From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Thu Feb 14 2002 - 06:23:42 MST
In all honesty, if you read my original reply, you certainly haven't engaged
it with it in your reply. I'd particularly like to hear whether you accept
the idea that actual violence can be propagated memetically through the
media.
> But is that a concrete aspect of being human, or
> can it be
> overcome? It seems like it's overcome in some, so it could be overcome in
> all - in which case we'd be much less suceptible to _crap_, as a species.
Or what you perceive to be such. I've been pondering your previous posts and
I'm wondering if the memeplex you're seeking to transmit might not be a
particularly obdurate variant of an individuality meme. In which case, a lot
depends on what you are trying to argue. If you are simply asserting that
the herd-like behaviour exhibited by some groups (teenage fashions or anyone
who read celebrity magazines being a case in point) can be alarmingly
UTistic, then I doubt we have any disagreement. However, I suspect you're
saying something rather more contentious than that. For instance, to use
your description of walking around a first world city, I'm afraid I just
don't see the slack-jawed imbeciles that you appear to see, drooling a'la
Pavlov whenever they see an advert or branded good. I see a populace that
are much more individualistic that at any previous point in history, who
increasingly can be described as having memetically selected 'designer
lifestyles' for themselves. On the whole, this kind of thing reminds me of
the same kind of argument that sounded radical when Johnny Rotten proclaimed
that the individual was supreme and that there was no such thing as society,
and then sounded silly when Margaret Thatcher said the same thing.
Of course, there is the question of exactly what memeplex you would wish to
engineer to replace this behaviour you appear to find so offensive -
historically, people have always been inclined to materialism if they have
had the resources for it - the only countervailing memeplexes I can think of
would be socialism and religion, both of which produce mindsets that are
markedly more narrow and conformist than anything produced by consumerism.
> I admit to being an idealist,
Couldn't you admit to something more socially acceptable, like coprophilia?
:-) Idealism that exists without reference to pragmatism is a dangerous
property indeed - Marx's desire 'to elevate humanity from this pettiness'
caused the death of thousands and consigned millions more to penury.
Idealism that commences from the proposition that human behaviour must be
mangled to fit in with a set of preconceived ideas is not something that can
truly be said to deserve the name. You have to remember that people are told
from birth onwards that materialism is a terrible, terrible thing; I view it
as being very positive that they happily ignore all such exercises in hand
wringing.
>and I do wish that people weren't such willing
> and indescriminate hosts. What's always bothered me, however, is the
> scientific (and sometimes elitist) resignation about the dumb masses and
> their fate (in which the observer almost never believes they share).
Oddly enough, I gave up pondering that a while back and concluded that as I
rarely buy anything I subsequently decide was a bad idea, it matters little
whether the decision to purchase was autonomous or memetically induced (to
use a spurious distinction). I certainly feel no need to apologise for
buying things like books and cds that give me pleasure.
>When you learn about current events, are you sad, curious or patiently
hopeful?
> Detached? Something else?
I'm not sure how we got from the subject of shopping to the rather broader
topic of 'current events.' I'm even less sure of what you are expecting - am
I patiently hopeful about the death of Princess Margaret? Well, on balance,
no. I think her chances of rising from the dead are really quite slim. More
seriously, I'm cautiously optimistic that if environmental and educational
conditions are such to permit the development of as broad a memetic
repertoire as possible, then it should be possible to address any number of
serious concerns (into which, category, alas, shopping does not fall).
Obviously, the problem would mainly be with environmental and educational
conditions.
I could as easily turn the question around though - it seems to me that
you're the one with the dismal view of matters, given that you seem to
believe everyone but you to be a mindless automata jerking on a string (a'la
behaviourism and operant conditioning). I simply think that as far as
advertising is concerned, people simply select which memes are of most
advantage to them out of a free market.
> PS- Even new-age self-help books have _a few_ nuggets of truth in
> them.
On the principle of an infinite number of monkeys in a room writing Hamlet,
I'm sure they do.
>Do you always throw out the baby with the bathwater?
No, I usually prefer to throw the baby out and keep the bathwater. Nast,
unpleasant noisy things, babies.
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