Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19980326110739.007a0a60@pop.netaddress.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 11:07:39 +0100
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Josip Pajk <j.p.pajk@usa.net>
Subject: Re: memetic engineering and superstition
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980325145636.28788B-100000@grumpy.oswego.edu
>>We memeticists seek to liberate society from blind cultural evolution.<<
But evolution IS blind, and, as someone said, "Nature is a fair-player".
The rules of the game are the same from the begining of time until now. We
are now in the position of changing this rules. Are we "fit" enough to do so?
>>Some destruction of our environment was a side-effect of defective
memetic structures, but Science slowly corrects this debt through research
not only in unintrusive methods of production, but in research on how
technology can be valuably synthesized with nature.<<
Valuably for WHO? Nature or technology? Technology is only a bad copy of
Nature. What is the point of "synthesizing" it with Nature? Is it not
better to "engineer" technology in such a way to be "coexistive" with Nature?
>>Politics at best functions to keep ecological research going and to
encourage implementation.<<
Politics functions only for the sake of keeping itself in the leading
(control) position. Encouraging ecological researches and their
implementation is only a "marketing" method for gaining votes, until it
finds a more appropriate (marketable) "enemy".
>>Their cultural behavior and world-view were reciprocally motivated and
mutually justifying:<<
Exactly. It was true for the Aztecs, and is true even today. The name of
the game is "I (the controller) am the only one who can save you from
yourself", because you cannot understand what is going on here. Fortunately
as Alfred Lang wrote:
>>The tracks or grooved ways are something good; but if nobody were willing
to walk besides the tracks, we would know little of the world.<<
It is OK while we are only walking and sightseeing and trying to UNDERSTAND
the countryside besides the tracks. The problems arise when we start to
build and "synthesize" our engineered structures in it.
>>The memetic structure of education adapts to the memetic structure of
individuals's consciousnesses. This is a perfect example of memetic
engineering. By actually understanding people and understanding
institutions we improve them.<<
Education is only the mean for the forced integration of individuals in a
particular society or group. If the individual does not follow the
educational "grooved ways" it is punished with bad grades. I believe that
education is more adaptation of the individual`s memetic structure to the
educational one that, as you state, the reverse. You can improve
institutions (by improving the people who guide them?), but how can you
improve people if they don`t want to be improved. Are today native American
Indians maybe improved comparing with their social state before the
continent was discovered by technologically more "evolved" (rational,
conscious) people.
Josip
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