(583 posts)
Sep 1, 2009 9:20 am
About Memes
Interesting facts about cultural memes -- they take on lives of their own and they live through replication --whether they are being touted or refuted the repetition , the reiteration is doing its meme function. If they are ultimately successful they become “common knowledge," replicating for the long term, shaping culture for generations.If memes fail, they wash out in the short term and their proponents loose credibility and become the butt of jokes, sarcasm, and ridicule. It behooves the purveyors of public discourse to apply some standards of rigor before generating narrative lest they wind up winning the battle losing the war. Those who live by bald faced assertion may well die by verity.
Truth has a funny way of percolating up through the noise in a system-- in the economy of cultural memes, the verifiable facts do wind up making significant differences. Some times it just takes awhile. This is why evidence is necessary in courts of law and replicable experiments necessary in science. Fact checking and rigor winnow out a lot of noise and help separate strong memes from weak.
Its a sort of natural selection of ideas over the horizon of time-- Memes mutate and replicate and rise and fall in the competition of the cultural marketplace-- eventually smarter ideas win out, even over deeply and widely held dumber ideas. What is workable and efficient wins out over what has been traditional but now seems to clutter up peoples lives—incrementally, intelligence gets a winning advantage
Liars, madmen, the stupid and the crazy all get their say in the marketplace of culture. Propaganda merchants sell their wears and zealots and fear mongers can hold sway and generate tons of narrative, loads of memes. Those seeking verity can become deluged and bewildered, but time is on their side.The weak memes of noise have a disadvantage; they are dependant upon their purveyors. It is difficult and expensive to keep up pretense.
Strong memes tend to be self supportive in that they hold some kernel of verifiability or some quality of actionable utility that folks gravitate towards. The relative honesty they carry makes them tougher and more independent over the broader marketplace. Weak memes shrink from rigor, strong memes swim in it . Weak memes need to be propped up, strong ones can stand alone, so to speak
So my friends when faced with the overwhelming mass of bs in discourse take heart-- the truth will out-- just give it time, or as Bucky Fuller once said, "human beings always arrive at the right solution after trying out all the wrong ones" -- Its a meager solace, but it sustains.
