7/31/2019 Sex, Death and the Selfish Meme
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Sex, death, and
the selfish
meme: Nature abhorsan Asshole
7/31/2019 Sex, Death and the Selfish Meme
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by John MacBeath Watkins
In theory, the first bacteria to appear on earth is still alive. It has divided billions of
times and adapted to new environments, and billions of its cells have fallen to immune
systems or other hostile environments, but it has been able to change without dying.
Creatures like us, who reproduce sexually, cannot manage to rearrange our genes so
readily. To adapt to an ever-changing environment of bacteria and other changes in our
environment, we had to find another way change our genetic structure quickly. While it
might be more efficient for all the members of a species to be child-bearing, we cannot
afford to reproduce parthenogenically because we need to adapt our genetic structure by
mixing our genes. We must reproduce and die off to keep up in the evolutionary battle with
other organisms such as bacteria.
Richard Dawkins, in his influential book, The Selfish Gene, argued that in essence
that makes individuals the servants of their genes. Genes are biological strings of
information that use us to reproduce; a mother that lays down her life to save her children
is acting in the interest of passing on her genes, even at the expense of her own existence.
In that same volume, Dawkins gave us another concept; the meme, a string of
information that uses the minds of human beings to replicate itself. The implication is that
if you lay down your life for an idea, you are acting in the interest of the selfish meme. We
have, in fact, an existence in a symbolic worldthat is nearly as important to us as our
physical existence.
This is important in our society because we live in a new Gilded Age, in which an
ideology much like social Darwinism minus the bogus biology has taken root. It justifies
great social inequity based on the notion that we should be selfish, that greed is the way the
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world works and successfully greedy and selfish people are to be admired. In the war of
each against all, they are the victors.
In part, this is the just worldfallacy applied to an unequal society, a Panglossian
approach to bad outcomes. In this fantasy, the world rewards those who deserve to be
rewarded, so the existence of their wealth is evidence of their virtue, and we live in the best
of all possible worlds. But it has also become a meme in its own right, taking over minds
like a virus, changing behavior like some parasites do, and ensuring its continued existence
even at the cost of the host organism.
Mind you, our minds are in large part made of memes -- they are the software in
our brains. But there is code and there is code. Sometimes, memes are malicious code
intended toserve those who write it. Agnotology, the science of producing ignorance, is
one example of this. The Soviet effort to distribute copies ofThe Protocols of the Elders of
Zion in the middle east to make any effort toward peace less likely to succeed is the meme
equivalent ofStuxnet. They were in essence hacking Muslim culture instead of their
computers.
In any case, the existence of the selfish meme means that self-sacrifice to continue
the meme that makes us who we are makes as much sense as self-sacrifice to continue the
genes that make us who we are.
This makes a mockery of Ayn Rand's thesis inThe Virtue of Selfishnessthat
altruism is destructive and one should never sacrifice one's self for others.
From the Ayn Rand Institute website:
Manevery manis an end in himself, not a means to the ends of
others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others
http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2010/12/agnotology-science-of-our-time.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishnesshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishnesshttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2010/12/agnotology-science-of-our-time.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness7/31/2019 Sex, Death and the Selfish Meme
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nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rationalself-interest,
with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of
his life. Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruismthe claim that
morality consists in living for others or for society.
Yet why would every man be an end in himself? His end will come soon enough,
and his children and this impact on the minds of others will carry on who he is into the
future. Self-sacrifice in the service of the survival of his genes and his memes is entirely
rational, far more rational, in fact, than actions compatible with any commonly understood
definition of selfishness. It is certainly more rational than rejecting any claim that morality
consists of living for others or for society.
The question is not whether we should sometimes put the greater good ahead of
ourselves. The question is, what memes do we allow to be part of ourselves, and strive to
pass on as part of our legacy? A meme that says doing things well is both satisfying and
useful will lead to greater success for any descendents and intellectual followers we might
leave behind.
But as Stanley Milgram's famous experiment showed, people will do great evil if
they think it serves the greater good. You don't get death camps, killing fields, or suicide
bombers in societies where everyone is acting selfishly, you get them in societies where a
malicious meme has taken hold. Marx made the mistake of thinking that because religion
has done bad things, the solution was to get rid of religion, and because property has been
the source of much misery, the solution was to get rid of property. Rand made the same
mistake with religion, and substituted altruism for property in the things she wished to
dispose of.
But religion, property, and altruism are all useful things for a society to have. It is
because they are powerful and necessary that they have to capacity to do great harm or
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great good. They must be challenged to show that they are doing good instead of harm, but
to assume that they must be done away with is akin to thinking software is bad because
some software is malicious.
Since a certain amount of selflessness is needed to assure the reproduction of your
genes and memes, where do we draw the line on selfishness? I've come up with John's
Law:Nature abhors an asshole. In its simplest form, this means that selfishness must meet
social standards of decency to be okay, even at the cost of personal sacrifice. Those social
standards, after all, are memes that have evolved to further the survival of the society that
carries them.
In addition, there is a special case where the ethics of Ayn Rand might make sense.
If the individual won't die, and can go on forever, as the bacteria referred to earlier, it might
make sense for such an individual to act selfishly at all times.
Which means that Ayn Rand developed an ethical system suitable for bacteria, but
not for people.
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