Has anyone written anything on the inhibition of destructive memes? It seems to me that inhibiting destructive memes seems to follow a pattern. For those who don’t know, society is made of thousands of memes and when they all come together they form a culture. A destructive meme is a meme that doesn’t mesh or fit with the pre-existing memes. Walking around without pants was acceptable in other cultures, but not here for example. That is an example of a destructive meme.
Emotional pain is inflicted on the person who is adopting the destructive meme (a destructive meme is just an attitude/behavior/etc that is at odds with societies memes) and emotional pain is inflicted on his/her loved ones, which usually scares people away from adopting new memes. When people are drunk/high they are mroe prone to adopting abnormal memes because emotional pain doesn’t work as well.
Shame causes the person who has adopted the new meme to segregate him/herself from the social organism. This is a form of quarantine so that others are not infected with the new meme the same way we quarantine people with TB so they can’t infect other people with microbes.
Ridicule and humor are used to take away the status of the person with the new meme. A person’s influence in the social system and the creation of new memes is largely based on their status, and things like ridicule and laughing at someone (which happens to people with abnormal memes) takes away almost all of their status, resulting in them losing their ability to affect the social organism.
All in all it seems like this pattern is followed when new memes are brought up. However is this done for our benefit or the meme’s benefit? Do we torture and segregate ourselves for the good of the social group or do the memes torture and segregate us for their own good the same way people like Dawkins feel that our genes torment us for their own good? Are there other aspects of destructive memes that have been written about?
For example, in junior high school (junior high sucked, we were more apes than human at that point in our mental evolution) I remember everyone was wearing Nike Air Jordan sneakers because Jordan had high status. Had Jordan done something socially destructive like developed Alzheimers his status would’ve been taken away so his awkward memes wouldn’t infect the rest of society.
Tom Cruise is perhaps a better example. Before he adopted destructive memes that were at odds with society he had more status than before. Before he could’ve promoted a cologne and millions would’ve bought it (adopted his meme) but now that his memes are more at odds with societies his promotion of a product would not lead to as many people taking him seriously.
The book ‘obedience to authority’ touches on this subject a bit. Most people will adopt whatever behaviors that a higher status person imprints on them, to one degree or another. Taking away status takes away the risk of that happening.
Memetics is still a protoscience, really - I’m not sure how much of it is anything more than a nice metaphor or analogy.
Still, the analogy with genes does hold in this case. Most genetic mutations do not yield positive results in terms of reproductive fitness in competition with those already about. However, occasionally a mutation does compete successfully. Even if it becomes isolated from the original population, this fitness might even see its new little group outlast the old big group.
So it may be for new ideas. Here on this message board we often have all kinds of attempts at original thought. Most of the time they aren’t particularly convincing, and perhaps even attract scorn or opprobrium. But occasionally, one might take root and actually begin to spread despite initial reproductive trouble. And, who knows? Maybe it will last the test of time while currently popular ideas become laughably naive.
I’m not referring to neutral memes, I’m referring to destructive memes. A neutral meme is something new that doesn’t threaten the existing order (or we don’t perceive it that way), a destructive one is one that is an actual threat to the current order. A wiccan in a family of Christian fundamentalists for example.
So a gene or meme which changes the current demographics is destructive? Surely any change is by definition ‘destructive’ in that the old description ceases to apply? These “neutral” and “destructive” labels seem unnecessary and subjective to me. If the new meme of, say, racial equality was destructive because of the negative consequences for its adherents, well, destroy away.
What I’m getting at is it seems like there is a pattern of tools that are used to maintain the current meme order of pain, shame & ridicule that prevents new memes from implanting in a culture. However neutral memes or memes that mesh with the pre-existing framework (like a new form of art, a new song or something along those lines) do not have the same effect as memes that are a threat to the pre-existing order.
This whole thing is subjective and just something I’ve noticed recently. I’m wondering if anybody has written on memes and the tools they use to maintain themselves. It seems designed that there are numerous defense mechanisms that are acted upon when a new meme comes along that threatens the old one. People associated with the new meme and their loved ones feel pain, the person who has the new meme feels shame and undergoes self imposed quarantine and others take away that person’s status so that person’s memes lose their ability to affect other people.
For an example of a destructive meme just think of something that would cause you to ridicule or lose respect for someone who acts/thinks a certain way. I’m assuming that shame is a sign of a destructive meme, and something like wonder or curiosity is a sign of a neutral meme.
I’m also guessing forgiveness is a part of the defensive process as it allows outcasts back into society. For example obese women are treated badly in retail stores, but if they say “i’m obese, but I’m trying to become thin” people treat them with respect even if they are still obese.
So perhaps admitting in one form or another ‘I know this behavior is bad and different, but I’m trying to change it’ gets you accepted back into the group, as opposed to an unrepentant person who adopts new memes and doesn’t want to change them.
Designed by whom? The first rule of genetic evolution is that you do not talk about design, purpose or teleology of any kind – that is just quaint old anthropomorphising. If you wish to discuss memetic evolution in similar terms, you must similarly leave behind the teleological baggage.
And sometimes the new meme makes them feel empowered and individual, and emboldened enough to set off on a crusade setting the world to rights (and no matter how Quixotic the quest there will always be loons happy to act as Sancho Panzas).
The counterexamples are just too numerous for your characterisation to be useful IMO. In an environment of scarce resources, old memes can die out having been outcompeted by new upstarts, but the vast majority of new memes will not budge the old, tried and tested dynasties.
Thx for the Dennet link, Sentient Meat, a truly interesting essay.
The point I think Wesley is trying to make is that memes do not seem to die out as a result of competitive pressure alone, but rather via an active effort on the part of the older, stronger meme to eliminate the newer meme.
“Designed” is a poor choice of word if you want to argue memes are–like their biological counterparts–championed via passive evolutionary processes alone. However, the establishment of a successful meme does seem to entail the creation of active defenses against all potential competitor memes (emotional pain, shame, ridicule), defenses that don’t seem to exist in newborn competitors.
Like you, I am not sure whether the notion of a meme is anything more than a handy metaphor. The development of mechanisms in the service of defending a successful meme against all potential rivals doesn’t seem (to me at least) strictly explainable in terms of expected meme evolution, but then again shame and ridicule could themselves be memes (in which case I think memetics is in danger of being true by definition).
Well, whatever you call it there seems to be a system in place that maintains the current social order and any activity that threatens the order results in a variety of defensive mechanisms that prevents the spread of memes that are contrary to pre-existing orders. I don’t think it is a coincidence that shame causes people to avoid social situations, or that ridicule takes away a person’s status and as a result their ability to affect the social organism. I am curious as to whether anyone has written on this subject, what they found and if this defense mechanism is designed to serve humans or to serve the memes/culture itself.
Designed is a poor choice of words. Selected for by natural selection would be better.
How often does that happen? How often do people just up and join cults or go on major life changing sprees? It doesn’t happen much and when it does happen people nearby start to ridicule the person with the new memes, taking away his/her authority to change the social organism. Even if that person doesn’t feel shame and a desire to segregate themselves (or feel suicidal and desire to end their own lives) because they really believe in the new meme chances are not many other people will.
You really haven’t addressed my main point which is that there is an almost ‘immune response’ that is activated when contrary memes are presented. There is pain to scare off people from publicizing their belief in new memes (believing new memes in private seems to be ok, just not in public), shame to segregate the believers and their memes, ridicule to take away their authority, suicide to prevent their spread (homosexuals for instance make up 30-60% of attempted suicides in the US even though they only make up 1-2% of the population, diseases like schizophrenia carry a 10% risk of suicide over a lifetime), and forgiveness to allow reformed, reobedient people back into the social organism. I’m interested in that and how this meme immune system came into being and finding out more information about it.
What could an “active effort” be but a competitive mechanism?
Personally, I’d be reluctant to label memetic equilibrium and/or propagation as “destructive” vs. “defensive” until we know how memes work. As SM quite rightly pointed out, “memetics” is at best a rough blueprint of an investigative program, but presently there’s considerable doubt about its promise, as the gene/meme analogy hasn’t held up to scrutiny terribly well. You can theorize in a conventional sense with genes as we know them, but with other forms of information, descriptive and predictive power has proven elusive.
If the analogy with genetics holds, very rarely: genetic mutations are almost universally detrimental, as I’ve mentioned twice already. But thosemutations which are ultimately beneficial despite initial detriment are the most important ones of all.
After all, if new memes were so doomed, whither innovation?
I think we’re in agreement here; my ill-stated point in drawing the distinction between “destructive” vs. “defensive” propagation is that–to my knowledge–such a distinction doesn’t match what’s commonly seen in genetic propagation, causing me to further question the meme/gene analogy.
New memes are not doomed. If that were true there would never be social change.
I’m still not really getting an answer to my original question of ‘do things like shame, ridicule, suicide & emotional pain function as a tool to keep new memes out of the social organism’ or if anyone has written on that subject. Even if it isn’t memetics it is still sociology so I’m sure someone has written something about it.
I’m not really concerned if this can be labeled memetics or not, I’m concerned about defense mechanisms a society uses to keep contrary ideas out.
What the OP is describing seems to be is the typical negative response(s) to cognitive dissonance. It can be viewed as a ‘survival mechanism of the dominant meme(s)’ or something else depending on the meme of the observer.
Memetics seems like a fine discipline for adressing the questions you have, but like a lot of sociology (IMO), it’s tough to answer any question in a satisfyingly-rigorous way. I think part of the reason why the “meme” meme won’t die despite its poor track record as a scientific concept is its undeniable attractiveness. The notion that snippets of cultural information compete just like snippets of genetic information makes a lot of sense at first blush, and it may very well not be a bad idea. It’s just been very difficult to develop the idea into a rigorous field of study about the transmission and survival of information of any sort, a generalized theory of evolution that encompasses all forms of information.
I think your basic idea, that these strategies maybe act sort of like an immune system for the memeplex, is a very reasonable one. It makes a lot of sense, and clearly a mechanism posessed by a memeplex that allows it to resist being destroyed or subsumed by another memeplex fits nicely with a hoped-for evolutionary paradigm of informational natural selection. Memeplexes that evolve these potent defenses would presumably outcompete memeplexes that lack them. Unfortunately, that’s just a WAG I can’t back up with anything more than my own sensibilities.