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Pick Your Side, The Fun's About To Begin! Pick Me! Me!
Have you ever heard the story that we human beings only use 10 % of our brains? But do you know that our brain uses 30 of its capabilities for vision alone? So how could we be using only 10? The answer is meme. What is a meme?
It is a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. Individual slogans, catch phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes.
An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. And because we human beings are all parts of one living entity this is how our 'god' masters have effectively controlled us. It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture.
The meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme.
And memes survive in the world because people pass them on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellow humans. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them. My favorite example of a crucial meme would be "fire" or more importantly, "how to make a fire." This is a behavioral meme, mind you, one which didn't necessarily need a word attached to it to spring up and spread, merely a demonstration for another to follow. Once the meme was out there, it would have spread like wildfire, for obvious reasons...
But when you start to think of memes like that — behavioral memes — then you can begin to see how language itself, the idea of language, was a meme. Writing was a meme. And within those areas, more specific memes emerged. Memes, like genes, vary in their fitness to survive in the environment of human intellect. Some reproduce like bunnies, but are very short-lived (fashions), while others are slow to reproduce, but hang around for eons (religions).
Note that the fitness of the meme is not necessarily related to the fitness that it confers upon the human being that holds it. The most obvious example of this is the "Smoking is Cool" meme, which does very well for itself while killing off its hosts at a great rate. And most terrifying to our master 'gods' is that time and space do not restrict memes. An 'idea' arising in North America will soon rise in Africa, and can do so in the same instant.
The only effective means of controlling us pesky earth humans is to keep us continually fighting against each other, dividing ourselves into groups, tribes, societies, countries, religions, whatever works. The failure to do this however would be catastrophic to the 'gods'. The curtain would part, the Master Wizard of Oz would be revealed. And now, right now, in this early part of the 21st Century there exist but two remaining factions, 'gods' and 'men', and we're getting ready to duke it out!
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