see also:
The ‘ship of theseus’ is the label. The label is not arbitrary.
I am “David Marx”. There is only one me. You can apply that label to someone else and it won’t be meaningful in the sense that there is still a “me” here that is deserving of some kind of persistent label. “The artist formerly known as David Marx”. That dude over there. There exists some combination of words to which I’m meaningfully reducible to. This combination of words describes something that as uniquely embodied in the world, so once my body dies “I” necessarily will as well, because my body is part of me definitionally. … ok that’s just meaningless garble there.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at.
The Ship of Theseus is an example of how language is a kind of DNA. There is some set of symbols which encodes a label that uniquely ascribes an identity to this thing. The existence of that set label serves as a kind of nucleation point in space. Ideas are a particular kind of nucleation site which are like an organism whose substrate is humanity.
That’s not the greatest example, the “can we even beat fascism” thing I think alludes better to what I’m getting at.
“School shooting” is an idea that is out in the world. There is nothing we can really do about that. The fact that it’s been done before results in us talking about it (Cultural Transmission). Studies have demonstrated that coverage tends to promote copycat events. Someone hearing about it makes them more likely to have the idea to do it themselves. It probably wouldn’t have even occurred to them otherwise. Similar to graffiti. There are certain areas that just get tagged a lot because it becomes a part of the local culture. People who aren’t even embedded in that culture will see the graffitti, and the idea is transmitted immediately.
Information is more fundamental than substance. Literally. Physicists have done the experiments and are confident to within an inordinate number of sigmas.
It’s important that there are books discussing Fascism so we are capable of learning from our mistakes and trying to prevent them.