OJ Simpson passed away this week of cancer. He was a man who had everything fame and fortune had to offer, and pretty much lost it all (for reasons we won’t get into).
But if you could distill what most people remember about him into a single phrase it would have to be “the Murder Glove” meme from his wife’s murder trial: “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.” First shared by his defense lawyer, Johnny Cochrane, to the jury, it’s one of the most popular memes of the last half century (outside of perhaps Make America Great Again).
We all know how it ends.. the glove didn’t fit, so he was acquitted, giving the global media an iconic moment that was seen around the world. Not to mention starting a media feeding frenzy that lasted for years and planting the seeds for what would become an entertainment empire.
In a genius move, Cochrane managed to distill thousands of pages of legalese and a situation fraught with ambiguity AND moral dilemmas to a single line, that flipped a switch deeply burrowed deep within the jurors minds, rendering all other decisions impossible.
His secret? He managed to leverage an ancient, evolutionary quirk of human cognition.
For 99.9+ percent of modern homo sapiens’ existence, we haven’t had reading or writing (let alone phones, printing press, TV or radio). And we’ve only had mass literacy for less than 0.0002%.
Which basically means, that just because all this lovely literacy has allowed us to create and share information by a factor of ten, a thousand, a million, a billion, our DNA has not caught up with it.
According to our genes, we’re still in caveman mode.
Because our brain’s carrying capacity for carrying information was so tiny back then, we only had bandwidth for the most useful, culturally rich stuff. Short bits of easily remembered, easily retold information that we could spread around our tribe, making it easier for us to survive. Little packets densely crammed with meaning and useful content, both practical and metaphorical i.e. stories. Stories about how to build a fire, how to be a warrior or a child bearer, how to be a good person, how we relate to the gods, and they to us. There’s a reason why the Garden of Eden story, one of the oldest, most important, deep and resonant stories in history, only takes a couple of minutes to tell. Our forefathers did not have the bandwidth for “War And Peace.”
When you think about it, all most of us really have of OJ now, from his football and TV careers, his trial, his acquittal, the aftermath and now, his passing, are the memes. Everything else has been lost in the sands of time.
This is not because we’re shallow or stupid, or because there was nothing else to OJ, but because that is the way we humans are wired from the start.
