A friend of mine recently talked about how hard it is to get "me time" and how one gets all sorts of grief from others for this, and name-calling along the lines of "pathetic" and "anti-social" and such. I said this stems from some really basic memetic principles(1).
The first thing is that, as Susan Blackmore(1) points out, being quiet and apart from others does not spread memes, so memes for isolation and quiet contemplation will tend to be out-competed by yackity-yack memes. The second is a more "macro-memetic" concept, and that is that immunomemes will tend to spring up that result in the "bullying" of people who try to isolate for whatever reason.
These memes will assist whatever system they are a part of, since every "mind" that they can recruit by guilt and bullying out of a state of isolation and not spreading memes into a state where they a) become a host to more (yackity-yack) memes as well as a b) contagion vector for said memes, i.e., they carry them around and they meet up with other minds and infect them. Any immunomeme which manages to "recruit" a mind from a state of "contemplative isolation" to one of memetic involvement, by way of "bullying" the individual into a new behavior, garners potentially enormous advantages for the memetic system of which it is a part.
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(1) the reason why silence, while it may be golden, is as rare as hen's teeth is well-covered in Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine
模倣子 Memetics Essay Link to Memetic Index
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