Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 10:12:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jon Cortmaior <jcort@us.itd.umich.edu>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Memes and Morality
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970611164115.0068d964@dingo.cc.uq.edu.au>
On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Paul C wrote:
> Timothy wrote:
> >
> >To say that the "memes* made me do it is, as Robin Wood pointed out, a sort
> >of Nuremburg trial defense from the Nazis. Thus, McVeigh -- the character
> >who seems to have planted the Oklahoma City truck bomb -- *could* claim
> >that he is innocent, because "the memes" seized control of his mind. And
> >now we reach the central point.
.....etc.etc.
> meme would mean it would not be able to be passed on to future "generations".
> In McVeigh's case it seems his defective memetic code may be erased from
> the meme pool permanently.
I don't want to start a big argument about how evil the us military is...but...
it might happen anyway.
One thing we might want to remember when considering MvVeigh's "morality"
and motivations, is that he was in the armed forces. What does the US military
teach? It teaches that the most powerful way to convince people that your
ideology is the right one. He spent 4 (maybe more?) years in the army (if I
recall correctly), served in Desert Storm and was highly decorated...he was
_very_ good at what the army taught him how to do...which was _kill_ in the
name of things you believe in. My point? When you question whether or not
the memetic code that he was following was "defective" you have to question
where he got it...ie. the military, which isn't to say that whatever ideas
(memes, I mean) that he had planned on spreading weren't defective...
I'm more than a little tired right now, so I'm wording this as well as I'd
like to, but I think my gist is clear....
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Jonathon Cortmaior jcort@umich.edu www.umich.edu/~jcort
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