Emotional Memes of Anger and the Reproduction of Organizational Zombies: A Structural Analysis of Labels, Mimicry, Misreading, and Silence

This paper elucidates, through theoretical grounding and observational cases, the structure by which "anger" functions as a cultural meme within organizations—infecting, imitating, and reproducing itself. Drawing on Dawkins' (1976) theory of memes as replicable units of cultural transmission, the paper explores how repeated invocation of label words such as “temporary worker,” “full-time employee,” and “slave” constrains the frameworks of self-recognition, other-evaluation, and emotional expression among organizational members. As a result, a power structure emerges where anger operates as cultural currency. Well-intentioned individuals become infected by anger; spontaneous humor or unintentional laughter is expelled as “foreign matter,” and dialogic spaces collapse into silence and loyalty. As mimicry and internalization deepen, phenomena arise such as inverted evaluation axes—where individuals begin to desire validation from those who once harmed them—irrational chains of allegiance, and public execution-style harassment in online communication spaces. Anger memes infiltrate not only emotion but also language, belief systems, and structures of authority. By reconceptualizing anger not as a personality trait but as a structural-cultural meme, this paper visualizes the selection pressures operating on emotion, language, recognition, and institutional logic, and lays a theoretical and institutional foundation for reconstructing dialogue.