A meme that significantly inhibits reproduction and spreads horizontally (indoctrination) rather than vertically (upbringing) inevitably works like a parasite.

@danieldennett got it wrong:

(most) religion spreads vertically so is symbiotic - people teach it to their kids, meaning that the religion has to increase people's fitness to survive.

The real mind-parasites are the memes that spread horizontally and take over your life...

... since they don't need you to reproduce to make copies of themselves, their interests are misaligned with yours.

People's happiness is strongly correlated with reproductive fitness (duh) so the big, all-encompassing horizontal memes make people miserable as well.

The same dynamic works on a societal scale.

Functional values like rule of law and good institutions were spread vertically between countries -- from England to the UK to the British Empire -- so they have to make a country richer and overall better.

Dysfunctional values like multiculturalism and diversity are not spread vertically, they're spread horizontally. You can export refugees and virtue signalling despite being way too weak and disorganized to conquer a new territory.

Therefore these values tend to be parasitic rather than symbiotic.

There are some exceptions to this, it's not as neat, but this dynamic is how functional institutions spread.

Conquering other lands is not something we should start worshipping (especially in the age of nukes) but it's important to acknowledge that that's the dynamic that got us from the cave to the skyscraper.

We should continue the pattern by allowing functional countries to colonize parts of the sea and other planets, with institutions on earth to incentivize peaceful competition rather than violence.

This will help functional institutions to grow.