I don’t remember where I read it. Maybe the “everything is a meme”-book, whatever the title was. The thesis: Every idea is struggling for survival, just like we living beings do. Since the mind is our most powerful asset, ideas are what help us survive, or not. Good ideas help us, bad ideas hinder us. Suppose those ideas were somehow alive, and wanted to stay alive.
Because good ideas help us, the good ideas will proliferate, because the minds carrying those good ideas get to survive and those minds can then pass the good ideas on to others. Most notably their community and offspring. So it’s a good idea to have good social relationships, too. By extension, the idea that having children is good, is a good idea for the idea, because by definition, it gets to live on. And the idea that it’s not good to have offspring, will have a hard time surviving in the long run if there are no offspring to hand this idea over to. Mothers who regret motherhood, will often tell their own children not to have children. And that’s where the bad idea dies. Unless this shitty idea can reach people via different channels. That’s where our fragmented, globalized interconnectedness via the internet comes in. The lie has run around the world before the truth has got its boots on. But, as a Dutch proverb goes:
Al is de leugen nog zo snel, de waarheid achterhaalt haar wel.
Roughly translated:
However quick the lie may flee, the truth will catch it eventually.
(There are some nuggets of gold in some Dutch proverbs. It’s not all bad.)
Closest equivalent: “The truth will out”