2015-10-15

模倣子 The Memetics of Intergenerational Abuse and Genocide

I was talking with a buddy this morning about my theories about intergenerational abuse and genocide (and racism and sexism, which are kind of separate) and how they relate to imitation and memetics.  I think I need to write up an essay on that one.  Actually the "battle between the sexes" is theoretically related to intergenerational abuse and genocide for the same reasons, i.e., non-reciprocal memetic resonance. Mommy gets to abuse the kiddies, but the kiddies cannot abuse mommy in return, so the act of imitating the received behavior cannot be completed until the kiddies grow up, and typically have their own children, and then they can complete the circuit by playing the role of the abuser, in a way to "understand" both sides of the action, which is what the imitator brain does.  I see you juggling, I visualize what your body is doing, through a kind of empathy derived from the Dunbar Number and its attendant concept of "group/tribal mass empathy", and then I perform the action myself.  I get the "memetic reward" once I successfully imitate you, once I'm doing what you did and the pins are staying in the air.  By the same token, a people who have been the victims of genocide will, theoretically, carry out the same kinds of actions on another people who are subject to them when they get the chance.  It's like the Joni Mitchell song, if you will, i.e., "Both Sides Now", to paraphrase,

I've looked at intergenerational abuse from both sides now
From parent to child, and still somehow
Until the child abuses he can't feel it all
If being the victim is all he knows
And he hasn't imitated the abuser role
He doesn't know intergenerational abuse at all

I've looked at genocide from both sides now
I have to find meaning in it all
The camps, death marches, and feeling small
Until I imitate the perpetrator role
I really don't know genocide at all

I can't look at gender from both sides now
Nature chooses, win or lose, and so it goes
The fears, the pains one never knows
Envy of imagined joys just grows and grows
The eternal other you must deprecate
Is deöbjectification even possible at all?

I need a term.  Could be "thwarted memetic reward", "non-reciprocal memetic reward", or "deferred memetic reward" (maybe I like the third one best -- what do you think?). Maybe even "displaced memetic reward"? That's pretty good, no? Or "delayed memetic reward"? But that kind of implies that the memetic reward will be collected at some point.  Still, maybe...

Talk with you soon!  I may have time this weekend to embark on this Sex and the City memetic network analysis.  I'm getting really curious about what I might turn up

1 comment:

  1. This may have been before I settled on the term "residual memetic debt" which is what I use now.

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