About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Changing the World Without the Use of High ExplosivesIf you grit your teeth when you hear or read the word "meme" raise your hand.
Get ready to suffer. Pretend it's rough sex. Just think of how much better you'll feel when it's over. And I wouldn't do it to you unless I loved you, right?
The origin of the word is attributed to Richard Dawkins, who used it in his book The Selfish Gene. It represents as an abstract, conceptual analog to a gene. In his intent, a meme connotes an idea or a fragment thereof that is capable of being transmitted via language (or any sort of replicable behavior) and could be studied epidemiologically, as if it were a species of parasite or a virus. An "infection" by a meme would result in an alteration to the new host to allow the meme to be replicated and transmitted to others.
Thus any idea (or even an unconscious behavior) that can be conveyed, either intentionally or unintentionally, is a meme by Dawkins's definition. That makes the entirety of human knowledge—or at least that subset that is obtainable by learning from others rather than only by direct experience—memetic in nature.
Everyone seems to focus on the transmissibility of memes but few seem to talk about how memes change the host to make transmission of that particular meme more likely.
That's the part that makes viruses dangerous, you know. Not how easily they are spread, but what they do to you when they take over a few of your cells here and there and co-opt your resources, making your various and sundry innards make and distribute copies of the virus at the expense of your normal, healthy operation.
There's a concept, eh? What is it that people say or do that, when you see or hear it, it makes you sick—and makes you likely to spread the joy?
How do you identify—and more importantly, protect yourself from—pathological memes?
I know, I know. Too many long words, too much jargon. We both know you know the words, but after a while, all you hear is a buzzing sound…..
You're not sick unless something interferes with (to the point of discomfort, inconvenience, or improper function of) your body and/or mind as is evidenced by a perception of pain and/or negative impact to your relationships, school, and/or job/career, whichever may be applicable. Until that happens, there is no pathology. You're not ill. You just have quirks. Keep that in mind.
So what are pathological memes? Selfishness and violence and martyrdom come immediately to mind, as general categories. Studies show that specific tendencies to domestic violence and child molestation are transmitted primarily by people who have been abused in the same fashion. I'm sure you can come up with a few more examples. I recommend you try, just in case you're infected and don't know it.
The strange part isn't that these ways of acting get passed along. The big mysterious part is how witnessing (or being the victim of) other people's actions changes you into a slightly different version of yourself—someone who looks and acts a lot like you but is more likely to pass along something noxious.
Even if you don't pass it along, you'll almost always think of it as an option. One more temptation to fight. You've been changed by what you've experienced.
Another big mystery: How do we fight off the infections we manage to resist?
I'm going to disappoint you today. I don't have the answers. (Or maybe I'm just not pompous enough today to try to pretend that I do. Disappointment either way.)
It doesn't much matter, I guess. You don't have to be able to build a car from scratch in order to be able to drive one.
And thus today's article: a little introspection on my part with a mediocre attempt to get you to do the same on the off-chance you'll try to get someone else to run a brief systems diagnostic … and so on and so on, until mutation and degraded signal puts to rest my sorry little attempt at manipulating your minds.
You know the "six degrees of separation" theory, right? If I could make this little stone skip six times, I could change the world—slightly—for the better.
It might be easier to fit the sharks with freakin' laser beams.
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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy |
