The Faith of a Heretic



The Herding Mechanism

Chris Krause

Tuohey Lit. Of Fact

1/2/2005

Abstract

The question often arises, “Are people defined by the culture or society in which they live?”

The answer is far more disturbing then many are able to grasp. Humans from their birth extensively utilize mimicry to understand the world around them (Dawkins); they adopt commonly accepted mechanisms of operation- from the primeval (propulsion, bodily operation, harmonics, survival methods), to mental constructions (acceptable mates, religion, lexicon, music, clothing, expression, or anything else one has adopted for use in his everyday life) and beyond (Blackmore). Society is perpetuated on the mind virus (Godin) or meme (Dawkins).

Humans are constructs of the society they are born in- everything you know or have known has been absorbed through mimicry of observation and sense (Dawkins). Nothing is original or unique. Teenage outcasts who dress like every other teenage outcast are not expressing paramount individuality- they mimicked another outcast who appealed to them for their apparent rogue, lawlessness, relaxed control over their Self when in truth no such state exists.

This concept is clearly demonstrated in the two novels Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom and The Color of Water by James McBride.

Introduction

"The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative viewpoint on the way society works, one based on the meme, the Herding Mechanism, cultural infection (Grant), and social programming - using the novels mentioned prior as a firm base of support.

The Herding Mechanism

It is the nature of every human being to herd together amongst other likeminded and identical human beings (Blackmore, Dawkins). In a herd one feels safe (Both emotionally and physically) and part of something greater, often a community or nation. Difference is shunned in the herd, to the extent of genocide. The goal of a self-aware herd is to create a dronebase for which all individuals are part of (and destroy all foreign intrusion). This urge of attraction is rooted in the primeval necessity of survival and is no longer appropriate or practical in the modern era. Its propagation has been sustained by the selfish gene or meme (Grant) and passed from generation to generation by one’s forefathers. This entirely insincere, bovine and fabricated existence comprises modern society.

The Meme

Today’s society is a programmed one comprised of herds of infected individuals banding together with common aspirations in a drone like manner. No longer is the natural philosophy of old even considered, entirely replaced by hedonism and the programs of corporate benefactors. Human beings today are dependant on spoon fed disinformation from the media and the government; they collapse into panic and anarchy without their proper fill of reassuring lies and propaganda. Happiness and free will is an illusion, only pain, suffering and automation remains. By means of mass communication programmers are able to infect a wide population rapidly and remain in control- the hosts never appear aware of the delusion they live in. Humanity, since the advent of mass communication, has become increasingly bovine. An interwoven matrix of illusion creates a new reality, inextinguishable from the prehistory prior to the infection. Combating programming is nearly impossible- since the very fabric of how we communicate and debate is based on the contextual meme. A meme, (rhymes with "dream" and comes from memetic and memory), is the term given to a unit of information that replicates from brains and inanimate stores of information, such as books and computers, to other brains or stores of information. Inanimate sources of information have been termed 'retention systems'. The term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his controversial bestselling book The Selfish Gene.

Programming

“One can resist the invasion of an army; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

- Victor Hugo

A programmer (any individual who maliciously or innocently seeks to influence the state of another) is the infector of the meme. Programmer archetypes include money hungry CEOs who campaign to popularize their product regardless of its quality or necessity, clergy who seek to spread their fabricated and blind belief in imaginary entities or abstract hierarchical concepts and centralized self-aware government agencies which seek to spread widespread panic and fear (By means of creating distant, never approachable enemies and localized terror and danger) to boost the economy and war effort. More innocent programmers include teenagers raving about their favorite music, movie or video game (which persuades those who are not a part of herd that believe they enjoy that entertainment to become a member), parents and their insistence that college or working is somehow important and the midlife crisis many men go through as justification to buy garbage they don’t need. Many programmers weave elaborate matrixes of illusion (Wilkins) to create an entirely new reality (Augner)- prime example of the paradigm shift created post 9/11 by the self-interested United States government. This shift created many memeoids (Grant/Henson) in its wake, or those whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds. Examples of memeoids include Kamikazes, Shiite terrorists, Jim Jones followers, or any military personnel.

Examples (compiled from http )

So far a lot of theoretical concepts have been thrown up into the air- with little to back these claims. Here are a few of the limitless number of common memes present within modern society (compiled from various sources):

* Technology is a major example, such as cars, paperclips etc. Technology clearly demonstrates mutation as well which is essential for memetic (or genetic) progress to be made. There have been many paperclip designs throughout history, for example with varying degrees of longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity (ie. memetic "success")

* Jingles; advertising slogans set to an engaging melody

* Earworms; A song that you can't stop humming or thinking. "It's a Small World After All" is commonly used as an example.

* Jokes; Or at least jokes that are popularly considered to be funny

* Proverbs and aphorisms (e.g., "You can't keep a good man down")

* Nursery rhymes; are propagated from parent to child over many generations, sometimes with associated actions and movements.

* Epic poems; used to be important memes for preserving oral history, although they have largely been killed off by writing.

* Chain letters; "You must send this message to five other people, or something bad will happen to you."

* Religions are complex memes, and religion, including folk religious beliefs, can even spread virally (such as The Prayer of Jabez).

* Conspiracy theories

* "I am a lucky person. Here are some stories of my luck. If you believe in good luck, you can become lucky like me." (and its obverse: see luck).

* Internet phenomena such as Internet slang and Internet humor (like All your base are belong to us)

* Susan Blackmore theorized that a "self" is merely a collection of memetic stories which she calls the selfplex.

* The concept of memes is itself a meme. Even the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme has become a widely spread meme. However, the idea that the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme, is not yet particularly common as a meme.

* Movies are very memetic given their mass replication, causing people to imitate a huge number of things they observe in them such as saying "You can't handle the truth" from A Few Good Men or "Alllllllrighty then" from Ace Ventura, even if they have not seen the movies themselves.

* Longstanding political memes such as "mob rule" and "republic, not a democracy".

* All sorts of group-based biases, from antisemitism and racism to cargo cults.

* Programming paradigms, from structured programming to extreme programming.

* Moore's Law has a particularly interesting form of self-replication. The conviction that "semiconductor complexity doubles every 18 months" became more than a predictive observation but a performance target for an entire industry once it was extensively believed. Manufacters now strive to make the next generation of semiconductor technology recreate the performance growth of the previous generation and so maintain belief in Moore's Law.

* Concepts like Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source or Altruism

Tuesdays with Morrie

“Love or Perish” – Morrie Schwartz (Tuesdays with Morrie)

Morrie recites a quotation by his preferred poet, W. H. Auden, to cover one of his central, imperative teachings to Mitch: in the absence of love, there is a void that can be filled only by loving human relationships. Each of Morrie's lessons adds to a grander, all-inclusive message that every human being, Mitch in particular, ought to rebuff accepted cultural principles, and as an alternative expand his own. As Morrie perceives it, popular culture is a tyrant beneath which the individual society must endure. In his own time, Morrie has backed away from this cultural repression in favor of crafting his own way of life founded on love, acceptance, and open communication. He develops his own society as a rebellion in opposition to the media-driven greed, brutality and superficiality which has stained the traditions promoted by trendy culture. Morrie encourages Mitch to liberate himself of this dishonest, overbearing way of life in favor of his own, and it is merely when he does that he begins to reconsider his life and revitalize realization.

The media is repeatedly depicted in Tuesdays With Morrie as being innately wicked, sucking Mitch dry of his zeal and dreams, and feeding the public stories of murder and hate that have ruined the decency of the world's common society. Mitch, who is out of employment due to a unionized strike at the Detroit paper he writes for, recurrently notices the awful events reported by the media he for a elongated time has been a part of. He reads about homicides, torture, theft, and a dozen other horrible crimes that stand to contrast the wickedness of the common way of life with the righteousness of the world Morrie has shaped for himself. The O.J. Simpson murder trial also makes numerous appearances all through the book, and provides Mitch with proof to maintain his claim that the general populous has become reliant on and rather addicted to, media coverage of fairly worthless stories, stories that contribute nothing to individual maturity or integrity as a human being.

The Color of Water

"The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It's what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable"

-The Color of Water (94)

In the Color of Water James McBride is another typical example of how society molds individuals into mere drones of automation. Having grown up in the civil rights movement, James was filled with revolutionary ideas and crass, insincere distrust for white people due to the malicious tongues of his peers. Hatred is something you learn, now what you are born with. This is true of all cases; social awkwardness is the result of programmers and madmen. Human beings at birth are innately familial and temperate of other organisms. Only with time and continued exposure to mind virii can hatred become a way of life, can bias become instituted into one’s personal, subjective reality.

James also takes on the archetypal profession of a street thug and not only observes but absorbs this way of life as his own. This is simply put, the effect of exposure to adjacent programmers. For whatever reason, he has been informed (through observation or through direct contact) that such a way of life is appropriate for the given time. Convinced that mutating from a likeable, clean, amiable young man to a vicious, morally defunct, allegedly desirable, obnoxious criminal, James has displayed the ultimate representation of what the herding mechanism truly is. He has joined the herd which congregates upon street life; he will later join a religious herd to alleviate the self-doubt he unquestionably was experiencing during his time as a thug. However, he is simply herding amongst a different set of cows with a more “acceptable” outlook on life. Society defines what is proper and what is venomous, thus James, having doubted his past life, takes on the part of a religious man to calm the pain in his bombarded natural Self.

Later James comes to terms with his mother, not because he loves her (“love” is biological anyway) but because he is expected to outwardly love his mother by the society in which he is a part of. It would not have been a proper ending for the novel and for his own past memoirs if it ended on a negative note. After all, aren’t books supposed to end with a hopeful ending? Memetics manifest.

Conclusion

“To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.”

- Hypatia of Alexandria

We have gone over the subject matter extensively, now you can only ask yourself how valid is your own life? What sincerity remains? Under what banner, name, deed or veil will you continue to live? It is clear that indeed society and culture does not only define an individual, they create and foster the individual. If an individual strays from the norms of society, he is ostracized, he is removed by force or he is simply abandoned. True individuals cannot exist, for the very essence of how we communicate is predicated on the illusory matrix of lies and falsities that for generations for persisted. We can only communicate by the language that we speak and write – language will never be able to effectively express one’s thoughts. Language is itself a convention, is itself a mechanism created with parameter to perpetually keep the world numb and deaf.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

- John Donne

Works Cited

Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 2nd ed. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. London, Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Grant, Glen. “Memetic Lexicon.” Principia Cybernetica Web (Principia Cybernetica, Brussels). Ed. F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn and V. Turchin. 1990.

Heylighen, Francis. “Memetics.” Principia Cybernetica Web. Ed. F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn & V. Turchin. Brussels: Principia Cybernetica. Nov 2001.

---. “What makes a meme successful? Selection Criteria for Cultural Evolution.” Proc. 16th Int. Congress on Cybernetics. Namur: Association Internat. de Cybernétique. 1998.

James, William. “Great Men and their Environment.” Atlantic Monthly. 46. 1880.

Wilkins, John S. “What's in a Meme? Reflections From the Perspective of the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology.” Journal of Memetics. 2,1, 1998.

Augner, Robert. The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. Free Press. July 11, 2002.

---. Meme. . 2005. < >

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download