Memes
Why do we want what we think we want? Why do we like what we think we like? To study memes is to study the production of truth. And then to become Meme Warriors.
Memes are ideas that travel. Just like a gene is a unit of biological information that replicates, a meme is a unit of non-biological information that replicates. Memes are viral, they spread and infect us—trends, logos, slogans, tunes, ideas about race, sex, domination and entitlement.
Mass communications don’t just control how we think, but what we think about.
We need to challenge the conditions that make thinking possible, to rebel against the regime of the production of truth. We must understand what it is that we’re protesting—it’s not just the destruction of lives, but the destruction of meaning. We’ve got to mute the meaning- manufacturing-machine, and then we’ve got to start to question everything. We’ve got to jam the spectacle, stop the show. We need to go on a spree of idea regeneration. The way to reclaim reality is to disconnect from the disconnection and re-connect to the source. We need to slip free of the cultural trance we’re dancing in and to turn people’s imaginations on. Discover that source that’s been waiting all this time for us to return and ask these questions. Re-defining “progress” is our greatest challenge.
When we talk about this, people tell us, we’re dreaming. Yeah. Somebody has to dream. Ask them, don’t you think the Pentagon, The Stock Market and Disney are somebody’s dreams? This is my dream—I dream of a day when we’ll no longer be driven by cars, worked by jobs, watched by t.v.’s , mined by corporations. I’m dreaming the 11th commandment—thou shalt love nature, of which you are a part. That we won’t give our earth’s resources and life away to be destroyed and sold back to us as beer-cans and plastic. That what has been stolen will be taken back, by us. Forget sustainability, we need restoration. I dream that unjust laws will be broken and the enemy’s name spoken and the police and soldiers will turn from the lies of the masters and join us in this work.
How do we catalyze this mass, psychic jail break? Humans structure information about our experiences through the narratives we tell each other. There’s power in collectively understood symbols. We are the animals who live by stories, they shape our perception of reality. To change the future, we’ve got to change our stories. Empire has controlled the stories, repeats them constantly—Prosperity. Security. Freedom. These are all bullshit. We need to tell the stories of earth community. We need to redefine progress and wealth in the stories we tell. The biblical story led us to this dysfunction and the modern story keeps us here.
Religion and technology conspire to keep us believing that we’re separate from the earth, that we’re better than all other life forms. We need to tell the story about how we can apply our power by revoking our obedience. We need to believe in our collective strength again. The fact that we are all connected is a planetary reality. The fact that we don’t know this is a huge condition of our disability.
We’ve got to consciously analyze and attack the assumptions of our colonized minds. If we—and the rest of life—are to survive and step free of corporate culture, we must provide new myths. We need new cultural narratives to frame the big story of our time—the story of competing futures. Corporations or democracy? Liberation or oppression? Awakening or denial? Evolution or extinction? We need to change the majority of humans from disabled spectators into empowered citizens, and let the battle touch their self-contained lives. We need to help people see that they’re connected to everything. We need language to speak to the crisis of denial, symbols like hammers to shatter all the justifications.
The lies are powerful; think of them as equasions. State power = law and order. Devastation = development. Doomsday economics = prosperity. The right to drive is more important than the right to breathe. This is a free country, the greatest country in the world, in history, ever. We need new models of work, education, health, environmental and social protections, and dignity in life rich with meaning. Memes popping like non genetically modified corn in hot oil.
First, we need an analysis of the place we’re currently coming from, where we currently are. We need to use the dominant culture’s own momentum against itself. Guerilla fighters know this. Every guerilla must know the terrain of the culture he’s trying to destroy. In the U.S., our ruling meta-meme is that the corporate-driven marketplace delivers happiness, prosperity, and freedom for all. There’s been no competing mass vision since World War 2. Ideology is more important than armies to maintaining empire most people don’t even recognize that this is an empire.
We need a new ideological vision that can stand against the ecocidal, post-microsoft, internationally monopolized, crap saturated, globally melting, revenge soaked, nuclear, plastic, chemical, high-tech Modernity. Something more compelling and comprehensive than just recycling or changing lightbulbs. We need to challenge the lies of “green consumerism”. We can start there. We can start anywhere, because everything is connected. That is the great cosmic truth, the foundation of biology and not knowing that fact is a huge condition of our disability.
In this culture 3,000 marketing messages are rammed into our neocortex every day. That’s how memes have been harnessed to work for the powers that be. It’s a one-way process— nonconsensual, and unarguably violent. Potent memes change minds, alter behaviors, and transform cultures. In an authentic culture, the ideas percolate from the bottom up and the best ideas win. Nobody controls this wild process— it emanates from people with no agenda but to describe their world and themselves in it, first hand. Everybody has the right to participate. Everybody experiences the world as an authority. But, in this culture, memes ooze down from the top, from only those who can afford to buy the time on our airwaves, corporations who’s only morality is to make more wealth for already wealthy people. And they don’t believe in the authority of the people. And, in this culture, the most repeated ideas win. The most repeated ideas win.
The good news is, that an organism under attack creates antibodies that will grow and spread and work to destroy the enemy. More good news is that it’s only at moments crisis that true change can come, because we have nothing to lose. Because we open our fierce grip to a larger perspective. Thoreau said, “The highest we can attain is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence.” That intelligence is the Life Force—the source of breath, green life, and evolution.
The questions to ask are huge—How can we learn, again, to love this world? How can we start to give back as much as we take? How can we learn to live with less? How can we create justice for all? What will wake us from this American dream of entitlement and domination, this nightmare for all others? What will stop us from wanting to devour and enslave the rest of the planet? How do we make it unprofitable to destroy life? How do we show people that living with less is way more creative than demanding more, that giving is far more fun than plundering, and that convenience is the enemy? What’s the difference between wealth that’s siphoned and wealth that’s funneled? What if our foreign policy centered on spreading joy and not pain?
Organize. Act. Replicate. We need to step up into the role of cultural shamans. It’s up to us to lead the way into cultural change—to recognize our power and our authority to do this hands-on re-direction of our mis-directed society. The folkways, the mores, the system of values is ours to pronounce. Who else has the right? Certainly not multinational corporations.
Forget accumulating possessions—the key to happiness and survival is not to possess, but to Be Possessed. We need to be remember that we are possessed by existence itself—it’s the very nature of the universe is to be possessed. The most basic cohesion of matter comes from possession. The orbit of the earth, gravity, is a fact of its possession. We are possessed by the life force, by the fact of breath and blood and death. In this we are connected to every living thing.
The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that everywhere you look, there’s good work to be done.
It’s not just about sustainable communities—we had those in this country once—they were called Pequoit, Arapahoe, Cheyenne. And it’s not about prayer and visualization, because if those people, who were so deeply culturally rooted in prayer couldn’t change the trajectory, neither can we. Not with only supernatural help. Not with righteous goodness. But, anything is possible from here. Howard Zinn reminded us that the Renaissance came on the heels of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague.
Everything— oil, money, nuclear war, global warming, racism, technology—all poised on the edge of a cliff in total precariousness. What will be the tipping point? Because today we are facing the cluster-fuck of Synchronous Cascading Failure. Synchronous cascading failure means that the powers of this empire are so overextended, the supply lines so long and deteriorating, and everything so connected to everything everywhere that any single mistake could trigger a series of fuck ups that could end us.
This might be one overloaded circuit, one degree of temperature, one biotech crop, one big storm, one sick chicken, one economic crash: one single failure in this bizarre balancing act will start the core meltdown. And, BAM! Synchronous Cascading Failure. We’ve got condoms, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, vitamins, airbags, plastic surgery, none of it will save us. The stock market goes into a freefall and there’s a run on the banks, but there’s no money in the banks! The economy’s all a damn lie just like democracy is all a damn lie, so, think about this when the empire’s spokespeople speak of security.
All that can save us now is the imagination. It must start there, with our minds. We need to resuscitate meaning, to cultivate new ideas, to harvest meme seeds and sow them wide. The work for social change agents is to be gardeners of the mindscape—explorers who create maps for getting to there from here, engineers building bridges between the many various liberation movements. Let’s tell the stories of the possible, in our most passionate voices, because this is the literal battle for the hearts, minds, and attention spans of an ever more anesthetized society.
We need to spread our ideas and critiques throughout the culture and break the media consumer trance. This is meme warfare. We can consciously, deliberately, and fundamentally redirect the trajectory of history. It’s time to shatter the illusions of social consent to criminal projects. This is a tipping point, a choice point, that humans have never before encountered. We have the power to consciously determine our evolution, to re-define “progress”. Will these be death throes or birth pains? Root canal or birth canal?
What will save us? Not technology. Not force. Only the imagination. The ability to tell ourselves a different story. Many different stories. How do we replace memes of violence, consumerism, and fear with memes demonstrating how to fit into the pattern? Because Darwin’s been twisted for us too, y’all—it’s not about survival of the fittest, but survival of the fit. How do we fit inside the environment of life to which we were born? How to belong. Be-longing shakes us free of the trance.
What are the memes that will clearly communicate the crisis, and what are memes that will champion the way through to a radically different cultural identity? Think about it. Pass it on.
There’s more to life than being young, rich, fast, thin, beautiful, and technologically advanced.
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