I’ve talked about the idea of advertisers and politicians attaching their brand to existing memes, or even creating new memes and then later attaching their brand to it. For example, the republican party associated themselves with John Wayne (with his eager participation), to appear to be the party of the manfully tough he-men...Which they then contrasted with the democratic party’s “weak” compassion (think in terms of McGovern, here, not the current dems).
They created some bad signal - compassion bad/sociopathy good - and got people to buy into it. This is the reason Joe Sixpack votes for them...They’re “tough enough” to do the job. The irony is, of course, that John Wayne, offscreen, was something of a sissy himself. His real name aside (Marion), he was approached at the republican convention in 1972 by a collection of wounded war veterans, and he couldn’t bring himself go out to speak with them.
So, again, the most effective memes are bad signal...They simply aren’t true. It is only important to embed the desired
emotion in people. Show them facts, and they’ll use reason. Present them with emotion, and their brains shut off.
Even when the meme is true, you can wind up with bad signal. One of the most destructive memes in history was put into words by Tacitus around 110CE, and dealt with the events of “the year of 4 emperors” (69CE)...He said:
“Welcome as the death of Nero had been in the first burst of joy, yet it had not only roused various emotions in Rome, among the Senators, the people, or the soldiery of the capital, it had also excited all the legions and their generals; for now had been divulged that secret of the empire, that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome.”
This meme is, in my opinion, the root cause of the problems that led to the downfall of Rome. Rather than the army being a tool of the state, it became an agent of the ruler - or would-be rulers - that was used to gain or maintain power, and thus had to be kept happy with ever-increasing bribes and privileges.
Compare that with the current meme “government = oppression”, which in many cases may be true, but - accurate or not - is still used to sell three political groups. The GOP, the Tea Party, and the Libertarian party all attach themselves to the “big government is bad” meme,
in an effort to become the dominant force in that big government.
An interesting effect is what happens when two bad signals are equally propagated and conflict with each other. For example “all drugs will kill you” and “drugs are beneficial and make you more creative”. Both are largely false, and both are widely believed, sometimes by the same people...So it is possible to graft utterly irreconcilable memes to the same person’s mind, and have them both stick.
Is there any mystery as to why people act so irrationally much of the time? Not only do we receive an excessive amount of signal, but most of it is bad signal, and quite a bit of it is conflicting. Since this is emotional programming, it’s no wonder at all that 80% of the population are complete wrecks.
The
most interesting part is, the only way to rid yourself of this is to tirelessly examine each embedded meme as you trip across them, to decide if the signal is bad or not, and condition yourself out of believing it. Problem is, you’re receiving bad signal at a huge and ever-increasing rate...A rate astronomically higher than the rate at which you can possibly divest yourself of any of it.
In fact, some psychologists are beginning to believe that we don’t actually have “personalities” so much as we have “memetic false-consciousness”...ie, we are nothing more than a tangled-up web of memes. Personally, I reject this on account of Papa Hemmingway, but the idea - a pile of bad signal in and of itself - is out there, and presently will be latched onto by no end of new age hippies and other people that are afraid of being alive.
A conclusion we can draw from this is that being alive and awake takes hard work, care, and attention. This takes more effort than most humans are willing to put out...But not you and I. We understand that being actual sapient beings is worth any amount of effort. We will drink and smoke, rant and rage, because we know that this is how things are
managed. It’s how we
get things done on the mean streets and in the pervert bars and in the very offices and workplaces that we find ourselves.
Truly, we are up for
any program, because anything else is unworthy of the memory of generations of sickos and degenerates that preceded us.
Okay for now,
Dok
