[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSome societies have not evolved much beyond the Lore meme because they have not interacted with other cultures.\u00a0 Their survival strategy for dealing with strangers has been to run away rather than compete.\u00a0 They were pushed onto the least desirable lands.\u00a0 At the other end of the scale, the most productive lands were the focus of the most competitive cultures.\u00a0 These cultures have experienced more meme competition.\u00a0 Their social evolution has gone through a lot more changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Great Memes describe survival issues and\nstrategies. Two of them come as a\npair. First was the Agriculture meme,\n\u201cWe can grow food rather than chase it!\u201d \nThis was followed shortly by the Barbarian meme, \u201cWe can survive by\nraiding our neighbors\u2019 siloes!\u201d This strategy\nwas not available prior to farming. \nHunter-gatherers can\u2019t carry enough food around to make it\nworthwhile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Barbarian meme leads to empire, where a core culture\ndominates neighboring cultures by force. \nIt is a great meme in the same sense that Voldemort was a great\nwizard. It created a two-class system of\noppressor and oppressed, whereas a hunter\/gatherer band is essentially a classless\nsociety. The development of a third \u2013\nthe middle class – took thousands of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a form of government, empire is about the worst way to\ntreat one\u2019s neighbors. \u201cLet\u2019s eat our\nneighbors!\u201d is worse, but the cannibal meme has fortunately died out. \u201cLet\u2019s trust our neighbors!\u201d has turned out\nfar more survivable. It took time to\nbuild the institutions that made the Trust meme possible. The Treaties of Westphalia are often cited as\ncritical to the development of the nation-state, one of the key institutions\ninvolved. It is ironic that the treaties\nwere signed by western kings, who thus managed to make their kingdoms obsolete. Western civilization reached other kings, and\nsome are still in king mode, though they are legally nation-states now. The extent to which their cultures absorbed\nthe Trust meme depends more on the flexibility of the culture than the length\nof the contact. Still, non-western\nkingdoms survived contact better than tribes or clans. Those forms of organization got pushed off\nthe productive lands and survive today only in the least desirable places. Nations did the pushing, as well as empires\nand kings. In general, nations don\u2019t\nattack nations, but will take tribal lands. \nEmpires will take anything. (need an aggression matrix here)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The West created laws and institutions that allowed the\ndevelopment of the Trust meme. It made\nus rich but did not replace the Barbarian meme. \nNewly created wealth was first used to increase military power. Another round of empire-building commenced. The new nation-states flexed their muscles in\nthe same old imperial ways. These days,\nthat sort of thing is frowned on. There\nare still a few empires around, and a few peoples under their thumbs. Just about every culture has had imperial\nentanglements. The only societies that\ndidn\u2019t are the Uncontacted Tribes. Their\nstandard reaction to others was to run away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Societies that chose to interact with others have tried many\nforms of organization since we started growing our food rather than chasing\nit. Empire was the largest form we\u2019ve\ntried, and along with the city-state, the oldest. We tried kingdoms where the land was good or\nclan and tribe where poor land couldn\u2019t support organizations so refined. Even less organized is the gang, an ad-hoc\ngroup formed when all else fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of these forms of human togetherness are spontaneously\nformed, as is characteristic of complex adaptive systems. (link)
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nMost societies have gone one level of abstraction further, making symbols for the sounds in their words, and storing their collected wisdom on clay or paper.\u00a0 Storing memes pictorially would have rated high in old Egypt or China.\u00a0 In the struggle between societies and their memes, the phonetic alphabet definitely won.\u00a0 Arabic numerals, abstract symbols for the number of things, also won.\u00a0 In terms of adaptability, Arabic numerals may be the easiest major meme for a culture to adopt and fully absorb.\u00a0 Compare to the Trust meme below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trust Meme<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Barbarian meme led to empire, where one culture dominates its neighbors by use of force. This is not a nice way to treat your neighbors. Most games, like sports competitions, are zero-sum games – one winner, one loser. War, which is the empire’s forte, is a negative sum game. Even when you win, it costs lives and treasure. This is not always obvious if you are winning. In the olden days, it seemed the only way to get rich was to take stuff from someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The best example of a positive-sum game, where both participants win, is trade. If I have two rifles and you have two hunting dogs, the first gun or dog is more valuable than the second. I’ll give you my second gun for your second dog. Both of us become better hunters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even barbarians can make such trades, but only face-to-face. The trick to modern civilization is to feel comfortable making a trade with a total stranger. This requires trust. One can use middleman, who knows both participants. More broadly, such middlemen can band into organizations with interchangeable middleman. Guilds started in the Middle Ages. These evolved into the second-most important organization man has created – the corporation. Corporations only work because they have proved trustworthy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Topics of interest with respect to memes include how far and how quickly they spread. Also interesting is which cultures adopt new memes. In this regard, the speed of the Japanese incorporation of western memes is astonishing. They seemed ready to trust foreign ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humanity\u2019s Greatest Memes: #1 \u2013 The Lore Meme Internet memes are fun, but they don\u2019t reflect the serious intent of the original concept. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the meme in his 1976 book, \u201cThe Selfish Gene\u201d. He calls memes the \u201cgenes\u201d of human cultures, our device for transmitting critical survival information down the time … <\/p>\n
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