Barbelith Underground > Conversation > A better word- "myth", "meme", "ghost"

Hmm.

It appears the subset of readers who read my post then considered it then responded to it, are being drowned out by more-voluble people getting distracted, zipping around on the surface, or heading off on tangents.

Ignoring the obvious trolling (the re-writing of my "race/racism" example is most amusing, both in terms of illuminating the game-playing, and in terms of rather neatly exemplifying the thread's stated concept), here's how most of the above reads to me:

"I'm trying to better analyse/communicate the implications of [red] but i want a better name for it."
"Can you give me an example of something red?"
"Umm. An apple. A car."
"See, this is sloppy thinking. How is fructose and cellulose useful in analysing colour? And what possible relevance to red is petrol, sparkplugs, or the stitching in seats' upholstery?
Before we get any deeper into "colour" we need to step back and think a lot harder about orchard management and the sociological costs of robotic automation of General Motors' manufacturing process, and the fact that GM produce SUVs. SUVs are bad."

There is a name for this particular logic game/argument error, but it's not coming to me right now. And i'm fundamentally not interested.

If people are genuinely interested in this, i ask that they look to the first post THEN the examples, choosing to see the examples as examples within what was said, rather than choosing to see the examples as a complete discarding of what was said.
And then, importantly, consider how the examples INTERSECT, rather than extrapolating from the irrelevances necessarily attached to any example.

"Morés" (thanks jack), "Stereotype" (thanks subnaut and grant), and "Mindset" (thanks astrojax) are all aspects of the idea i'm trying to find a neat non-emotionally-laden badge for. "Morés" i'm still chewing on, wondering if its Moral implications count as hard against it as "myth"'s fantasy implications. In particular i wonder if "folkway" is not closer, if preceded by "both explicit and implicit". "Stereotype" unfortunately is now swamped by its emotional implications, and "mindset", while very close, is in the context of this thread a result and an excuse but not the motivating/creating force.
Consider it the vehicle but not the factory which builds the vehicle.

This thread is about finding a word for the Factory.

I have considered in the past subnaut's other suggestion: of coining a new word/phrase. But am kinda reluctant to. Most such coinings are wank, and i have the continual feeling that there's something that should be on the tip of my tongue. (plus "S2P" sounds too much like my old interweb 1.9 pitching environment. )

It could be helpful, i think, to tease apart a different interpretation of something legba posted, to see if that makes things clearer for people.

per legba:
>For example, "the anger directed at trans-gendereds or even "out & loud" homosexuals". The "myth" here is that the minority (LGBTs in this case) are dangerous, and certain people respond to that myth instead of responding to the actual people- thus defensiveness (and offense) against a threat that isn't actually there. The homophobes are responding to a myth, not empirical data. You're trying to find a name for such responses, yeah?

Legba's last 2 sentences have returned to the essence of the key core concept. (thanks legba)

key core concept, as per the original post in this thread:
"socially-driven preference for common memes, to the extent that most people will reinterpret events or people as being iterations of a similar meme, rather than view the event or person baldly."
And where the meme differs from the reality, the response may not be appropriate for the reality.

A correction though: i am NOT looking for a name for the response. What i am looking for is as per 2nd para:
"I don't have a good word for these societal whalebones."
Not the response, but the thing being responded to.

So the question remains: What's a good word to describe these meme-ish things, which are so seductive to the human mind, so powerful an influencer on it, that it will short-cut its verifiable experience of reality in favour of that meme?

But let's re-flavour legba's teasing-apart of that one example, in the language of this thread's goal:
LGBTs conflict with a number of "Myths" (or whichever language-token is settled on): that gender rôles are strictly split on a chromasomal/sex basis, that reproduction is critical for the species, and that re-inforcing homogeneity implies individual control implies individual social dominance and/or that homogeneity implies safety. All these three things are strong common themes through most human societies, and are responsible for creating motivations that are useful within human societies, or are at least self-sustaining. (You can see straight away now that the language-token "Myth"'s necessarily-attached baggage tends to obfuscate rather than help understand the preceding statements.) Two main groups of Angered will be those who are afraid of change and see lgbts schisming the nice safe pool of homogeneity, and those who are social and who seek status within that pool of homogeneity so see lgbts' schisming of that pool as a challenge to their own goals.

In this micro-example, legba talks only of the first group. I've mentioned another group that's also motivated to act in this example's circumstances. However, please do not let this minor difference distract discussion from this thread's core. "A matter of fact" does not override "a matter of law"; the particular data stored in it does not override the nature of the variable; if i add "roses" to your "lillies", they're still flavours within the same "[bouquet]"; if you see "green" and i see "blue", we are both seeing "[a colour]".

I hope this alternate breakdown/unpacking/analysis of the same example makes clearer my original intent/question/request.