Viral Internet images, say

Usage examples of memes.

You (and each of your parents and all your siblings and friends) contain a complete set of memes, which are the conceptual building plans for our culture.

Others have gone so far as to wonder if memes exist in brains in as physical a sense as dendrites or glia cells.

To produce the Renaissance, it wasn’t necessary to change out ninety percent of the memes of the Middle Ages—or eighty or sixty or thirty or even twenty.

For example, the Heaven’s Gate cultists possessed a lethal meme that made suicide irresistibly attractive to them—but I’m not much interested in memes that are lethal to individuals.

I’m interested in memes that are lethal to cultures (and to our culture in particular).

Early Semitic witnesses to our cultural beginnings saw that their neighbors had plucked some memes from the gods’ own tree of wisdom.

The memes that made us the rulers of the world are lethal, but they didn’t have a lethal effect ten thousand years ago—or five thousand or two thousand.

These memes come to us from all the speakers who are vocal wherever we happen to grow up—parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, teachers, preachers, bosses, co-workers, and everyone involved in producing things like textbooks, novels, comic books, movies, television shows, newspapers, magazines, internet sites, and so on.

All these people are constantly repeating to each other (and of course their children, their students, their employees, and so on) the memes they’ve received during their lifetime.

Our genes will not survive the death of our planet, a few billion years hence, and our memes have a much shorter life expectancy than that.

Among tribal peoples living undisturbed (as, for example, in the New World before the European incursion), the transmission of memes from generation to generation generally takes place with virtually perfect fidelity.

Nonetheless, there is a central core of culturally fundamental memes that we’ve been transmitting with total fidelity from the foundation of our culture ten thousand years ago to the present moment.

Identifying this core of fundamental memes isn’t very difficult, and it would have been done long ago if someone had thought of it.

The difference between us and them is that we possess (or are possessed by) a complex of memes that so far have utterly barred us from quitting.

We’re driven to cling to our hierarchical society by a complex of memes that tell us that what we have is unimprovable no matter how much we dislike it, no matter if it devastates the world and results in our own extinction.