“The savvy memetic engineer is able to isolate, study, and subtly manipulate the underlying values systems, symbolic balance and primal atavisms that unconsciously influence the individual psyche and collective identity.” Via Disinfo.
Memetic Engineering
Coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his controversial book The Selfish GeneK (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), the ‘meme’ is the study of ideas, behaviours, and skills which replicate and transmit themselves via imitation (using the human mind similarly to the way that a virus does in a biological host).
Memes are ‘replicators’ that compete to get themselves copied into as many minds as possible. Dawkins’ original examples included catchphrases, clothes fashions, and new ways of building arches. By implication, the mind can be fashioned, manipulated, and controlled just as the physical body is by genes.
Important early scientific studies were conducted by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter (particularly columns for the prestigious Scientific American magazine) in the early 1980s. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas (New York: Basic Books, 1983) explored memetics from the perspective of abstract mathematics and linguistics. A climate of viral metaphors (Ebola, AIDS) and a rapidly growing hedonistic cyberculture (influenced by evolutionary psychology) helped popularise the memetics field in the 1990s.
Memetics met with academic opposition from socio-biologists including Edward O. Wilson, and Dawkins himself expressed concern about memetics becoming an empirical science of culture. Dennett and others developed slightly different interpretations of memes from Dawkins, and the academic world has consequently been slow to adopt the new science.
Memetic Engineering developed from diverse influences, including cutting edge physics of consciousness and memetics research, chaos theory, semiotics, culture jamming, military information warfare, and the viral texts of iconoclasts William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Genesis P-Orridge. It draws upon Third Culture sciences and conceptual worldviews for Social Engineering, Values Systems Alignment, and Culture Jamming purposes. An important example of macro-historical memetic engineering analysis explaining how domination, patriarchy, war and violence are culturally programmed is Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1988), which outlines her very important Dominator and Partnership Culture thesis.
The savvy memetic engineer is able to isolate, study, and subtly manipulate the underlying values systems, symbolic balance and primal atavisms that unconsciously influence the individual psyche and collective identity. A highly educated but susceptible intelligentsia, worldwide travel, and information vectors like the Internet, cable television, and tabloid media, means that hysterical epidemics and disinformation campaigns may become more common. This warfare will be conducted using aesthetics, symbols, and doctrines as camouflage that will ultimately influence our cultural meme pool. These contemporary Life Conditions (Historic Times; Geographic Place; Existential Problems; and Societal Circumstances) are explored in books like Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), John Brockman’s The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), and Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudo-science, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: W.H. Freeman & Co, 1996).
Fictional descriptions of memetic engineering include Isaac Asimov’s seminal Foundation Trilogy (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), George Gurdjieff’s difficult but ultimately very rewarding artificial mythology Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Penguin USA, 1999); Neil Stephenson’s awesome novels Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993) and The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1996); and Robert W. Chambers’ unearthly The King in Yellow (Buccaneer Books, 1996) tome, which influenced seminal horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
