We should pretend bad guys don’t exist

A proprietary eponym is a trademark or a brand name that refers to the general product or class of products that the company makes. Examples include Kleenex, Sharpie, Q-tips, Scotch tape, Tupperware, and Velcro, all of which have become normalized as words in our daily conversations. The companies that make these products share in common such a dominance in producing their product and a knack for propagating their image that we’ve come to accept this linking of word to idea without protest.

ISIS is not unlike these brands in that they’ve so perfected the art of marketing (or production) that their name has become synonymous with the product they produce, a new and improved form of terrorism. ISIS is now a household name, another Apple or Microsoft, a corporate shark feasting on the attention given to their brand. In fact, SNL did a skit a while back that casted ISIS as a budding company pitching their radical, militant organization to the Shark Tank sharks.

ISIS sustains itself on fear and attention—when we examine the organization’s mission statement, we see that this is literal. ISIS’ first and foremost objective is the creation of a global caliphate, and integral to the achievement of this goal is the recruitment of new members and the downfall of states in opposition to this goal (i.e. the United States). The recruitment of new members hinges on the attention given to its radical ideology, while increasingly contentious debate on national security and immigration, deeply based in fear, has threatened to slice nations in half.

Like the brands that represent proprietary eponyms, ISIS relies on us to maintain its power. We are responsible for giving them attention. We are responsible for allowing the fear they produce to make our decisions for us. By comparing ISIS to some needy startup, the SNL Shark Tank skit perfectly highlights this dependence. And in the same manner, SNL shows us that we can stop them by undermining their legitimacy. We can and should pretend that ISIS—or the idea of ISIS—doesn’t exist because without our attention, ISIS would no longer be able to recruit members, and without fear, we would unite on the issues that currently plague us.

ISIS-chan is an anime character and anti-ISIS meme that activists have spread on social media to undermine the validity of ISIS as a terror-based group. She’s a cute melon-eating cartoon that directly counteracts ISIS’ propaganda. To pretend ISIS that doesn’t exist really means to remove the violent, terrifying significance, the essence that makes the ISIS what it is, from behind the word. While we can’t truly release ISIS from our collective conscious, ISIS-chan shows us we can do this, and that’s what’s important.

The notion that invalidating bad guys is an effective form of combat is nothing new, especially in a world where conflict is being fought in the beliefs and opinions of the general population more so than on the battlefield. We’ve seen the mockery made of Kim Jong-un and the countless political cartoons that chip away at Trump’s legitimacy as a presidential candidate. Since fundamentally, every bad guy is driven by a concept, this isn’t an idea that can only be applied to ISIS.

It is a bit of an idealized vision—I mean, how can we ignore ISIS when there are real, physical skirmishes being fought in the Middle East? But again, when you get down to it, ISIS is a group of guys and girls bound together by an idea, and without this uniting ideology, they’re just a bunch of regular people. While we might not be able to end all terrorism with some memes, it’s at the very least a step in the right direction.