THE IRONY OF IT ALL
MEMES THAT MATTER / 06 MAY 2025
Thank you for joining my Substack and Memes that Matter. We start on Tuesday 06 May (AWST). You will receive the meme and the zoom link through my Substack a week before each meetup, and on the day of meeting. The same two zoom links will be used for all subsequent sessions. Feel free to oscillate between groups if your time-zone allows.
Timezone A / Australia (AWST): 7–8 AM PERTH TIME https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86768631434
Timezone B / Australia (AWST): 6–7 PM PERTH TIME https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81328332865
Our first meme explores the topic of Irony, the ability to look over the shoulder of our own thoughts. Irony, rightly understood, is a declaration of independence from ourselves. I have always found it a reliable ‘defence against the dark arts’ of my own opinions, my all too solid convictions and ideas beyond their use-by-date. It has helped me to take the hammer in hand and chisel at the cliché I have become.
Above all, it enables what our meetup will be about: the art of conversation that lifts to the level of dialogue: dialogues transparent for meanings we co-create, for the logos we invite into our midst.
Here is a written summary: of the first online session
THE IRONY OF IT ALL
Welcome to Memes that Matter/ Conversations that Count. I am Horst Kornberger and I started Memes that Matter to help myself as well as others make sense of the world.
A meme, for those not familiar with the term, is simply an image or idea specifically created for the internet. The memes I tend to create are visual metaphors that help me think outside the box. They do this by engaging the imagination before they engage the intellect. This practice has helped me greatly to find orientation in an increasingly confusing world, and I hope it will do the same for you.
I am starting with the meme of irony because it addresses the discrepancy between what seems to be, and what really is. I see the sense of irony as kind of fine-tuned antenna for things that don’t match, for instances that don’t make sense, for situations that contradict what they pretend to be.
Just think of how modern democracy boils down to ticking a box every four years. Or how our economies, in spite of being hyper-productive, produce all kinds of poverties. Just think how our seemingly advanced knowledge about nature has ruined nature; and how we continue to combine futuristic technologies with the worst of stone age mentalities to wage war. And don’t forget the perhaps most disconcerting fact of all: our proven capability of producing intelligent machines without an equally proven capability to keep them under control. All of these instances are ironic, and it is important to perceive them as such. There is a marked difference between knowing that something is wrong and perceiving the irony implied in it.
In the first case, we will try to fix the problem within the system in which it exists. In this case, knowledge is often enough. In the second, we step outside the system, and in doing so, realise the distance between what was intended and what has actually come about. In this case, knowledge is not enough. What is needed here is the self-knowledge that shifts our focus from fixing a problem to addressing the real causes behind it. And the real causes behind it are, in many cases, and certainly in the cases cited above, the way we think.
There is a tale that powerfully illustrates the dangers of knowledge without self-knowledge. It is the tragic tale of King Oedipus, the Greek hero whose life is riddled with circumstances he could not escape. It is so deeply ironic because his very attempts to escape these circumstances bring them about. Irony, in this case, illustrates the gap between his comprehension of reality and the actual reality he is in. It is an important tale for our time as Oedipus is an early representative of the same rationality we all possess. The myth highlights this through the fact that he alone is able to solve the riddle of the sphinx. He is the only Greek hero I know of whose only claim to fame is a purely intellectual feat: the ability to answer a question that seemed insurmountable to others. His tale is about the extraordinary powers of the intellect, and its equally extraordinary propensity to err.
The tale emphasises this when he becomes the first detective in history. He commits himself to find the murderer, not knowing that it is himself. There is no greater conceivable ignorance than looking for someone and not knowing that it is oneself.
This tale has much to teach us today when the rational powers Oedipus pioneered have become the hallmark of our civilisation. Our knowledge, like that of Oedipus, lacks self-knowledge. As a result, we may, just like him, look in the wrong direction and blame our problems on accidental circumstances, rather than on the way we approach them. The ironies cited above clearly point in that direction.
Luckily, there is another tale, a tale that shows how irony can become a constructive, rather than destructive force.
I am sure you have heard of the so-called Socratic irony. It is often equated with the ‘feigned ignorance’ the philosopher assumed in conversation. He used carefully orchestrated questions to make his opponents admit their own ignorance. He could do this only because he had an acute sense for the limitation of his own intellect, or what amounts to the same: a rare capacity to extricate himself from his own opinions as well as those of others.
Plato brilliantly describes this ability of Socrates' in his Apology, the famous dialogue that treats his mentor’s trial before the Athenian court. I know of no better introduction to the creative use of irony. Socrates, already an old man, is accused of impiety by his enemies. The situation is serious. If convicted, the penalty is death. But in spite of his life being at stake, Socrates’ defence remains ironic and even humorous throughout the ordeal. He famously begins his ‘apology’ with the words:
‘I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but for my own part, I was almost carried away by them; their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, scarcely a word of what they said was true. I was especially astonished … when they told you, that you must not let me persuade you, implying that I am a skilful speaker. I thought that this was particularly brazen of them to say, only just before events must prove them wrong, when it becomes obvious that I have not the slightest skill as a speaker — unless, of course, by a skilful speaker they mean one who speaks the truth. If that is what they mean, I would agree that I am an orator, and quite out of their class.’
To fully appreciate the irony implied you need to imagine this said in the context of an Athenian court in 399 BC. The custom at the time for anybody in danger of being condemned was to appear meek and repentant, curry the favour of judges and accusers by bringing their weeping wives, distressed children and disconsolate friends. Socrates does none of this. On the contrary, rather than repenting, he assures his judges that he will continue to do what he has done, should he go free.
His only defence is to relate how he came to do what he had done: It all began, so he relates, when the God Apollo, speaking through his oracle of Delphi, announced that he, Socrates, was the wisest of all Greeks. This surprised no one more than Socrates, who had always thought of himself as ignorant. In order to make sense of the god’s pronouncement the philosopher began to examine it:
‘I set myself with considerable reluctance to check the truth in the following way. I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here, if anywhere, I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority, ‘You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.’
Well, I thoroughly examined this person — I need not mention his name, but it was one of our politicians (I was studying when I had this experience) — and in conversation with him I formed the impression that although in many peoples' opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and many of his followers.’
Socrates examined many of his contemporaries, until he understood that Apollo had declared him the wisest because he alone was aware of the limitations of his knowledge, whereas others prided themselves with insights that proved erroneous on closer examination. Naturally this kind of research was not appreciated by many of his fellow citizens. He became much admired by some and much hated by others, politicians in particular.
Socrates, of course, was not just condemned because he confronted this or that Athenian politician. Politicians at his time had just as many opponents as they have today. He was condemned because he confronted something far more fundamental than their political opinion. He confronted the thinking behind it. He confronted convention and the paradigm underpinning it. It was this that cost him his life. It was a price he obviously thought worth paying, for what he called the truth, or rather the uncompromising search for truth. A search, that he felt, was assigned to him by Apollo himself.
I bring this not to serve an old tale on new plates provided by the internet. I bring this because historic occurrences, as in the example of Socrates, metamorphose and become part of our mental make-up. What was external once becomes internal later. In early Greece, for instance, conceptual thinking was still a rare commodity. Later it became more common. Now it is well within everyone’s scope. The Pythagorean theorem was once understood only by a mathematical elite. Today, it is within reach of every twelve-year-old. Or just think how a new generation comes equipped with the technological capacities that the generation before them struggled to acquire. It’s a kind of historic digestion. The most important part of history are the capacities we derive from it.
I mean to say that the Socratic drama is by no means over. Today, it continues on the stage of our own mind. Today, the politicians we dote on are our political opinions. And many of us are just as sensitive and condemning about anybody who dares to question their validity. And even more so when the thinking behind this validity is challenged.
But by the same token, there exists also an interior, more sagacious aspect in us all, a kind of inner Socrates; a capacity in other words, that allows to distance ourselves from our pet opinions, an ability to think outside the box, and not inside another. This is no easy job even for a purely interior capacity. This inner Socrates is just as readily accused of impiety (of being politically incorrect, for instance), and therefore condemned, and imprisoned in some remote corner of our conventional mind.
There are some who seemed to have managed to execute the inner Socrates once and for all. But generally, he or she is somewhere there in the corner of our conscience, biding their time.
But what about the instance Socrates thought of as Apollo, a divinity whose influence the Greeks ritualised in the form of an oracle.? What capacity can do for us, what Apollo has done for Socrates? The best way to identify this capacity is by way of its signature, its style, its approach.
The entity that the Greeks called Apollo was not famed for dispensing ready-made answers. He rarely gave direct advice. Instead, he answered in riddles that had to be solved, encouraged quests that had to be followed, gave advice that had to be thoroughly understood before it became useful. In short, the god did not dispense the truth. He encouraged the search for it by pointing in the right direction. He encouraged the active, creative and conscientious kind of thinking that Socrates possessed and that his contemporaries lacked.
The equivalent today must have similar qualities. It cannot be the thinking we already have and that has created the very problems we face and the ironies attached to them. Nor can it be a political program promoted by this or that party. It cannot therefore be anything that provides polished solutions and readymade answers, or once-and-for-all established truths. It can only be what supports and inspires our search for them. The only capacity I know of that matches this description is creativity. Not the creativity that is associated with the traditional arts, but one available to all of us. I am pointing to a muscle of the mind we already have, but rarely use. In fact, so rarely that we are hardly aware of its existence.
In the next sessions we will explore how to become more acquainted with this muscle and use it to reimagine democracy, economy and culture in the image and likeness of what is most creative, most universal in us.