Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won’t long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex’s immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as ‘blasphemy’.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is ‘woo’.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as ‘mass hallucination’.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who’ll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I’ve heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend’s memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn’t do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.
The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and “I’m worthless”.
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there’s plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists’ preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don’t know the future well enough to say that things won’t get better, and they personally have good qualities, they’ll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn’t count because…”: If you point out a depressed person’s accomplishments, they’ll often tell you, “Anyone could’ve done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They’re just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don’t know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.
A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren’t really testable. You can’t know whether people’s praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can’t pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by ‘mass hallucination’.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.
Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can’t see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as ‘nonsense’ or ‘right-wing propaganda’ or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.
Something weird happened today. I’m still trying to rewrite myself as always, stuck working at my parents shop again after my RSI injury as typing and working a mouse hurts my hands too much still to find an IT job. A job I really dislike but am making the best of for the time being, and with the help of a green tea extract pill I’m taking called Theanine. A nootropic substance that gives you a focused relaxation. I can’t say I really notice much effect on my consciousness, but I can say I’m experiencing much less stress and not losing my temper as often.
This had a strange effect today, not on my mother/boss who still gets angry at me when I’m doing nothing wrong, though a lot less. But on other people who know me less well. One collegue was adressing me but forgot my name for a second and actually said “who are you again?” in a jesting way which was funny, but still. What was weird was I replied with “Jakobus”, which I thought sounded funny but totally came out of the blue (you know where that is!). Jakobus is an old dutch form of Jacob. And I really don’t know anything about the name except for Jacob’s Ladder.
What’s really peculiar is the girl’s father came at the end of the day to fix our dishwashing machine, I was getting mom’s car from the garage to park it in front of the shop so I came in later when he was already inside, and when I entered the shop I said “hi!” to her dad and he said “Hi… sorry I just can’t think of your name.” So I replied, “It’s Jakobus!” which made the girl and me laugh out loud.
So tonight I’m watching an anime about a multiple personality killer called Monster, and the main protagonist is watching the news and this happens:
Another Jacob!
I don’t have much time to research the name today after work, nor will I tomorrow. But a quick wiki search gives me this.
The name comes from the Hebrew root עקב ʿqb meaning “to follow, to be behind” but also “to supplant, circumvent, assail, overreach”, from the word for “heel”, עֲקֵב ʿaqeb).
Jacob (Ya`aqob or Ya`aqov, meaning “heel-catcher”, “supplanter”, “leg-puller”, “he who follows upon the heels of one”, from Hebrew: עקב, `aqab or `aqav, “seize by the heel”, “circumvent”, “restrain”, a wordplay upon Hebrew: עקבה, `iqqebah or `iqqbah, “heel”).
In the narrative of Genesis, it refers to the circumstances of Jacob’s birth when he held on to the heel of his older twin brother Esau (Genesis 25:26). The name is etymologized (in direct speech by the character Esau) in Genesis 27:36, adding the significance of Jacob having “supplanted” his elder brother by stealing his birthright.
Interesting so a guy who supplanted his elder brother (I derive, my older personalities) by stealing his birthright. So overwriting another guy!
Spoilers about the anime Monster so don’t read on. But the guy drying his hair with the towel is also a multiple personality sufferer, whenever he gets in a pinch he goes Berserk and switches to his Magnificent Steiner personality who saves him every time he’s about to die.
Steiner: a) occupational name for someone who worked with stone: a quarryman, stonecutter, or stonemason; an agent derivative of Stein.
b) This interesting name of English origin is an occupational name for a dyer, particularly of grass rather than fabrics and deriving from the Middle English Steyn(en) and latin “distingere” meaning to dye.
http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/steiner#ixzz2zH8ECXvO
So a stonemason or a dyer.
Rudolf Steiner, Wayne Dyer.
His name in the series though is Wolfgang Grimmer.
Grimmer: 1) from urban dictionary: One who is named after the norse god Wodhin. The root of which is ‘grimm’ meaning to bear a lot. Therefore Grimmer is one who can bear a lot.
2) from the regular dictionary:
1. harsh, unyielding. 2. frightful, horrible, dire, appalling, horrid, grisly, gruesome, hideous, dreadful. 3.severe, stern, hard. 4. ferocious, ruthless.
Wolfgang: Its earliest known bearer was a tenth-century saint. The name is a combination of the Old High German word wulf, meaning “wolf” and gang, meaning “path, journey”. Grimm (Teutonic Mythology p. 1093) interpreted the name as that of a hero in front of whom walks the “wolf of victory”.
All interesting connections to what I’m trying to do with myself. I may research some more later on or maybe you guys know some connections!
