Why “No Lives Matter” is More than a Meme
How an idea is no joke when it’s held by those in power
Engaging in any online civil rights discourse in the last few years, you’ve likely come across All Lives Matter. This response is generally from someone who thinks it’s an incredibly intelligent retort, but it’s a smokescreen. On the surface, all lives matter is an innocuous statement. Of course lives have an inherent value. The issue is what it’s being used as a response to.
Black Americans make up around 13% of the population, yet are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans. We’ve seen in the US and the UK that people of colour (PoC) are disproportionately dying of COVID-19 due to higher rates of poverty as a result of historical injustices.
All lives matter, then, is weakly and haphazardly spraying a hose across an entire neighborhood when a single house is on fire. Black lives matter is using that water in a targeted way to attempt to put out the blaze in a pinpointed manner.
The trouble with “No lives matter”.
In the words of a random Instagram commenter who was trying to tell me why it was so hilarious:
Let’s dig into the origins of the word meme, coined by the edgy-for-a-teen evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. A meme is the memetic version of a gene; a unit of cultural information spread through imitation. While we now think of memes as fun internet pictures and phrases, we need to be aware of their origins.
As with all media, if we’re not critical of what we consume, we’re susceptible to internalising the ideas it promotes. There’s no such thing as ‘just a meme,’ especially in these polarised times where corporations and numerous nations’ governments are trying to sway popular opinion. They manage this by harnessing principles of behavioural psychology for social engineering (known in this context as memetic engineering, hacking people’s minds for political support.
People were sadly joking that Donald Trump is the first meme president. This was due to the reliance on white supremacist 4chan-like rhetoric by him and his sons, as well as propaganda shared as memes.
It’s become increasingly clear that people like Trump and the rest of the current GOP, Boris Johnson and the rest of the British Conservative party that they don’t see an inherent worth in individual lives. It’s clear when people like Betsy DeVos say:
There’s nothing in the data that would suggest that kids being back in school is, is dangerous to them — in fact, it’s more a matter of their health and well-being that they be back in school.
Someone who’d say that doesn’t see lives as inherently important, especially when the daily rate of COVID-19 infection continues to sharply rise daily.
When no lives matter, no lives have inherent worth. Anyone in a position of power who holds this perspective will prioritise the lives of people they deem worthy: Sycophants, other wealthy people, those in a chosen racial demographic or with certain political views.
Camus’ branch of existentialism may at first seem nihilistic as the ultimate conclusion is “life has no inherent meaning”. However, this is ultimately freeing at an individual scale as it’s followed by “That means we must make our own meaning.” When applied to people en masse, however, this framework is nihilistic. If no lives matter, our choice to let some people die is not morally wrong, because the beholder gets to define what makes a life matter.
