It’s not a meme, it’s a psychological concept. It boils down to when you attribute a motive or a mindset to someone when in fact you’re only speculating based on that of your own. So if you assert that someone let’s say is doing something because they’re afraid of xyz - and in fact there could be many reasons and there’s no real evidence of what you’re claiming, but if your peers know that that is a characteristic of yours, they might accuse you of projecting.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Projection is the thing some people do where they accuse someone else of something they themselves do, especially when there is no reason to suspect the accused. It could be considered a form of self-report.
An example might be if a racist individual (lets call them Bob) accuses someone of racism (Joe) because they crossed a street. Joe may have had plenty of valid reasons to cross the street; maybe they wanted to go into the shop across the street, maybe their car was parked on the other side, maybe they saw a friend and wanted to surprise them. Bob, however, being a racist fuck, sees Joe cross the street, sees a black man walking down the sidewalk that Joe just left, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that Joe was crossing the street to avoid the black dude. The reality is that Joe didn't even notice the black guy, but Bob, being a racist fuck, assumes that Joe is just doing the same thing that Bob would have done.
That is projection.
I'm not sure if that fully answers your question, though I will say I see people seemingly jump the gun a lot. Accusing someone of projecting is similar to accusing someone of arguing in bad faith; except instead of accusing them of arguing in bad faith, you're accusing them of making accusations "in bad faith", so to speak. However, like accusing someone of arguing in bad faith, some people will just use it to shut people down.
It’s not always negative. If you’re a compassionate person, you may conclude someone else’s actions are motivated by compassion (like yours are) even when you have no way to know the motivation.
Projecting, to me anyways, is when someone is forcing a narrative for the sake of an argument. It's like an advanced stage of making strawmen. But now it's all forced so they're just forcing it on you.
I think there's an added element of "some aspect of the strawman you're projecting on to others is actually something you think about yourself"