I am the proud owner of MemeticEngineer.com — I have owned it forever!  Anyway, I just wanted to share with you what memetic engineering is — I also own memes.org — I love the concept and theory around memetics!

Memetic Engineer on Disinfo

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.

Memetic Engineering on Wikipedia

Memetic engineering is a term developed and coined by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibran Burchett while they researched and observed the behavior of people after being purposely exposed (knowingly and unknowingly) to certain memetic themes. The term is based on Richard Dawkins‘ theory of memes.

• The process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others in society or humanity.
• The process of creating and developing theories or ideologies based on an analytical study of societies, cultures, their ways of thinking and the evolution of their minds.
• The process of modifying human beliefs, thought patterns, etc.

Memetic Engineering via Wired

What if culture – even consciousness itself – were nothing more than an artifact of the interaction of selfish memes, ideas capable of replicating and co-evolving with supreme indifference to their impact on human hosts?

A meme-centered paradigm of human culture and consciousness is, to say the least, disconcerting. In Consciousness Explained, cognitive theorist Daniel Dennett captures the horror graphically:

I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who’s in charge, according to this vision – we or our memes?

A meme-focused vision of culture and consciousness acknowledges forthrightly that memes are not mere random effluvia of the human experience but powerful control mechanisms that impose a largely invisible deep structure on a wide range of complex phenomena – language, scientific thinking, political behavior, productive work, religion, philosophical discourse, even history itself.

But consider the matter more closely. What if it were possible to construct a new science of the meme – memetic engineering – analogous to the discipline of genetic engineering? Such a science would allow us to manipulate complex patterns of replicating memes and achieve consistent and predictable manifestations in the form of a precisely altered cultural phenotype. Who would then be in charge of the course of cultural evolution, our selves or our selfish memes?

This may sound like science fiction, but a possible precursor to memetic engineering has already been studied at the Santa Fe Institute. The 2050 Project – an effort jointly pursued by SFI and the World Resources Institute – used a computer modeling tool called Sugarscape to construct a “cartoon history” that mimics the true history of ancient Native American tribes, such as the Anasazi, and then assesses the impact of changes in various cultural inputs – availability of resources, migration patterns, altered assumptions concerning diffusion of cultural mores – on alternate histories that might have transpired but were foreclosed by intervening events in real history.

The objectives of this research, breathtaking in their implications, were described by the investigators in Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, a project monograph:

The broad aim of this research is to begin the development of a more unified social science, one that embeds evolutionary processes in a computational environment that simulates demographics, the transmission of culture, conflict, economics, disease, the emergence of groups, and co-adaptation with the environment, all from the bottom up.

Research initiatives like the 2050 Project hold out the prospect of such a new kind of social science, as well as the possibility of a new science of memetic engineering. While predictions about the pace of scientific innovation are notoriously risky, my guess is that by the beginning of the 21st century the embryonic field of computer-based memetic studies either will reveal itself as an intellectual dry hole or will prove to be a technology of extraordinary power.

If the second scenario comes to pass, what are the long-term implications for our self-image as a species – endowed as we are with at least the illusion of free will and blessed, perhaps uniquely among the creatures of this earth, with the baffling gift of conscious thought?

First the dark scenario. Memes might come to be viewed explicitly as the primary actors in the drama of human history, exerting an iron-fisted control precisely analogous to that of Richard Dawkins’s “selfish genes” in the pageant of biological evolution.

This is the disquieting vision that Daniel Dennett proffered – the human mind as a mere meat computer, conscious human beings as puppets dancing to the blind watchmaker’s hidden melodies. But is this a fair reading of the philosophical implications of memes? Perhaps not. If we consider the matter carefully, we can glimpse a subtler message lurking between the lines of this emerging discipline. It is the same message implicit in the new science of evolutionary psychology, articulated by Robert Wright in The Moral Animal:

Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that we’re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

So too in the realm of human culture, our best hope for eventual liberation from an endless succession of dangerous ideologies and blinding prejudices – our best chance for overthrowing the tyranny exercised by blindly replicating memes indifferent to their often devastating impact on the mortal vessels they selfishly commandeer – may lie in a 21st-century enlightenment centered, at least in part, on a rigorous new science of the meme.

A meme is any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

A meme is defined within memetic theory as a unit of cultural information, cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes). Via Wikipedia.

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.

Meme theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection similarly to Charles Darwin‘s theory of biological evolution through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an organism’s reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts.

The idea of memes has proved a successful meme in its own right, gaining a degree of penetration into popular culture rare for an abstract scientific theory.

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, which first came into popular use with the publication of his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins based the word on a shortening of the Greek “mimeme” (something imitated), making it sound similar to “gene”. The concept received relatively little attention until the late 1980s, when several academics took it up, notably the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who promoted the idea firstly in his book on the philosophy of mind, Consciousness Explained (1991), and then in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). Robert Anton Wilson also discussed the concept in his writings.

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity (such as a song, an idea or a religion) that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as replicators, generally replicating through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (though not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes do not always get copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes. These memes may themselves prove more (or less) efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a theory of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.

Considerable controversy surrounds the word meme and its associated discipline, memetics. In part this arises because a number of possible (though not mutually exclusive) interpretations of the nature of the concept have arisen:

1. The least controversial claim suggests that memes provide a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that considering cultural developments from a meme’s eye view — as if memes, or the people who carry them, acted to maximise their own replication and survival — can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Dawkins himself seems to have favoured this approach.

2. Other theorists, such as Francis Heylighen, have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics in order for people to regard it as a real and useful scientific discipline. Given the nebulous (and in many cases subjective) nature of many memes, providing such an empirical grounding has to date proved challenging. However, a recent study by Mikael Sandberg, further elaborates the memetic approach to empirical studies of innovation diffusion in organisations.

3. A third approach, exemplified by Dennett and by Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine (1999), seeks to place memes at the centre of a radical and counter-intuitive naturalistic theory of mind and of personal identity. Evan Louis Sheehan uses the hierarchical model of cortical architecture proposed by Jeff Hawkins to develop such a memetic theory of mind in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence.

Etymology

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translated as “Memory-feelings in relation to original feelings”). According to the OED, the word mneme appears in English in 1921 in L. Simon’s translation of Semon’s book: The Mneme.

According to Dawkins, who coined the phrase and didn’t know about mneme, meme represents a shortened form of mimeme (from Greek mimos, “mimic”). Dawkins said he wanted “a monosyllable word that sounds a bit like gene”.

Applications of memetics

Memetic accounts of religion

Memetics regards religion itself as memetic, and Richard Dawkins has often discussed religion.

Some fundamentalist evangelical religious movements act predominantly to swell the reach of their faith-meme. These movements devote a large amount of time to evangelical activity.

Many of the world’s most successful religions demonstrate memetic modification over time — the theologies of the 21st century differ to a greater or lesser extent from the theologies of previous centuries. Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism (and their descendants) have all developed through variation, modification and memetic recombination from a shared monotheistic meme: Zoroastrianism appears to have functioned as an important and widely-shared religious ancestor (see Lawrence Mills, Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia, Chicago, 1913), contributing through Judaism to Christianity, Islam and their many derivative religions.

The Religious Right in the United States of America attaches conservative political views to Christian religious evangelism (“meme piggybacking”), and fundamentalist Christianity has associated a particular set of politico-social ideas/memeplexes with a separate set of religious ideas/memeplexes that have “replicated” very effectively for many centuries. For other examples of piggybacking involving religious memes, note the conversion-histories of the Hungarians and of Kievan Rus’: adoption of Catholicism and Orthodoxy respectively entailed perceived cultural, political and diplomatic benefits and adherence to perceived mainstream civilization.

In Western countries, universities evolved from medieval religious institutions devoted to learning. Of the nine colonial colleges in the British colonies of North America, eight had affiliations with religious institutions. Many US colleges separated themselves from their seminaries, because the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents federal funding of religious organizations. One can think of American academia as an offshoot religion that eliminated less adaptive memes (beliefs in the supernatural) in response to a selective pressure (funding restrictions).

A tendency exists in memetics to disparage religious memes, beginning at least as early as Dawkins’s openly-expressed atheism. (Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) calls all religious memes “mind viruses”.) Author Neal Stephenson speculates that traditional religions act as mental immune systems to suppress new (and potentially harmful) memes. Some compare this process to a scenario where the action of a virus (here a religion or a “bundle” of religious memes) proves ineffective and maladaptive if it kills its host(s), or to where the presence of less-harmful bacteria on the skin prevent infection by more-harmful organisms. For example, popular Christianity forbids both murder and suicide, and its precise definitions of heresy ensure that properly-educated Christians have difficulty in accepting new religions or new viewpoints which advocate such actions.

Susan Blackmore has made a case that the study of Zen meditation in itself comprises a process of meme “pruning”, i.e., a means to remove experiential clichés that reduce the value of life. This has not exempted Zen itself from serving as a source of highly mobile memes, such as “the sound of one hand clapping” koan or exclaiming “mu”.

Daniel Dennett used the idea of religion as a meme (or as a set of memes) as a basis for much of his analysis of religion in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Personal and intangible experiences which might seem “above” memes may rather have subconscious roots in memes absorbed during a lifetime.

Memetic accounts of science

The scientific method offers a body of social and experimental techniques which, given certain preconditions — a free press for the circulation of information, a large number of people predisposed to see the world as a mechanism subject to general regularities which humans can observe, describe and model through repeatable experiments and/or observations — acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an educated population as journals circulate and blogs proliferate. By demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice can make itself more attractive to potential converts. Whether or not experimenters can necessarily verify them, ideas and attitudes — those which scientists tend to hold or those which feel aesthetically pleasing in combination with scientific discoveries — can propagate themselves in societies where science has a high status by the process of meme piggybacking.

Furthermore, one can view the scientific method as a successful meta-memetical means of selecting those memeplexes best suited for explaining observable physical processes, through its mechanism (parallel to the evolutionary algorithm used in computer science) of providing standardized methods for creating and evaluating competing populations of solutions to a given problem.

Memetic explanations of racism

When regarded as non-conscious replicators (much like viruses), individual memes generally lack moral goodness or badness. However, the behaviors that memes generate in individuals and groups can have moral implications. History furnishes many examples of the moral implications of racist/ethnic/class memes when they interact with politics, such as the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Racism provides an example of a common meme: an ideology that has come to separate people, killing those who are either the targets or practitioners of racism (the latter due to backlash) and threatening the lives of those who do not believe in it. Once introduced into a culture, memes evolve (antisemitism versus xenophobia) and spread through society, sometimes becoming both harmful and attractive so that they spread like a virus.(Ref.: 1994 G. Burchett)

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of “cultural software” maintained that memes form narratives, networks of cultural associations, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Some of these structures can help generate racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, by making this kind of belief spread fast and wide. Conversely, some memes can have moral implications that most observers might deem positive, such as the meme of anti-racism, which tends to generate behaviors of tolerance.

Memetic account of personality

Memeticists often define an individual’s mind as a “playground for memes” or as an “ecology of memes”, where the different memes that have colonized that mind at different times interact with each other. For example, when a mind successfully infected by the memeplex for religion X becomes exposed to the memeplex for religion Y, memeplex X may repulse memeplex Y: X can block Y from infecting the mind (for instance through use of such memetic components as the meme that “all other religions besides X are evil”).

In a person’s history, language provides the first and most important memetic infection. Indeed, memeticians generally regard language as a memetically evolved phenomenon. For example, even at the level of animals, many species have evolved particular cries to convey different meanings, such as “danger”, “hungry”, “aroused”, “go away” or “come here”. Experiments can verify the memetic nature of the cries of these species, showing for example that the cries do not arise when humans raise the animals concerned: they do not generate the cries by instinct, but learn them from other animals. Human language, as a memetically evolved tool, can serve not only to communicate concepts between humans, but also to combine low-abstraction concepts into higher-abstraction ones. This combination/abstraction process, seen memetically, constitutes creative breeding of memes, where the interaction of several memes results in the birth of a new, combined meme. For example, the mind of Richard Dawkins saw the creative breeding of its memes for “replicator”, “culture”, and “mind”, and this breeding gave birth to the new meme of “meme”.

After humans become infected with the memeplex for language — generally during babyhood — they get infected with a series of higher-abstraction memes, and especially values memes. Depending on the education received by the person, the lessons drawn from experience, and the surrounding cultural materials (tales, songs, books, etc), a certain ecology and history of meme infection and interaction builds up within that person’s mind. Memes generate behaviors in their host — either spoken or acted behaviors. Because each person has an individual memetic infection and interaction history, there emerge singular behavior patterns. We conventionally refer to these meme-generated patterns of behavior as a person’s personality.

Memetic engineering

Main article: Memetic engineering

Memetic engineering consists of the process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others. It consists of the process of creating and developing theories or ideologies based on an analytical study of societies, their ways of thinking and the evolution of the minds that comprise them. Attempts at Artificial Meme-Phrase Creation have not met with noted success, though apocryphal stories tell of the putative origins of these sorts of memes.

Sometimes people modify and fabricate memes consciously, even intentionally (though some argue that the intention comes from the memes). This would help to explain how rapidly, extensively and usefully memetic evolution has functioned in and for culture. People apply many ever-evolving meme-based systems of analysis and error correction to all information flowing in and out. Just as genetic material has developed gene-based error-correction models, memetic systems have found it advantageous to associate with meme-based error-correction models. The entire process could appear as meme-based systemic complexes taking advantage (like a virus) of an extensive computational system (the human brain in this case), programming it to produce and modify memes, and thus to modify and expand the memotypic soup which largely dictates human thoughts and actions (and of course to build very useful – but still likely erroneous – memeplexes).

However, attempting to popularize a fabricated meme or an unproven theory often results in a backlash against said meme: the originators of a meme may appear to have a hidden agenda, as in the case of intelligent design. Meme-intense societies may generally deride — then forget — such fabricated memes or theories.

Memetic evolution

Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection but also variation, and memes also exhibit this property. Ideas may undergo changes in transmission which accumulate over time. Generations of hosts pass on these changes in the “phenotype” (the information in brains or in retention systems). In other words, unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. For example, folk tales and myths often become embellished in the retelling to make them more memorable or more appropriate and therefore more impressed listeners have a greater likelihood of retelling them, complete with accumulating embellishments that may serve to modify human behavior. More modern examples appear in the various urban legends and hoaxes — such as the Goodtimes virus warning — that circulate on the Internet.

Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas pass from one generation to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. This process affects which of those ideas will survive for passing on to future generations. For example, a certain culture may have unique designs and methods of tool-making that another culture may not have; therefore, the culture with the more effective methods may prosper more than the other culture, ceteris paribus. This leads to a higher proportion of the overall population adopting the more effective methods as time passes. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme’s function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. Similarly, like the biological evolutionary process, cultures can retain memes that once served a purpose during one epoch or era as vestigial memes (a.k.a. evolutionary misdirection) much like (debatably) the vermiform appendix, or wisdom teeth in humans.

Propagation of memes

Memes have as an important characteristic their propagation through imitation, a concept introduced by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Imitation involves copying the observed behaviour of another individual. Typically imitators copy behaviour from observing other humans, but they may also copy from an inanimate source, such as from a book or from a musical score. Imitation may depend on brains sufficiently powerful to assess the key aspects of the imitated behavior (what to copy and why) as well as its potential benefits

Researchers have observed memetic copying in just a few species on Earth, including hominids, dolphins and birds (which learn how to sing by imitating their parents).

When imitation first evolved in the animal ancestors of humans, it proved itself a valuable skill for learning, which increased an individual’s ability to reproduce genetically. Some have speculated that sexual selection of the best imitators further drove a genetic increase in the ability of brains to imitate well.

Interestingly, memetics suggests that memes have the potential for a much more lasting effect than genes. Most organisms pass their genes on to their offspring sexually, but with every generation the genetic contribution of a given ancestor halves – so that a person only has a quarter of their grandfather’s personal genes, for example (of course, populations inherit most genes in common). Susan Blackmore has poignantly evaluated the legacy of Socrates. Since the 5th century BC Socrates’ genes have become thoroughly diluted (dispersed); however, his memes still have a profound effect on modern thought and on contemporary philosophical discourse.

In modern times, the advent of the Internet — and more specifically of email — has provided memes with a high-fidelity propagation medium that enables highly prolific memes to propagate quickly. Chain emails furnish a significant example, and in-depth studies have examined their evolution and mutation based on their differential survival rate. Paper-based chain letters, predecessors to this meme-distribution net, have also attracted study, but they have a lower propagation-rate due to the higher copying effort, and a higher mutation-rate may have occurred due to manual transcription or degraded photocopying, thus potentially reducing their lifespan. It seems plausible that the first email chain letters started when recipients transcribed paper-based chain-letters to email, suggesting that memes can move from one propagation medium to another (more efficient) one.

Evolutionary forces affecting memes

Even if one accepts the memetic description, it still remains to single out which memes have good potential for spreading. One can make an analogy with biology. To be able to say something about the spread of a gene in birds that affect their wings ornithologists need to know about both population genetics and aerodynamics. Similarly, memeticists need to complement the description of memes with a description of what makes a meme easily absorbable by people other than the original carrier.

Only the number of extant copies (and where those copies reside) determine the measurable success of a gene or of a meme. A strong (but not complete) correlation exists between genes that do well and genes that have a positive effect on the organism which contains those genes. And if we can restrict attention to memes normally interpreted as statements of fact, then a correlation emerges between those memes that do well and those that reflect reality. However, some genes and memes do survive which owe their success to other factors. Similarly, a correlation exists between successful memes of a technological/economic nature and those that help the economy (such as slavery and free markets (each in their day), for instance).

A gene’s success in a body may stem from its attempt to bypass the normal sexual lottery by making itself present in more than 50% of zygotes in an organism. Some genes find other ways of having themselves transmitted between cells. Hence multiple factors influence the evolution of genes — not just the success of the species as a whole. Similarly the evolutionary pressures on memes include much more than just truth and economic success. Evolutionary pressures may include the following:

1. Experience: If a meme does not correlate with an individual’s experience, then that individual has a reduced likelihood of remembering that meme.

2. Pleasure/Pain: If a meme results in more pleasure or less pain for its host then the host will have a greater likelihood of remembering it.

3. Fear/Bribery: If a meme constitutes a threat then people may become frightened into believing it. Similarly, if a meme promises some future benefit then people may incline to believe it. The memes “if you do X you will burn in hell” and “do Y and you will go to heaven” provide examples. Memes which pass on the fear of a threat, of the likelihood or effectiveness of a threat, that “something will happen if you do such and such a thing”, have a high likelihood of success, and may therefore replicate and remain in the meme-pool. They may assist in this way in the survival of a thought, a theme or a philosophy within a community.

4. Censorship: If an organisation destroys any retention-systems containing a particular meme or otherwise controls the usage of that meme, then that meme may suffer a selective disadvantage.

5. Economics: If people or organisations with economic influence exhibit a particular meme, then the meme has a greater likelihood of benefiting from a greater audience. If a meme tends to increase the riches of an individual holding it, then that meme may spread because of imitation. Such memes might include “Hard work is good” and “Put number one first”.

6. Distinction: If the meme enables hearers to recognize and respect tellers (as leaders, intelligent people, insightful, etc.), then the meme has a greater chance of spreading. The erstwhile receivers will want to become themselves tellers of the same meme (or of an evolved/mutated version). Thus élite knowledge can provide a promotion to élite status.

Memes, like genes, do not purposely do or want anything — they either get replicated or not. Some meme systems have negative effects on the host or on their host society, but humans generally have a symbiotic relationship with these abstract entities.

Memes do not mutate in an exclusively passive way. The brain inhabited by a meme system can carry out a sort of active modification of a meme. One could draw an analogy with a cell’s error-correction systems, but they clearly function quite differently. In essence, people create and modify memes almost continuously. One can modify, manipulate, and create meme systems in thought, for instance through internal dialogue. As soon as one opens one’s mouth and says something (or does something) that one has not copied (but that others can copy), one has unleashed a novel meme. Thus, one could conclude that we all perform the role of a memetic engineer to some degree (even if not consciously).

This seems especially evident in modern society, more notably in the scientific and philosophical realms and in the entertainment industry. It has become standard practice for scientists and philosophers alike to assemble memetic systems and to question their philosophical and empirical integrity. On perceiving a flaw, one may seek theoretical (mathematical/thought experiments/logic/analysis) or empirical (experimental/observational) resolution. This happens in large part due to the influence of some of the more “modern” philosophers of the past. Over the last few hundred (or thousand) years, a “philosophy” or paradigm has evolved and developed which benefits the societies in which many embrace it. That philosophy includes the ethical, moral, and scientific obligation to take nothing for granted and always to question any new information one perceives. People following this tradition have transformed the memetic base of modern science and philosophy. These people include (just to name a scant few) Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Benjamin Franklin and Karl Popper. Science accepts nothing as true unless empirical evidence and observation suggests such “truth” strongly and consistently. This entire procedure adheres to a meme system that has evolved to the point of rejecting almost any absolute truth-claim. This meme system now includes such novel analytical paradigms as the scientific method and Dewey’s Decision-Making model (among many other meme-based systems) to help distinguish useful (or truthful) meme systems from “bad” ones.

Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has postulated what he calls “memetic selection criteria”. These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis project on the testability of the selection criteria.

Cultural materialism holds that the evolutionary pressures of economy and ecology explain many aspects of human culture. For example, the food taboos sometimes enshrined in religions – like the concepts of sacred cows, kosher and halal – would have prospered because they allowed the believing population to (say) live more hygienically and thus survive longer than non-believers in environments possibly more hostile to survival. A migration or a change of the economic infrastructure could render the taboo neutral or even adverse.

Meme-resistance

Karl Popper advocated memetic caution in the strongest possible terms: “The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us.”

Resistance to violent and destructive courses of action has formed a common meme that can guide human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths — for instance the U.S. and USSR stockpiled but did not use nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. Some cultures can consider ignorance a virtue — in particular, ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would prove disastrous if pursued by many individuals.

The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme-vector, seems to host both sides of this debate. Opposition to use of the Internet can stem from any number of memes: from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography.

The Principia Cybernetica project maintains a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes. It also refers to an essay by Jaron Lanier, The ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals, which very strongly criticises “meme totalists” who assert memes over bodies.

Memetic virus exchange

One controversial application of this “selfish meme” parallel (compare the selfish gene) results in the idea that certain collections of memes can act as “memetic viruses”: collections of ideas that behave as independent life-forms which continue to get passed on — even at the expense of their hosts — simply because of their success at getting passed on. Some observers have suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave this way; so by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they do not provide particular benefits to the believer.

Others maintain that the wide prevalence of human adoption of religious ideas provides evidence to suggest that such ideas offer some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value; otherwise memetic evolution would long ago have selected against such ideas. For example, some religions urge peace and co-operation among their followers (“Thou shalt not kill”) which may possibly tend to promote the biological survival of the social groups that carry these memes. However, the idea of group selection stands on shaky ground (to say the least) in the field of genetics. Accordingly, some consider the idea of selection of ideas beneficial to the group exclusively as unlikely.

Dawkins notes that one can distinguish a biological virus from its host’s normal genetic material by the fact that it can propagate alone, without the entire genetic corpus of the host being propagated — or half of it, in the case of diploid sexual reproduction; thus, a virus can “sabotage” the host’s other genes. This applies to memes in the sense that a meme that requires the success of its hosts has a greater likelihood of favouring the interests of these hosts than does a meme capable of succeeding even if each host quickly dies. For example, the commonplace meme encouraging people to wash their hands after they use the toilet or before handling food, and to remind others to do the same, is not at all harmful. In contrast, a cultish meme telling people to quit their jobs, abandon their families, and run around spreading the meme seems quite virulent.

Reproductive isolation in meme “speciation”

In traditional population genetics the normal genetic variation, genetic selection, and genetic drift do not lead to the formation of a new species without some form of “reproductive isolation”; i.e., in order to split a single species into two species, the two subpopulations of the original species must ultimately lose their ability to interbreed, which would normally maintain their heterogeneity. However, once separated, natural selection and/or just genetic drift acting on the normal genetic variation in the two subspecies will eventually change enough characteristics of the two subgroups that they can no longer interbreed, which by definition means that they will comprise two different species. Examples of reproductive isolation include geographical isolation, where a suddenly-appearing mountain range or river separates two subgroups; temporal isolation (isolation by time), where one subgroup becomes entirely diurnal in its habits while the other becomes entirely nocturnal; or even just ‘behavioral’ isolation, as seen in wolves and domestic dogs: they could interbreed, biologically speaking, but normally they do not.

A similar phenomenon can occur with memes. Normally, the population of individuals having a meme in their consciousness contains sufficient internal variation and mixes enough to keep a given meme relatively intact (although it covers a wide range of variations). Should that population become split, however, without sufficient contact for the two different subgroups of variations of the meme to equilibrate, eventually each group will evolve its own version of that meme, each version differing sufficiently from that of the other group to appear as a distinct entity.

The Kellerman meme provides an example of this occurring on the Internet. A search of the web and/or Usenet for the word ‘Kellerman’ will turn up many citations, describing at great length the behavior of a ‘Dr. Arthur Kellerman’, who, with the willing assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and the public-health lobby, purportedly fabricated studies in order to implicate firearms (and by extension their owners) as a menace to public safety, for the purposes of statist control of the population. The authors of these pages and postings describe purported machinations, “junk science,” a subsequent recantation by Dr. ‘Kellerman’, and the use of his work by proponents of gun control.

The original meme of Kellermann and his work on gun-related violent injury has generated a new meme (“Dr. Kellerman is an evil lying gun-grabbing enemy of freedom”) by the classic genetic phenomenon of a deletion mutation. The sub-population involved had strongly negative attitudes towards Kellermann’s work as well as a lack of firsthand familiarity with his studies and career. Because of the “reproductive isolation” caused by the total non-intersection of the results of searches for “Kellerman” and “Kellermann”, the ‘Kellerman’ meme drifted even further in the direction of negativity, unchecked by facts related to the real Kellermann. As this group encounters new individuals of similar general outlook, they introduce new recruits to the ‘Kellerman’ lore only, and go on to produce their own websites and postings furthering the rapid progress of this meme.

(This phenomenon also demonstrates two other features of memes — the “meme-complex” (memeplex) as a set of mutually-assisting “co-memes” which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship, and the “Villain vs. Victim” infection strategy.)

Debating the “meme” meme

Criticisms

Lack of philosophical appeal

One might regard the reduction of the highly complex nature of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a one-dimensional series of memes as an abstraction and, as such, a process which does not increase one’s understanding. The highly interconnected, multi-layering of such ideas resists memetic simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such “memes”. One cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes — rather individuals battle and rage with their memetic heritage every day. The levelling-off of all such interesting “memes” down to some neutralized molecular “substance” such as “meme-substance” would introduce a bias toward scientism and abandon the very thing that makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.

To see such an argument for holism as against the kind of atomic reductionism implied by memetics, see Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

This central problem with the possibility of memes has an illustration in the inability of such a meme-reductionist proposal to afford an explanation of how memetics itself qualifies as a meme, or, further, how one could describe biological genetics as a rather successful meme current in 20th-century science. Either way memes fail. Providing such an explanation would remove the ground from which the idea of memes themselves arose and so empty memes of all meaning. Without such an explanation memes find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.

Another philosophical criticism sees memetics as re-introducing, or re-inforcing, the classic pre-20th-century form of Cartesian dualism, that of mind versus body. Memetics seeks to include in the overall science of evolution such a dualism in the form of meme/gene. This dualism remains tenable, but many prominent philosophers have criticised it widely and historians of philosophy often consider it on the wane. Wittgenstein, in his critique of Cartesian dualism, Philosophical Investigations, argued for the absurdity of positing two parallel worlds, one of “body stuff”, the other of “mind stuff” whose interaction one does not (and perhaps can not ) know. (See also Wittgenstein’s private language argument).

However, in response to such criticism one might add that memeticists have started to see memes not as atomic but as complex interactors in an environment of other memes and physical entities, a development pre-figured perhaps in the theory of the association of ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, such a response would require memetics to prove it had some value to add to such complexity in order to prevent it falling into the same disuse as the theory of association of ideas.

Memetics might counter the charge of dualism by noting Leibniz’s monadology. This provided a direct response to Cartesian dualism based on an indivisible unit, the monad. Memes resemble monads in that they lack physicality (not having shape, size, mass, charge or energy) and yet as a totality they account for reality. Taken together they form the sum of all experience at any given time. But this argument essentially becomes a solipsistic exercise.

Against the charge of dualism, memeticists might counter that memes in fact supersede genetics, science itself then becoming just another meme that aims, not at the “Truth”, as such, but at the useful. However, memetics would then have undermined its own truth and the history of its own arrival on the scene, thus becoming yet another ontotheology.

Explaining, or re-naming?

One important criticism of meme theory hinges on the following question: “If memes are the solution, what is the problem?”

Critics in this vein point to a dearth of useful applications of meme theory in its two decades of existence. Beyond highly general explanations of highly complex phenomena (especially religion), meme theory has yet to produce, according to critics, a solid case-study of a concrete phenomenon that has gained acceptance among either scientists or social scientists. Rather, they contend, all memetic studies have done is translate conventional social thinking into “meme language” — without adding new explanatory value.

This criticism continues by asserting that no reason exists for differentiating or discerning the word “meme” from the word “idea” or from the phrase “pattern of thought”.

In response to these criticisms, a memeticist might characterize the intitial question as misleading (the word “explanation” or “descriptor” might seem more apt than “solution”). The creation of the term “meme” — as opposed to “idea” or “pattern of thought” — allows for specific description and application of the meme as a phenomenon. Additionally, using a new term such as “meme” allows one to avoid semantic baggage associated with well-known terms such as “idea”; and conveys a (mistaken) connotation of novelty.

Lack of rigor

Evolutionary biology has advanced in recent years in large part because scientists have distinguished rigorously between phenotype and genotype — between physical appearance and its biochemical basis. For example, dwarfism may come about through any one of several genetic mechanisms. An animal population undergoing selection for smaller size might develop a predominance of any one of these genetic traits, or several in parallel, or a bundle of them. Identifying the particular genetic mechanism makes the rigorous and precise science of population genetics possible.

Memetics, by contrast, has no such model for the storage and transmission of memes. Memeticists typically assume that memetic “phenotypes” equate with memetic “genotypes” — that every individual believing in one god, for example, carries the same “monotheism meme”. This assumption seems like a serious — and to critics, fatal — weakness in memetics relative to its genetic model.

In response to these criticisms, memeticists might argue that as their discipline does not construe memes as atomic entities, they therefore parallel indirectly the entirety of existing evolutionary taxonomy. (For example, one would not preclude fish from the animal kingdom for their lack of lungs.)

The author Evan Louis Sheehan, on the other hand, does portray memes as particulate (atomic-like) entities, captured in cortical hierarchies identical to what Jeff Hawkins proposes in his book On Intelligence. Each hierarchy expresses a pattern that the brain-owner has sensed and remembered. “Sensed patterns” can reflect anything from the shape of a tree to a commonly performed pattern of behavior that routinely propagates through mimicry. A cortical hierarchy consists of a “molecular” entity, constructed from sub-hierarchies, which are themselves ultimately constructed from atomic entities — sensory elements. Sheehan, in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence builds a model of creative thinking around a Darwinian process of combining and recombining various causal memes.

The problem of virus-analogies

Some critics attack proponents of memetics for what they see as severely flawed conceptions of one aspect of memetic theory: the intermittently applied analogy with viruses. Neither biological nor computational viruses (according to this line of thought) can serve for analogous purposes because they differ radically from thoughts; thus meme-proponents commit the fallacy of false analogy. Once a biological virus has infected a cell, or once a digital microprocessor has started to execute a computational virus, the outcome becomes almost completely determined: an observer can attempt to identify that outcome by examining the order of nucleic-acids in the cell genome or the bit-pattern in the computer-memory. All possible configurations of such viruses are well-defined and get stored in digital form. — In contrast the brain consists of a massively parallel-executing mesh of neurons: we still do not know exactly how it stores and retrieves information. The senses provide continuous, noisy and highly different input (note deafness, blindness, and disorders of perception). Observations of witnesses suggest that similar experiences of different people may result in very varied interpretations. Misunderstandings occur. Some concepts appear so abstract or need so much mental capacity that the majority of people cannot understand or “grasp” them. This situation suggests the questions: How can proponents of memes know that a “transfer” of a meme actually occurs in the sense that it remains the same entity? If meme-proponents explain the result of such a transfer as a “new meme” or as an “imperfect copy”, what core of the transmitted meme remains unchanged? If nothing remains unchanged, the claim of a transfer seems highly dubious.

Memeticists may then argue that various physical aids may ensure the correct transfer of the core of a meme. For instance, a sculpture of a cross or a physical hardcopy of the Qu’ran may ensure that humans copy the cores of these memes (the symbolism of the cross and the words of the prophet respectively) with sufficient fidelity.

General response to criticisms

A number of criticisms of memetic theory stem from confusion over what the term “gene” refers to. In microbiology, microbiologists see a “gene” as a cistron, a specific region of DNA. The analogy between memes and genes, however, relates to an evolutionary biologist’s gene, an abstract replicatory unit of information. People who think of a gene as an actual visible piece of DNA often criticise the memetic analogy because of this. An example of such an “abstract replicatory unit of information” might code for the color of one’s hair or for the length of a digit.

Historical antecedents of the meme concept

Plato used the term eidos to speak of the immutable and eternal nature of an existing thing. The human mind acted upon this eidos, according to Plato, when reasoning about the world around it. Aristotle rejected this notion in favor of an abstraction and categorization of the world as perceived by the observer.

Descriptions of meme-like concepts appear in Sufi teaching. Muwakkals rank as separate beings, elementals, that make up human thought (compare Leibniz’s monads).

During the Enlightenment the terms “idea”, “perception”, and “impression” came into use. The essential meaning of the term “idea”, as then used, involved some existent phenomena resulting from perception of a stimulus and cogitation on that stimulus.

Charles Darwin struggled with the concept in his early notebooks (M and N Notebooks) and never succeeded in adequately addressing the complexities of the human social and cognitive capabilities. While Darwin lacked proof for a biologically-inheritable element, he had postulated one and seemed quite comfortable with the concept of biologically-inherited social traits. (A modern biologist ignorant of the connotations of the term might characterize the latter concept as “Social Darwinism”.) Darwin also wrote of selection of novelty and fashion and quoted Max Müller on the struggle amongst words and grammatical forms:

words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Müller has well remarked: — “A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.” To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in all things. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Gabriel Tarde (1843 – 1904), a French sociologist, developed ideas of cultural transmission based on imitation and innovation of small psychological interactions. His sociology attempted to classify social phenomena by the generation and propagation of ideas, practices, and habits. Some have seen this work as an appealing historical and theoretical precursor to memetics.

Bertrand Russell repeated several times the phrase “beliefs are contagious” in his writing about human error.

John Laurent in The Journal of Memetics has suggested that the term ‘meme’ itself may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (published in English as The Mneme in 1924). His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent found the use of the term mneme in The Soul of the White Ant (1927) by Maurice Maeterlinck (who allegedly plagiarised from Eugène N. Marais) and highlights its parallels to Dawkins’s concept.

Maeterlinck, in discussing theories which attempt to explain ‘memory’ in termites as well as amongst the other social insects (ants, bees etc.), uses the phrase “engrammata upon the individual mneme” (Maeterlinck, 1927, p.198). Webster’s Collegiate dictionary defines an engram as “a memory trace; specif.: a protoplasmic change in neural tissue hypothesized to account for persistence of memory”. Note that Maeterlinck explains that he obtained his phrase from the “German philosopher” Richard Semon.

Laurent suggests that the etymological roots of the term ‘meme’ may come from mimneskesthai, the Greek verb for ‘to remember, to keep in mind’ — rather than from the Dawkins-supplied root of Greek mimeisthai, “to imitate.”

The old saying “Ideas have a life of their own” clearly encapsulates the “meme about memes”. Keith Henson has traced this quote back to 1910 where an unknown interviewer of G. K. Chesterton used it – apparently as an old saying at that time.

One could conceivably trace this idea back to at least 1831, when Victor Hugo wrote: “[…]every thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating itself[…]” in his book Notre Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) (Book Fifth, Chapter II).

John Maynard Keynes ended his “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1935) with the following:

[…] the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. […] I am sure the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas[…]But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

– John Maynard Keynes

Everett Rogers pioneered the “Diffusion of innovations” theory (formalised in 1962) which explains how and why people adopt new ideas. Rogers reflected some of the influence of Gabriel Tarde (1843 – 1904), who set out “laws of imitation” in his book of 1890 that explained how people decided whether to imitate behavior.

The concept that ideas spread according to genetic rules predates the coining by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene; for example William S. Burroughs asserted that “language is a virus.”

In his book Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod wrote a two-page section about the selection and evolution of ideas:

For a biologist it is tempting to compare the evolution of ideas with the evolution of living nature. ideas have kept some of the properties of organisms. Like them they want to propagate and multiply their structure, like them they can mix, recombine and reseparate their content, like them they have an evolution, and in this evolution, selection undoubtedly plays a big role. (Translated from German: Für einen Biologen ist es verlockend, die Evolution der Ideen mit der Evolution der belebten Natur zu vergleichen. […] Ideen [haben] einige der Eigenschaften von Organismen […] . Wie diese wollen sie ihre Struktur fortpflanzen und vermehren, wie diese können sie ihren Inhalt vermischen, rekombinieren und wieder abtrennen, wie diese haben sie schliesslich eine Evolution, und in dieser Evolution spielt die Selektion ohne jeden Zweifel eine große Rolle.)

Monod continues talking about the fecundity and impact of ideas and some factors that influence them, using religious ideas as an example.

Anthropological cultural materialism advanced the view that the evolutionary pressures of economy and ecology explain many aspects of human culture. According to this theory, the food taboos sometimes enshrined in religions – like the concepts of sacred cows, kosher and halal – prospered because they allowed the believing population to (say) live more hygienically and thus survive longer than non-believers in environments possibly hostile to survival. A migration or a change of the economic infrastructure could render the taboo neutral or even adverse.

Examples of memes

Crudely-stated versions of some common memes include:

* Technology and technological artifacts: cars, paper-clips, etc. Technology clearly demonstrates mutation as well as transmission, which memetic (or genetic) progress requires. Many paper-clip designs have emerged throughout history, for example, with varying degrees of longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity (i.e., memetic “success”). An often-cited example of “technology as meme” involves the building of a fire.

* Jingles: advertising slogans set to an engaging melody

* Earworms: songs that one can’t stop humming or thinking about.

* Jokes

* Proverbs and aphorisms: for example: “You can’t keep a good man down”.

* Snippets of gossip.

* Nursery rhymes: propagated from parent to child over many generations (thus keeping otherwise obsolete words such as “tuffet” and “chamber” in use), sometimes with associated actions and movements.

* Children’s culture: games, activities and chants (such as taunts) typical for different age-groups.

* Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.

* Conspiracy theories

* Factoids

* Fashions

* Medical and safety advice: “Don’t swim for an hour after eating” or “Steer in the direction of a skid”.

* The material of video technology: very memetic given its mass replication — people tend to imitate scenes or repeat popular catch phrases such as “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men or “Alllllllrighty then!” from Ace Ventura, even if they have not seen a film or a television broadcast themselves.

* Religions: complex memes, including folk religious beliefs, such as The Prayer of Jabez.

* Popular concepts: these include Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source, Egoism, or Altruism

* Group-based biases: everything from anti-semitism and racism to cargo cults.

* Longstanding political memes such as “mob rule”, national identity, Yes Minister and “republic, not a democracy”.

* Programming paradigms: from structured programming and object-oriented programming to extreme programming.

* Internet phenomena: Internet slang. “Internet memes” propagate quickly among users using email, websites, blogs, discussion boards and other Internet communications as a medium.

* Moore’s Law: this meme has a particularly interesting form of self-replication. The conviction that “semiconductor complexity doubles every 18 months” became considerably more than a predictive observation; it became a performance-target for an entire industry once that industry extensively started to believe in the “law”. Manufacturers now strive to make the next generation of semiconductor technology re-create the growth in performance of the previous generation, and so maintain belief in Moore’s Law. Additionally, the evolution of this meme provides details of interest. The original law described growth in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, but people – more and more — have (wrongly) understood it as describing an increase in terms of performance. This could exemplify how a meme can mutate slowly under the pressure of its environment (partial technical understanding and simplification for use in the mainstream media).

* Consciousness and the self: Susan Blackmore theorized that a “self” merely comprises a collection of memetic stories which she calls the selfplex.

* Metameme: The concept of memes itself comprises a meme.

* Anecdotes: Short jokes or other stories.

* Phrases; A turn of phrase, or expression, like “Whasssssap!” or “Where’s the beef?” or the Internet meme “all your base are belong to us!”

* Viral marketing: A type of marketing based on memes and using “word of mouth” to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).

The Memetic Lexicon lists meme-attributes compiled by Glenn Grant under a “share-alike” licence. The examples it offers may help to focus the concept. The Lexicon has circulated since the early 1990s, and evolved into its version 3.5 of its memplex (Memelex) in 2004: A Memetic Lexicon. One should keep in mind that Glenn Grant has the background of a writer of fiction rather that of an authority on memetics: many of the terms in the lexicon he simply invented as an experiment in the spread of his own self-generated memes.

Dawkins’ genetic analogy

Richard Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

This analogy suggests that the definition of a meme should refer to the physical structure, or abstract code representing that structure, representing a real idea as observed in situ. Genes do not depend upon their transfer for their current existence; they may need a definite, although not necessarily unique physical structure. Similarly, a book, play, song, or computer file might replicate a meme.

William H. Calvin offers the concept of a Darwinian process in the generation of conscious thought, based on his theory of resonant electrochemistry in the neocortex.

Dawkins himself, in a speech on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, described his motivation for postulating memes: he portrayed the idea not so much as an attempt at creating an account for cultural complexity, but rather as seeking something with which the selfish-genetic mechanism would still work with unreliable replicators:

Next question might be, does the information have to be molecular at all? Memes. This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as a kind of… almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes. What if they were computer viruses? They hadn’t been invented when I wrote The Selfish Gene so I went straight for memes, units of cultural inheritance.
—Richard Dawkins

Memes as discrete units

Though Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”, memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.

Although memeticists speak of memes as discrete units, this need not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that “atomic” ideas exist which one cannot break down into smaller pieces. The meme as a unit simply provides a convenient way of discussing “a piece of thought copied from person to person”, regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word was first uttered. The “word itself” meme will most likely survive many more generations (after transmission alone or in other sentences) than the “speech in its entirety” meme will survive (due to errors of memory, abridged versions, etc.)

This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a self-replicating set of code. The gene in this definition does not consist of a set number of nucleotides, but simply a collection of nucleotides (possibly in many different locations on the DNA) that replicate together and code for some set of behaviors or body parts.

In 1981 biologists Charles J. Lumsden and Edward Osborne Wilson published a theory of gene/culture co-evolution in the book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They argued that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson later adopted the term meme as the best existing name for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance and elaborated upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
Memeplexes

Much of the study of memes focuses on groups of memes called memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes) — such as religious, cultural, or political doctrines and systems. Memeplexes contain mutually supportive memes that together become more evolutionarily successful. These memplexes may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes which, if they fit with a memplex, can ‘piggyback’ on that success. Memeplexes of religion provide a common example. In the case of Christianity, the theory suggests, the Christian memeplex evolved from Jewish religious teachings to form, among others, the Catholic church. Following the schism between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and later splits giving rise to various Protestant churches, various people have added and deleted individual memes, resulting in the formation of completely different memeplexes (religions/sects) within the basic umbrella of Christianity, as well as within (for example) the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. (Without some concept of cultural evolution, one might have to postulate repeated and contradictory divine/demonic revelations in order to account for the historical record of religions and for the existence of denominations.)
Transmission

Life forms transmit information vertically (from generation to generation) via replication of genes. Memes can also transmit information vertically by replication. Some life forms can spread from their host horizontally, within groups of contemporaries. Memes also spread from hosts in such a manner. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time: Copernicus re-discovered the ancient heliocentric views of Aristarchus, but Aristarchian memes survive. One can view memeplexes as assisting the survival and transmission of memes in a symbiotic relationship.

Memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. For example, the fashion-value that “less is more” spreads through the behavior of people dressing down in understated clothes and acting superior. This behavior then has the effect of showing others a real-life example of this fashion-value, thereby conveying to them the fashion statement that “less is more”. Verbal transmission can supplement or replace this imitative method.

Those interested in tracking how memes spread through culture may use memetrackers, websites that allow one to see how people receive, use, and spread new information on the Web. Cameron Marlowe’s Blogdex project pioneered research on this topic.
Memetics

Main article: Memetics

Memetics, the study of memes, remains a controversial field among many scientists and skeptics. Memetics originated when Richard Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic evolution to its most fundamental unit: the replicator (or gene). Dawkins, in a search for parallels and other things that he might classify as replicators, suggested that the information and ideas in brains — culture, for example — could function as replicators as well. Computer software may represent another form of replicator with which evolution may eventually build grand things, whether socially as in the open source movement, or through the use of evolutionary algorithms.

Memetics offers maximum explanatory value in cases where one cannot demonstrate the truth of the contents of the meme. For example, one can readily show that washing hands helps to prevent illness, so the best explanation for the widespread popularity of this practice is that “it works”, though memetics still helps explain the rate of spread, and details such as why the practice of washing hands before surgery took so long to catch on. Memetics, however, excels in explaining the spread of certain value-judgements (“chastity is important”), preferences (“pork is repulsive”), superstitions (“black cats bring bad luck”) and other scientifically unverifiable beliefs (“’X’ is the one true God”); since one cannot easily account for any of these phenomena by conventional scientific methods. Calling someone’s ideas/beliefs/action a “meme”, therefore, does not constitute an insult, but dismissing it as “just a meme” does. Calling a belief a meme does not constitute an insult in that most people who believe in memes regard all beliefs as memes anyway. For example, an atheist who classified a given theist belief-system as a meme would likely also classify his own atheist belief-system as a meme.
Memetic methodology

Memetics often takes concepts from the theory of evolution (especially population genetics) and applies them to human culture. Memetics also uses mathematical models to try to explain many very controversial subjects such as religion and political systems. Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in the fields (such as sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, etc.) most relevant to the claims and methodologies of memetics.

Memeticists generate much memetic terminology by prepending ‘mem(e)-’ to an existing, usually biological, term or by putting ‘mem(e)’ in place of ‘gen(e)’ in various terms. Examples include: meme pool, memotype, memetic engineer, meme-complex.

Some concepts of memetics

The term memetic association refers to the idea that memes herd. For example, a meme for blue jeans includes memes for trouser-flies, riveted clothing, blue dye, cotton clothing, belt-loops and double-sewn seams. In this way, groups of memes can operate symbiotically (to use a biological analogy) in the sense that they act for their mutual benefit/survival.

The phrase memetic drift (formed by analogy to genetic drift) refers to the process of a meme changing as it replicates between one person to another. Memetic drift increases when meme transmission occurs in an awkward way. Very few memes show strong memetic inertia (the characteristic of a meme to manifest in the same way and to have the same impact regardless of who receives or transmits the meme). Memetic inertia increases when the meme transfers along with mnemonic devices, such as a rhyme, to preserve the memory of the meme prior to its transmission. See Telephone (game) for one example of memetic drift.
Doubts about memetics

A basic difficulty in the study of memes involves the frequent lack of clarity as to what divides one meme from another. Whether this matters may remain a matter of taste.

In much the same way that the selfish gene concept offers a fruitful way of understanding and reasoning about aspects of biological evolution, the meme concept can conceivably assist in the better understanding of some otherwise puzzling aspects of human culture (and learned behaviors of other animals as well). However, if one cannot test for “better” empirically, the question will remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a valid scientific theory. Memetics thus remains a science in its infancy, a protoscience (to proponents) or a pseudoscience (to detractors).

Via Wikipedia.

According to hhavensteincw over at Slashdot, there’s a new Google Bomb campaign to get liberal bloggers to associate John McCain with a number of posts and articles that highlight “ugly” things about the Republican Presidential candidate:

“A liberal blogger has launched a ‘Google bomb’ project aimed at boosting Google search results for nine news articles showing Sen. John McCain in a negative light. The Computerworld article notes: ‘Chris Bowers, managing editor of the progressive blog OpenLeft, is launching the Google bombs by encouraging bloggers to embed Web links to the nine news stories about McCain in their blogs, which helps raise their ranking in Google search results. Bowers is reprising a similar Google bombing effort he undertook in 2006 against 52 different congressional candidates. “Obviously, it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit, your opponent’s information is going to get out there,” Bowers said.’”

Via Slashdot, Computer World, and  OpenLeft

I am having quite a lot of fun playing around with a very silly and wonderful Memes.org.

Thank you, Google, for accepting memes.org back into your holy holy index of love. Here’s is Memes.org’s full name, Memes.org Memes are Mind Viruses: Culture, Science, Technology, Politics, Religion, and Conspiracy Through a Memetic Lens

Michael Bernstein popped me an IM after reading my article, The Culture of “Acting White” Anti-Intellectualism Will Kill America, with a link to Cosby, Race and Escaping The Downside, which reveals America’s dirty secret, “in America, being poor, ignorant, desperate and unable to escape your situation has absolutely nothing to do with the color of your skin. It is universal.”

“The concept of ‘acting white’ and worries that African Americans are not pushing their children enough to focus on education have been long-standing concerns of Obama’s — he has mentioned them in several recent speeches — and issues that many prominent members of the community, mostly notably comedian Bill Cosby, have focused on in recent years,” via The Washington Post

Senator Barack Obama is right. “Acting white” anti-intellectualism isn’t the exclusive domain of African Americans. Growing up in Hawaii, there is a vibrant acting white anti-intellectual culture, except in Hawaii it is called “acting haole.” Either way, it keeps kids from “talking haole.” Speaking and writing — communicating — in standard English with a broad vocabulary and the ability to convey complex thoughts and concepts is de rigeur in order to become well-employed, successful, and upwardly-mobile in this and every other culture.

I have a set of books that my dad used to teach himself to lose his North Jersey accent. He took it upon himself to enunciate ever word, to explore language, to pronounce his t’s and r’s, and to make sure his spoken word was as neutral, as cohesive, and as comprehensible as humanly possible. My dad was tall, handsome, and white and even he knew that is was the cut of a man’s suit and the intelligence of his conversation and tone (including his regional dialect and accent, or lack thereof) that made the man. That being white wasn’t enough. That being tall and handsome wasn’t — isn’t — enough. He knew that he needed to act white and not act Jersey.

None of this is a race issue. None of this is a cultural issue. This is a class issue. Yes, there is, indeed, a class war, no matter what the main stream media is trying to sell. That said, the people who suffer are of course African American, Southern, poor, working-class, and under-employed.

Elita America has discovered something very powerful: we cannot judge on race, age, gender, or sexual preference, or family-of-origin, but we are still allow to make harsh judgment based on one’s inability to communicate, to be well-spoken, or to be competent on the job. One can still eschew based on education, based on training, and based on merit.

So, as long as minority-Americans and Southerners and the poor continue to show their roots through their mother tongue and their inability to speak in a businesslike manner, then there will never ever be a reason to ever reject someone based on volatile criteria such as blackness, femaleness, gayness, hispanicness, or whatnot — you can always just reject all of these same folks under the guise of “unqualified” or “inability to communicate” or “not representational of the company,” or some other euphemism for “you don’t speak or communicate in an appropriate manner.” Or, more accurately, “you sound ignorant.”

In Hawaii, Asian kids are called “bananas“ because they’re “white on the inside.”

I grew up bilingual: I was fluent both in Pidgin English and Haole, proper English. Most kids consider a point-of-pride not to — or be able to — speak English; of course, this was amazingly empowering on the schoolyard, but this doesn’t map to the boardroom.

Rejecting “whiteness” is the most self-destructive choice any boy or girl can make: we live in a bilingual America. Most whites I know in DC speak differently at work than they did growing up. Most have lost their southernness, I have lost all of my Hawaiian lilts and ticks.

Culturally eschewing East Coast whiteness and carrying anti-intellectualism as a badge of pride that not only corrupted my school yard but also my Island, my State, and my country. It isn’t just African Americans who are constantly being threatened by a plague of self-empowerment through anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and anti-East Coast enlightenment, it is America.

When America completely rejects intellectualism, learning, enlightenment, scholarship, fairness, justice, and rationalism — tearing down the master’s house — what will be left? What will be built up in its place?

What good will come of a country filled with (reverse-)racism, separatism, ignorance, mysticism, anti-intellectualism, sexism, bigotry, pride, fear, religiosity, and gross nationalism? We as a nation, we as a country, and we as a people will surely be corrupted from a cancer and that cancer will not be from without, it will be from within.

I was talking to Andrew Peach this morning about memes.org and he popped me the news story you’ve all heard about, McDonald’s seeks ‘McJob’ rewrite, and sagely added, “memetically, McDonalds have scored an own goal with this one…..I personally had never heard of the term McJob until yesterday……Now that I know it I will surely be using it all the time.” Too true.

McJob wasn’t a thing since Douglas Coupland mentioned it in Generation X. I haven’t used it at all in ten-years and I haven’t heard it being used at all during the entire minimum wage war.

McDonalds is using the argument that 80% of McDonalds’ managers came up from their McJobs but I don’t buy it because if you’re at a cocktail party and you drop that you’re a manager at McDonalds, you’ll still get ridiculed because that is still a McJob, perceptions-wise, and you are still a loser.

The only people in the McDonalds world who get any respect are McDonalds franchisees and executives. (The same with car salesmen are losers but if you own all the Cadillac dealerships in New Jersey, you are god.)

A manager at McDonalds who doesn’t own a franchise is still considered a loser. So, I think this is just going to make bad into worse for McDonalds. The concept of McJob was dormant as a meme until yesterday.

Firstly, I don’t think that the OED delists words; secondly, who is McDonald’s PR agency? This is a case of letting sleeping memes lie because the truth is is that my friends no longer use McJob and the media no longer uses McJob.

Well, they sure as hell do now…

Look at all of this coverage: UPI, Sun-Sentinel, Chicago Sun-Times, STL Today, The Sun, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, News24, BBC, Boston Globe, SkyNews, Daily Record, WIFR, Daily Southern, ABC News, My Fox NY, Manchester Evening News, The Post IE, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times… and more…

I guarantee you that everyone is going to start using the term McJob again after this….

Doh!

Now, there are even Prediction Markets based on the McJob

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 95% Catwoman 80% Hulk 80% Robin 65% Superman 65% Green Lantern 65% Iron Man 65% Batman 60% The Flash 50% Wonder Woman 40% Supergirl 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

“Scholars, journalists and bloggers write uncritically about the potential of blogs to spread information quickly and accurately…” Yeah, sure, that’s for shizzle, yo yo. Learn more on Wired.

BizHack posted a response to a blog post I posted and then deleted (oops) from the main page of my blog.

I didn’t delete the page, though, and John Keotsier nailed me, “Talk about good timing – Chris Abraham jumped ship from Edelman just before the proverbial sh*t hit the proverbial fan … Reputation is hard to gain, easy to lose. Good timing!”

Well, I didn’t jump ship so much as walked the plank. I mean, the blog post was Out of the Firing and into the Frying Pan, after all. Full transparency!

The Internet may have a latency of 24-hours but the Blogosphere is realtime.

Well, I never knew what an astute intellectual Adolf Hilter was because I just assumed he was a monster. Surely a monster, a madman, a devil, and also an evil genius,

“All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed . . .”

“. . . Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.”

Whenever I work for PR, I am reminded to keep the language in the message at a 7th grade level.

The entire chapter, VI, War Propganda, is posted below. Very current and very important in understanding the current war’s propaganda strategy and campaign.

Mein Kampf Chapter VI, War Propaganda, by Adolf Hitler

In watching the course of political events I was always struck by the active part which propaganda played in them. I saw that it was an instrument, which the Marxist Socialists knew how to handle in a masterly way and how to put it to practical uses. Thus I soon came to realize that the right use of propaganda was an art in itself and that this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties. The Christian-Socialist Party alone, especially in Lueger’s time, showed a certain efficiency in the employment of this instrument and owed much of their success to it.

It was during the War, however, that we had the best chance of estimating the tremendous results which could be obtained by a propagandist system properly carried out. Here again, unfortunately, everything was left to the other side, the work done on our side being worse than insignificant. It was the total failure of the whole German system of information – a failure which was perfectly obvious to every soldier – that urged me to consider the problem of propaganda in a comprehensive way. I had ample opportunity to learn a practical lesson in this matter; for unfortunately it was only too well taught us by the enemy. The lack on our side was exploited by the enemy in such an efficient manner that one could say it showed itself as a real work of genius. In that propaganda carried on by the enemy I found admirable sources of instruction. The lesson to be learned from this had unfortunately no attraction for the geniuses on our own side. They were simply above all such things, too clever to accept any teaching. Anyhow they did not honestly wish to learn anything.

Had we any propaganda at all? Alas, I can reply only in the negative. All that was undertaken in this direction was so utterly inadequate and misconceived from the very beginning that not only did it prove useless but at times harmful. In substance it was insufficient. Psychologically it was all wrong. Anybody who had carefully investigated the German propaganda must have formed that judgment of it. Our people did not seem to be clear even about the primary question itself: Whether propaganda is a means or an end?

Propaganda is a means and must, therefore, be judged in relation to the end it is intended to serve. It must be organized in such a way as to be capable of attaining its objective. And, as it is quite clear that the importance of the objective may vary from the standpoint of general necessity, the essential internal character of the propaganda must vary accordingly. The cause for which we fought during the War was the noblest and highest that man could strive for. We were fighting for the freedom and independence of our country, for the security of our future welfare and the honour of the nation. Despite all views to the contrary, this honour does actually exist, or rather it will have to exist; for a nation without honour will sooner or later lose its freedom and independence. This is in accordance with the ruling of a higher justice, for a generation of poltroons is not entitled to freedom. He who would be a slave cannot have honour; for such honour would soon become an object of general scorn.

Germany was waging war for its very existence. The purpose of its war propaganda should have been to strengthen the fighting spirit in that struggle and help it to victory.

But when nations are fighting for their existence on this earth, when the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has to be answered, then all humane and æsthetic considerations must be set aside; for these ideals do not exist of themselves somewhere in the air but are the product of man’s creative imagination and disappear when he disappears. Nature knows nothing of them. Moreover, they are characteristic of only a small number of nations, or rather of races, and their value depends on the measure in which they spring from the racial feeling of the latter. Humane and æsthetic ideals will disappear from the inhabited earth when those races disappear which are the creators and standard-bearers of them.

All such ideals are only of secondary importance when a nation is struggling for its existence. They must be prevented from entering into the struggle the moment they threaten to weaken the stamina of the nation that is waging war. That is always the only visible effect whereby their place in the struggle is to be judged.

In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated that in time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as quickly as possible and that the most ruthless methods of fighting are at the same time the most humane. When people attempt to answer this reasoning by highfalutin talk about æsthetics, etc., only one answer can be given. It is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its existence must not be subordinated to any æsthetic considerations. The yoke of slavery is and always will remain the most unpleasant experience that mankind can endure. Do the Schwabing 12) decadents look upon Germany’s lot to-day as ‘aesthetic’? Of course, one doesn’t discuss such a question with the Jews, because they are the modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God’s image in His creation.

Since these ideas of what is beautiful and humane have no place in warfare, they are not to be used as standards of war propaganda.

During the War, propaganda was a means to an end. And this end was the struggle for existence of the German nation. Propaganda, therefore, should have been regarded from the standpoint of its utility for that purpose. The most cruel weapons were then the most humane, provided they helped towards a speedier decision; and only those methods were good and beautiful which helped towards securing the dignity and freedom of the nation. Such was the only possible attitude to adopt towards war propaganda in the life-or-death struggle.

If those in what are called positions of authority had realized this there would have been no uncertainty about the form and employment of war propaganda as a weapon; for it is nothing but a weapon, and indeed a most terrifying weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it.

The second question of decisive importance is this: To whom should propaganda be made to appeal? To the educated intellectual classes? Or to the less intellectual?

Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. For the intellectual classes, or what are called the intellectual classes to-day, propaganda is not suited, but only scientific exposition. Propaganda has as little to do with science as an advertisement poster has to do with art, as far as concerns the form in which it presents its message. The art of the advertisement poster consists in the ability of the designer to attract the attention of the crowd through the form and colours he chooses. The advertisement poster announcing an exhibition of art has no other aim than to convince the public of the importance of the exhibition. The better it does that, the better is the art of the poster as such. Being meant accordingly to impress upon the public the meaning of the exposition, the poster can never take the place of the artistic objects displayed in the exposition hall. They are something entirely different. Therefore. those who wish to study the artistic display must study something that is quite different from the poster; indeed for that purpose a mere wandering through the exhibition galleries is of no use. The student of art must carefully and thoroughly study each exhibit in order slowly to form a judicious opinion about it.

The situation is the same in regard to what we understand by the word, propaganda. The purpose of propaganda is not the personal instruction of the individual, but rather to attract public attention to certain things, the importance of which can be brought home to the masses only by this means.

Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential. But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study – because that is not the purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.

All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.

The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be its success. This is the best test of the value of a propaganda, and not the approbation of a small group of intellectuals or artistic people.

The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this is not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or mental inertia.

Once we have understood how necessary it is to concentrate the persuasive forces of propaganda on the broad masses of the people, the following lessons result therefrom:

That it is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction.

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way. Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.

It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results. Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart.

On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely confirmed the information that they had already received and their belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue. Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug. This result was made possible because at home they thought that the work of propaganda could be entrusted to the first ass that came along, braying of his own special talents, and they had no conception of the fact that propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found.

Thus the German war propaganda afforded us an incomparable example of how the work of ‘enlightenment’ should not be done and how such an example was the result of an entire failure to take any psychological considerations whatsoever into account.

From the enemy, however, a fund of valuable knowledge could be gained by those who kept their eyes open, whose powers of perception had not yet become sclerotic, and who during four-and-a-half years had to experience the perpetual flood of enemy propaganda.

The worst of all was that our people did not understand the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with. In this regard so many errors were committed, even from the very beginning of the war, that it was justifiable to doubt whether so much folly could be attributed solely to the stupidity of people in higher quarters.

What, for example, should we say of a poster which purported to advertise some new brand of soap by insisting on the excellent qualities of the competitive brands? We should naturally shake our heads. And it ought to be just the same in a similar kind of political advertisement. The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.

It was a fundamental mistake to discuss the question of who was responsible for the outbreak of the war and declare that the sole responsibility could not be attributed to Germany. The sole responsibility should have been laid on the shoulders of the enemy, without any discussion whatsoever.

And what was the consequence of these half-measures? The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. As soon as our own propaganda made the slightest suggestion that the enemy had a certain amount of justice on his side, then we laid down the basis on which the justice of our own cause could be questioned. The masses are not in a position to discern where the enemy’s fault ends and where our own begins. In such a case they become hesitant and distrustful, especially when the enemy does not make the same mistake but heaps all the blame on his adversary. Could there be any clearer proof of this than the fact that finally our own people believed what was said by the enemy’s propaganda, which was uniform and consistent in its assertions, rather than what our own propaganda said? And that, of course, was increased by the mania for objectivity which addicts our people. Everybody began to be careful about doing an injustice to the enemy, even at the cost of seriously injuring, and even ruining his own people and State.

Naturally the masses were not conscious of the fact that those in authority had failed to study the subject from this angle.

The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Its notions are never partly this and partly that. English propaganda especially understood this in a marvellous way and put what they understood into practice. They allowed no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.

Proof of how brilliantly they understood that the feeling of the masses is something primitive was shown in their policy of publishing tales of horror and outrages which fitted in with the real horrors of the time, thereby cleverly and ruthlessly preparing the ground for moral solidarity at the front, even in times of great defeats. Further, the way in which they pilloried the German enemy as solely responsible for the war – which was a brutal and absolute falsehood – and the way in which they proclaimed his guilt was excellently calculated to reach the masses, realizing that these are always extremist in their feelings. And thus it was that this atrocious lie was positively believed.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda is well illustrated by the fact that after four-and-a-half years, not only was the enemy still carrying on his propagandist work, but it was already undermining the stamina of our people at home.

That our propaganda did not achieve similar results is not to be wondered at, because it had the germs of inefficiency lodged in its very being by reason of its ambiguity. And because of the very nature of its content one could not expect it to make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our feckless ‘statesmen’ could have imagined that on pacifists slops of such a kind the enthusiasm could be nourished which is necessary to enkindle that spirit which leads men to die for their country.

And so this product of ours was not only worthless but detrimental.

No matter what an amount of talent employed in the organization of propaganda, it will have no result if due account is not taken of these fundamental principles. Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success.

Particularly in the field of propaganda, placid æsthetes and blase intellectuals should never be allowed to take the lead. The former would readily transform the impressive character of real propaganda into something suitable only for literary tea parties. As to the second class of people, one must always beware of this pest; for, in consequence of their insensibility to normal impressions, they are constantly seeking new excitements.

Such people grow sick and tired of everything. They always long for change and will always be incapable of putting themselves in the position of picturing the wants of their less callous fellow-creatures in their immediate neighbourhood, let alone trying to understand them. The blase intellectuals are always the first to criticize propaganda, or rather its message, because this appears to them to be outmoded and trivial. They are always looking for something new, always yearning for change; and thus they become the mortal enemies of every effort that may be made to influence the masses in an effective way. The moment the organization and message of a propagandist movement begins to be orientated according to their tastes it becomes incoherent and scattered.

It is not the purpose of propaganda to create a series of alterations in sentiment with a view to pleasing these blase gentry. Its chief function is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.

Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. In this way alone can propaganda be consistent and dynamic in its effects.

Only by following these general lines and sticking to them steadfastly, with uniform and concise emphasis, can final success be reached. Then one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a persistent policy secures.

The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or political nature, depends on the consistency and perseverance with which it is employed.

In this respect also the propaganda organized by our enemies set us an excellent example. It confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.

But in England they came to understand something further: namely, that the possibility of success in the use of this spiritual weapon consists in the mass employment of it, and that when employed in this way it brings full returns for the large expenses incurred.

In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest hero type.

Taken all in all, its results were negative.

I knew it! Ken Lay lives!

Diane’s article, Linda Hirshman needs a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, reminded me of the article I read on the 9th, Is this really feminism? I believe that feminism is the empowerment of women in a patriarchal system with the goal of achieving a quality of choice at least equal to that of men.

A woman’s choices should include whatever she wants, including the guilt-free choice to become a mom and stay at home with her children; or, alternately, become partner, dean, president, or laureate.

If it is indeed her choice (and not the result of coercion) a woman should not feel shame (or be made to feel ashamed) for making any choice. This choice should not be multiple choice: doctor, lawyer, scholar, politician, or writer. This freedom of choice, this choice feminism, need to allow, without judgement, “dropping out” to become a “full-time mother.”

I don’t know is this bodes well with Linda Hirshman in either Homeward Bound or her new book, Get to Work : A Manifesto for Women of the World:

“What do you need to live a good life in the real world? Among other things, a real job-and changing diapers isn’t one. “Opting out” is a trade-off that is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face, sooner or later. Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work-a clarion call for stay-at-home moms to blast out of the house-is a rocket-propelled grenade aimed directly at the mommy wars, and offers a bold plan for all women to find and be able to pay for the kinds of satisfying lives that a grown-up should want to lead.”

I studied feminist theory in college (Marxist-feminism, French feminism, Postmodern Feminism, Deconstructionism) and the objective was to dismantle the master’s house without the master’s tools. Yes, the goal was to reduce the master’s house to rubble, but what I fear has been built in its place looks much the same.

As far as I could tell, the original goal of feminism was to redefine a woman’s role in society from being a man’s possession (from daughter to wife) to being an equal to men. Feminism was about tearing off the patriarchal yoke. Unfortunately, if I am reading it right, Linda Hirshman believes that one yoke should be replaced by another: feminist expectations.

In other words, as a woman, If you have the potential to rule the world and usurp men, it is your responsibility above all else so to do. Until then, the struggle must continue unabated.

This isn’t about attaining choice, this is about attaining control.

One technique of control is manipulation and Linda Hirshman and her book, Get to Work, is using shame, judgement, and disappointment in order to make empowered, first-class, wealthy, affluent, elite, a-type, pedigreed women feel bad about themselves and their choices if their choices don’t include “living up to your full potential” as defined by becoming partner, dean, president, or laureate.

And that is not choice, that is obligation: exchanging one yoke for another; one societal expectation for another.

Would you join? Would you participate? Do you think it would be cool?

All my heros are atheists who artlessly serve as God’s vessels. Douglas Rushkoff should know better. Via Boing Boing.

Says a journalist in an actual missive, “I was talking with a retired US general the other day…”

What follows is an actual conversation from an undisclosed location between an unnamed journalist and an unnamed retired general:

“What the fuck! This war in Iraq is a special forces war,” says a retired general, “we can prosecute this whole war with a small force of special forces operatives. A big occupying army does absolutely nothing to help us move ahead. It just presents a huge fucking target, militarily and politically, and pisses off the locals. Within the context of winning the war in Iraq, there is no reason to have any non-special forces troops there.”

So the journalist asks, “Uh, why are they there then?”

“Well,” replies the retired general, “because it scares the Iranians, and because we can just storm across the border, ready to go, all pumped and primed from the experience in Iraq.”

And the journalist asks, “why do we want to invade Iran?”

“Well,” says the retired general, “partly because we, like everyone else in the world, don’t want Iran to have The Bomb. But more because we don’t want China having a nice secure oil source for their 9% growth rate. We want them to know we can choke them if they get unruly – it’s not the execution of a threat that is powerful, it’s your adversary’s knowledge that you could that is powerful.”

“And even moreso,” adds the retired general, “we want Iran to just stop even think about opening a Euro-based oil bourse. If oil started being traded in Euros, demand for the Dollar would plummet and along with that, its value, and the US would be fucked since it depends on borrowing to survive. That is the attack that would kill us – no dirty nuke or anthrax would do more than inconvenience us a bit. A Euro oil bourse would sink the US like a tourniquet to the neck.”

“Frankly,” concludes the retired general, “those two reasons – Chinese wrapping up oil contracts, and the threat of a Euro-based oil bourse were the real reasons we were in such a rush to invade Iraq. With the war, all the Chinese contracts disappeared, and the potential for a Euro oil bourse evaporated.”