From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com)
Date: Wed 07 May 2003 - 21:25:05 GMT
Ted wrote:
"An article on Bigfoot in the latest issue of Skeptic (Volume 10, No. 1)
provides a perfect illustration of the difference between ideas and memes.
In "Big Foot, Bigger Hoax," Daniel Loxton presents the two faces of
Bigfoot. First there's prankster Ray Wallace, who appears to have
concocted the whole shaggy human story and kept it going for over forty
years. Then there's Bigfoot enthusiast Rene Dahinden, who died two years
ago, bitter and broke,never having seen the mysterious creature he spent
his life hunting.Wallace himself died last November, after which his son
announced, in an interview with the Seattle Times, "Ray L. Wallace was
Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." Michael Wallace revealed
the original strap-on alderwood feet that enabled his dad to produce fake
oversized footprints.
As Loxton observes, "while the Wallace family mourns the death of a
lovable prankster, reports of Bigfoot's demise have been greatly
exaggerated; indeed, Bigfoot is bigger now than he's been in years,
precisely because of those reports." Curiously, news of the hoax that
started it all has only fired up interest, triggering an increase in the
number of "sightings" reported in the Pacific Northwest.
For Ray Wallace, Bigfoot was an idea. In the late 1950s tales of "Yeti,"
a giant Himalayan humanoid, were circulating all over the world.
Wallace's idea was that a similar craze could be generated right here at
home by simply faking a few giant footsteps. He carved a pair of feet
and walked around on them at a construction site he was managing in
northern California. His idea circulated throughout the region as fellow
pranksters realized how simple it was to generate "Bigfoot" excitement in
their own hometown.
While the idea circulated, so did the meme. The Bigfoot meme propagated
so effectively because it exploited the all-too-human desire to believe
that our wild ancestor is somehow still alive somewhere, still roaming
free, not caged up and domesticated like us. Guilty at the thought that
we killed the "wildman" within, we project his image onto the forests and
mountains around us. On top of that, Rene Dahinden had another
motivation to believe. Since he had staked his reputation on the
authenticity of Bigfoot, the meme could maintain itself in his mind by
exploiting his pride.
Ideas are passive. They lack agency. It was human consciousness that
created the idea for Bigfoot, and this idea spread from one prankster to
another through normal conscious means. But before long the beast was
self-propagating among believers, based on its ability to exploit
unconscious desires. What is idea for one is meme for another.
Memes are ideas that take on their own agency. This is why the Bigfoot
myth only gets bigger when it's definitively demonstrated to be a fraud.
Memes don't depend on our capacity for rational thought. Any publicity,
no matter how bad, will help perpetuate them."
Ted
This isn't a bad bit of rationalizing. The idea of Bigfoot, consciously
created by fakers to draw tourism, generated what you are calling
the 'meme' of Bigfoot, the concept of a monster wandering in the
northwest forests which spreads because of psychological factors. I'd
call them both memes in a symbiotic relationship, much like idea of
promoting smoking for profit and the act of smoking itself. The meme of
promoting smoking for profit gathers strength from a conscious awareness
of its ability to cause the propogation of the smoking meme.
I don't agree that the subconscious elements of the 'bigfoot' meme give
it independent agency while the conscious elements of the 'fake bigfoot
to get tourists' mean that it is not. The act of spreading the 'bigfoot'
meme is still a conscious act whether one is aware of the psychological
elements enhancing its spread or not.
Ray Recchia
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