Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the
Meme.
Viruses of the mind, and the whole science of memetics represents a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind. (15)
Will we allow natural selection to evolve us randomly, without regard for our happiness, satisfaction, or spirit? Or will we seize the reins of our own evolution and pick a direction for ourselves? (16)
Once created, a virus of the mind gains a life independent of its creator and evolves quickly to infect as many people as possible. (17)
Consciously spreading ideas you consider important is one way to combat mind viruses. (19)
Taking over bits of your mind and pulling you in different directions, mind viruses distract you from what’s most important to you in life and cause confusion, stress, and even despair. (20)
Memetics is the study of the working of memes: how they interact, replicate, and evolve. (26)
If I talk about a good
meme or a successful meme, I’m
talking about an idea or belief that spreads easily throughout the population,
not necessarily what we think of as a “good idea.” (35)7
The most interesting thing about memes is not whether they’re true or false; it’s that they are the building blocks of your mind. (36)
Distinctions are one kind of meme. They are ways of carving up the world by categorizing or labeling things. (42)
Strategies are beliefs about cause and effect. When you are programmed with a strategy-meme, you unconsciously believe behaving a certain way is likely to produce a certain effect. That behavior may trigger a chain of events that results in spreading the strategy-meme to another mind. (43)
Associations are connections between memes. When you are programmed with an association-meme, the presence of one thing triggers a thought or feeling about something else. This causes a change in your behavior, which can ultimately spread the meme to another mind. (46)
Both rebels and yesmen behave predictably according to their memetic programming. (52)
The most popular and prevalent parts of our culture are the most effective at copying memes. (84)
Communication evolved in order to communicate very specific things: danger, food, and sex. We therefore, as the product of evolution of animals, find ourselves with the tendency both to talk about and to pay attention to danger, food, and sex in preference to other subjects. (87)
Memes involving danger, food, and sex spread faster than other memes because we are wired to pay more attention to them – we have buttons around those subjects. (88)
As nice as it might be to imagine that we are evolving toward a better, more civilized, more compassionate world, what we’re really evolving toward is a world full of memes and mind viruses that replicate better. (98)
Memes have their own evolutionary path. They do not evolve to support the replication of our genes. (99)
Superstitions get perpetuated because they have what it takes from a meme’s point of view: the cheap insurance component of a superstition just presses our button. (133)
Genetic evolution gave us the tendency to pay attention to certain memes. Note that I said “tendency,” not “mandate.” We have the ability to consciously override our genetic programming, and even over time to reprogram ourselves to unconsciously pay attention to other things, if we decide other things are more important. (135)
Evangelism is the intentional spreading of memes. Make sure that the memes you’re spreading are memes that you want the world of have more of. (155)
All cultural institutions, regardless of their initial design or intention (if any), evolve to have but one goal: to perpetuate themselves. (158)
If we want to combat the mind viruses responsible for the decline of culture, we need to be conscious of our own programming, consciously adopting memes that take us in the direction we want to go. (163)
Cynics perennially ask why life and culture, and television in particular, seem to be filling up with valueless and demeaning junk rather than artistic and thoughtful content. The answer is, of course, that the valueless and demeaning junk is a better replicator. (166)
If you’re interested in filling the airwaves with art and literature, you’ve got to make them better replicators. (166)
There are two ways to make something a better replicator: make it better exploit the environment or change the environment to its advantage. (166)
Truth is not one of the strong selectors for memes. (168)
Making sense is a selector, since people have a drive to make sense of things, but as we know that does not always correspond to truth. (168)
The whole news-reporting mechanism, with billions of copies of information being made every day, is a prime breeding ground for mind viruses. (169)
The things-are-fine meme is a very weak one, not pressing any of our major buttons. (169)
In reality, the bias in the media isn’t liberal or conservative – it is toward stories that push our buttons, meaning that we buy their papers, listen to their shows, and keep them in business. (170)
The so-called liberal bias was not a “liberal” bias at all – it was a bias against speaking out in favor of the status quo, for a reason no more sinister than this: being in favor of the status quo is boring! It doesn’t push any buttons. The news media have evolved into a self-perpetuating cultural virus speaking out in favor of change. This process has continued to the point where the word “conservative” – which used to mean “opposing change” – has evolved to refer to some of the most revolutionary ideas around! Argue for keeping things the same is not a good meme. (170)
We’re particularly susceptible to memes that push our danger button, since it was important in the days before television, back when the quicker you responded to danger, the better chance you had to survive and reproduce. (174)
…to stay in business, the news media have to report things that people are interested in. Those things are nothing more or less than memes that push our buttons. Now silly us for having stupid buttons like danger, crisis, power, territory, and so on. (175)
Without appealing to those buttons, the masses will not tune in, and the networks will go out of business. (175)
The tradition strategy-meme replicates because it programs people to perpetuate itself – along with the rest of the bundled memes. (192)
Heresy is any belief that goes against the dogma of a religion. The flip-side of tradition, the heresy distinction-meme is like an infection-fighting white blood cell, identifying and combating infectious new memes. (192)
In the not-so-distant future, the bulk of our culture will be composed of designer viruses. Why? Because now that we know how to do it, we will. We will conquer the conceptual landscape as surely as we conquered the wilderness. At first, designer viruses will compete with cultural viruses for a share of our mind. Soon the old cultural viruses will lose, because the natural selection with which they evolve is not as quick as the intelligence-directed creation of designer viruses. Those ways of thinking won’t be wiped out completely, but more and more the people infected with old cultural viruses will be restricted to self-contained, incommunicado enclaves like the Amish. (200)
After that battle, designer viruses will have to start competing with each other, and more and more sophisticated technology will be needed to create a winner in the mind war. We will see computer programs doing sophisticated memetic modeling to fine-tune the memes before launching. (201)
What kinds of designer mind viruses will we see in the future? It depends upon the intentions and the skill of their creators – and on the memes those creators are infected with! I would expect to see many profit-motivated viruses, many power-motivated ones, and perhaps a few motivated by someone’s vision of a better future for humanity. (201)
Golden handcuffs are nothing more than the consequences of leaving meme, the same one used by cults to keep people in line. (206)
Beliefs are like cow paths. The more often you walk down a path, the more it looks like the right way to go. (207)
When you get people to commit to a belief system and put up barriers to keep them from changing their minds, you’ve effectively harnessed their lives and energies. Add evangelism and you’ve created a self-spreading power virus, using up people’s lives to achieve some end. (208)