly accurate. This becomes important to us because in an economy, millions of individuals make decisions every day. Markets function as giant information systems that aggregate all these independent decisions into prices. As a result, market prices are the reflection of the collective decisions from each individual's knowledge (Hayek, 1945). 

It relates to memes because memes can dilute the wisdom of crowds. This was shown by Jack Treynor’s jelly bean experiment. In the first round, he asked his students to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar,  and unsurprisingly, the average guess of the students is accurate within 3% of the actual number. However, in the second round, Treynor added a caveat, telling his students to consider factors like the air space at the top of the jar and the fact that it was made of plastic, which might hold more beans. This act of sharing information caused the average guess to be off by 15%, much worse than the experiment before. 

This can be explained by Surowiecki's (2005) wisdom of crowd key characteristics, which include diversity of opinion, independence, decentralisation, and aggregation. These factors ensure that individual errors balance out, allowing the collective judgement to converge toward an accurate result. From the second experiment Treynor ran, we can argue that memes can eliminate the first three characteristics from the equation, undermining the effectiveness of the wisdom of the crowd.

This can be a big problem because the rule breaks not only when we actively communicate with others but also from our social life, meaning we might get influenced by memes without even realizing it. Research by Pavlin Mavrodiev & Frank Schweitzer (2021) found that social influence, like social pressure, can have the potential to distort the wisdom of crowds because in real life people tend to change their opinion based on others. This is why wisdom of the crowd tends to fail in most real-life scenarios, because of the concept of the bias of the crowd, where people tend to have the popular opinion, and we use the same distorted information to create our belief, making bias a systemic problem in the society (Berndt, 2025).

Before we jump to that conclusion, one of the core assumptions of memes is the survival of the fittest, that only the best ideas will spread. In theory, the most popular idea should represent the best information that tends to come from the expert, because the spread of memes is also based on the people's credentials (Dawkins, 1976). If most people believe that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, even though we cannot fact-check it, it shouldn’t be a problem because the experts already prove it's correct, so we can believe it also. However, this may not be the situation for other fields of study.

The Myth of the Expert

We tend to believe that an expert will produce a better result than us, or we might believe that the expert will always be correct. This phenomenon  is what's called 'the expert myth', where people with years of experience or high levels of knowledge in a field always make better judgements or decisions than non-experts. Logically it makes sense; someone who spends all his life in a specific field should do better and be correct most of the time, yet this assumption may not hold in certain cases.

In his book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (2005), Philip E. Tetlock conducted a long-term study involving 284 experts from diverse professional backgrounds, including policymakers, politicians, economists, and academics, to assess the accuracy of their political and economic forecasts and found that this kind of expert only does a little bit better than random chance, with the experts having higher credentials tend to do worse. This study shows there might be so-called experts that are proven veterans in the fields, yet somehow show no real improvement compared to others, and the reason might be from how they can learn.

One of the core ways for people to develop expertise is by receiving clear feedback on performance that is immediate and formative. In fields like economics, it's really hard to get this kind of feedback because their prediction or policy effect may be answered years later, and the result may still be inconclusive because many other factors are affecting the result of the feedback they got. harder for them to learn from their mistakes, and they tend to hold their biases (Elvira et al., 2025; Mueller, 2020).

Olivier Guedj and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (2018) study showed that financial analysts, experts that lack valid feedback, were found to be persistently optimistic with their predictions 5 to 10 times closer to each other rather than the reality. This pattern reflect echo chamber effect or memetic monoculture in this kind of expert, a form of memetic monoculture at the expert level, where shared assumption and collective bias reinforce the belief of the expert on certain situations.

This grew into a major issue during the 2008 financial crisis. The vast majority of economists at the time believed the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which is the idea that asset price reflects the state of the market, but it's the wrong interpretation of the theory. EMH only reflects the available information in the market and each individual's knowledge in the market. In real life, where information isn't perfect, the assumption falls apart.  In 2008, house prices were still increasing stably, and most analysts assumed that the market was stable, and this caused the regulator to fail to monitor and manage structural risk. As a result, the experts’ shared belief and the way it spread through the system contributed to the false sense of stability that ultimately fuelled the recession (Siegel, 2011).

Cutting the Strings

In the world of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Monsoon’s claim that “memes are the DNA of the soul” is less absurd than prophetic. It reminds us that our thoughts, beliefs, and even values are not as independent as we like to think. Memes taught us what might spread is not inherently the truth, but the one that survives. In the age where information travels in the blink of an eye, the distinction between knowledge and noise blurs. The wisdom of the crowd collapses into the bias of the crowd, and experts become vessels of the same collective illusion they once sought to correct.

Memes aren't inherently evil. Like every tool in the world, it's just another double-edged sword. The danger comes from memes becoming this invisible force that has gone from people's consideration. We live in a world filled to the brim with information that's there only to comfort us, we only listen to ideas that align with our belief. The wisdom of the crowd encourages us to remain open to all kinds of ideas, because no single person, not even the smartest in the world, holds the absolute truth, as everyone is susceptible to biases. Challenge your belief, your knowledge, and even yourself. The things you know might not align with the truth, as they might be fed by a theory convenient to our ears.

Reference

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