Memes and Meta-memes

A meta-meme is defined as a meme about memetics.  Mirror Reversal is a meta-meme because it introduces and describes many memetic concepts.  (See the glossary.)   

By being a meta-meme, Mirror Reversal is also a vaccime, similar to the functioning of a vaccine in medicine and immunology.  Vaccimes protect the individual from marauding memes that can infect and damage an unwary host.  They are contrary bits of information that shield a person from an opportunistic memeplex attack.  Education and skepticism are important vaccimes also. 

Here’s an example:  Two Jehovah Witnesses knock on your front door some Sunday afternoon.  They want to snag you with a memetic hook, just like bait in a trap.  “Are you interested in saving your soul?”  There’s usually a memetic threat that rides along with the hook, “You’ll go to hell if you don’t listen to us and believe what we say.”

Here’s where the vaccime, education, comes into play.  You listen to their pitch and they end it all with a non-testable assertion, “all this will become true when you die.”

“Hmmmm.” You utter.  “Wait a second, the great historian Will Durant asserts that there were hundreds of people who thought they were the messiah around the time of Christ.  Ancient mythology lists dozens of gods who shared the same characteristics.  Here’s a few:  Horace of Egypt, born of the virgin Isis on Dec 25; Attis of Phrigia, born of a virgin; Dionysis of Greece, traveling teacher who performed miracles; Mithra of Persia, born of a virgin; Chrishna of Hindostan; Crite of Chaldea; Baal of Phoenicia; Joa of Nepal; Thammuz of Syria; Adad of Assyria; Beddru of Japan; Quexalcote of Mexico. 

Most of these gods were born on December 25, had virgin mothers and were traveling teachers who healed the sick and performed tricks like changing water into wine or walking on water. 

Also, not one of the dozens of historians who lived in or around the Mediterranean contemporary to or soon after Christ even mentioned him in their writings.  

There are dozens of other inconsistencies and anachronisms.  So, the point is, the more educated and knowledgeable one is about history and science, the more immune one is to the meme attack.  The two JWs knocking on your door want you to become like them, membots.  People who have devoted their lives to a singular purpose:  more and more copies of the computer virus that possesses them. 

(When I was a little boy, I saw a movie called Invaders from Mars.  It portrayed a ghastly turquoise-blue, hairless head with no body attached at the neck—in a fish bowl!  What made the movie so scary was that the glossy-eyed head with a horrifying, poker-faced stare merely silently pointed its tentacles at its obeisant slave/zombies and they did its bidding.  That’s the way I picture the relationship of a pernicious memeplex to its membots.  They don’t even know how or why they’re being controlled.) 

Some Final Thoughts

Reader, with these final paragraphs I rid myself of a terrible burden.  Writing Mirror Reversal has pretty much made my life a tragedy, but I did what I had to do. So I tried to change the world, big deal.  After I graduated from NYU in the wild ‘60s, my family and friends considered me a wasted hippie idealist dreamer.  I was.  They were right, I don’t deny it.

But as I looked around and observed the real world, I never for one minute doubted or compromised my Thoreauvian, non-conformist worldview.  It was the slow, piecemeal degradation of the planet that appalled me.  I knew I was right and everybody else was wrong.  When I was a teenager, I remember my mother’s telling me, “You think you’re normal and everybody else in the world is crazy.  You can’t live like that.” 

“I know, mom, I just can’t help it,” was my answer.  If she were alive today the answer would still be the same.  This couldn’t be the natural state of things or we couldn’t have evolved as high as we did as a species. 

I looked around, observed the real world and saw human suffering constantly and steadily increasing.  I saw the numbers and habitats of animals constantly dwindling, such that most will be extinct by mid-century unless there’s a change in consciousness.  I saw people more and more alienated from one another, such that we can’t even pick up a hitchhiker in our neighborhoods to make friends and save a little gas.  A young girl can’t talk to a stranger because he might be a sex offender.  We have to break this cycle of alienation from nature and ourselves, or consciousness on planet Earth will cease to exist. 

How coolly corporate sponsors present programs like Life After People showing plants overrunning our biggest cities.  Our planet as barren of consciousness as the moon—as if it’s inevitable.  To me, this is obscenity, not the sight of the naked human body.  To me, the thought of life after people is unbearable, because it doesn’t have to be.

To sum up Mirror Reversal in a few lines:  Common hard working, good people have to stop being sheep.  No God is going to save us at the last second like the ship captain in Lord of the Flies.  The universe is indifferent to us.