The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Macromemetics Index
I thought that Dr. MLK said that, but maybe he just quoted it.
There's truth and falsehood in that statement. If bullies are active, which is usually after they've been let to have their way for too long and it's already too late, then good men and women may need to rise up and actively oppose them.
When war breaks out, it's usually after diplomacy has been sitting on its hands or failing otherwise for already a long time.
This is something I've discovered in my memetic research and experiments, which perhaps you dismiss, but there it is.
1. Bullies require a lot of participation from the greater society (The People) in order to accomplish their ends. Even if it's just their votes, or even just their silence, and by that I usually mean their tacit approval.
2. This works because The People have no ready response other than tacit (or explicit) agreement and support for the bully. Bullies depend on The People's default response, or their easiest response, their most memetically resonant response, to be helpful to them, to let them get away with it.
3. This is where memetic design and engineering comes in. It doesn't matter if it actually does anything, or accomplishes a specific goal "against" the bullies, so long as it's something The People can do. Make some memes that are not the bullies memes, even wearing a baseball cap on backwards or saying "I'd buy that for a dollar!" or "How 'bout those Knicks?" or "Who is John Galt?" This needs kind of a deep dive into Macromemetic theory, but it produces the desired results.
4. Why? The project of any movement is to ultimately get people to enact its memes, in some cases, breaking the windows of and dragging out of the homes a targeted group of people, in other cases denouncing them, taking their stuff and sending them off to prison, to march in parades, to make it so that the only thing people are allowed to say or do or wear is what the movement allows, and obviously this mostly has to be enforced by the bullying activity of their neighbors (since the police and the army are too few, and can only make examples of some).
5. This is a memetic victory, and the answer is not "education." The answer is to make it more comfortable, and by that more choice, easier choice, guarantee of positive non-bullying response from one's neighbors, choice of memes that one can enact, and not get in trouble, have others like one, and so on. Satirists, in plays, cartoons, and prose and poetry, accomplish this by resonating with their audience, which ideally is the good guys (the choir who need no preaching) and the bad guys (who are thoroughly inered, but are still susceptible to well-targeted memes).
6. A pet rock, an orange T-shirt, a catchy phrase or logo, are all MIAOs which can serve as attachment points for memes that undermine an evil movement, by starving it in two ways:
6.1. Linking as many established memes away from the evil memeplex. Evil movements want to co-opt religion, cultural iconography, tradition (this is literally the definition of fascism) and add their own memes on top of it, and effectively do evil things like steal, hurt and kill people, start wars, etc. By actively working to link these memes elsewhere, they are thwarted. Imagine having a "Jesus-fest" in East City Park that actively excludes or mocks the tenets of a fascist group trying to gain power, and establishes its own. 5% of people fund it and help to run it, 95% just show up for food, music, reading of the Beatitudes, some jokes and images and T-shirts and such. This sort of thing actually works (I've conducted experiments), even in the teeth of resistance, indifference, apathy, and even predilection towards the evil group's ideology.
6.2. Packing the memespace is a fairly basic memetic engineering technique and one which you see time and again in marketing and political campaigns (although often crudely and "accidentally" applied). A memetic fabric (the collections of brains involved -- to put it succinctly) can only contain so many (active) memes at a time. If your memetic system contains a lot of memes that all work together and can and are adopted by the memetic cohort (group of memetically connected people) then other memes are starved out or have no opportunity to enter. Hence, it doesn't matter what people are doing, as long as it links together and they keep doing it more than whatever the enemy wants them to do.
7. "Education" and the reliance on spirituality, religion, jurisprudence, and so on are, theoretically (and I never thought of this before right now), an immunomemeplex which contributes to the conservative nature of society. This is kind of a deep dive into immunomemetics, since it is the 1st Law of Immunomemetics, i.e., Any stable memetic system necessarily has an immunomemetic system inside it, keeping it from changing too much, getting "memetic cancer" or whatever, in other words, a "conservative" force.
7.1. "Kids need to learn the Truth" whether it's about quantum mechanics or math or the mysteries of the Holy Trinity in Christianity, or they need to learn to be good people, is all just immunomemetics, and injection of permissible bullying opportunities that serve the long-term stability of society (a.k.a. the memetic fabric and it's attendant stable memetic inventory). "Good people" were murdering black people and gay people for centuries, and only starting to stop...in the...well, last week, maybe, as far as I can tell. The MIAO of "Truth" and "goodness" is just something that a bunch of random memes attach to, many of them action memes involving killing and torturing certain, different people and doing things which if looked at "logically" or "objectively" would be considered very wrong, and the practitioner very hypocritical.
7.2. Again, it's all about bullying. Bullies subvert the memetic system, and skirt the immunomemetic systems designed to prevent radical change, preserve stability of the society. The fascists and the communists and their imitators and admirers have all weaponized education and religion and the courts to serve their ends. The idea that "yes, but, we're going to do education (and religion) right" is pure self-delusion. To try to change a "bad system" through education or religion is akin to trying to heal a sick body by taking control of one of its sick organs, and still worse, one of the organs whose stated purpose is to prevent the system from changing. Oh yeah, cherry on top, a sub-immunomemeplex inside the "education" immunomemeplex is that "education is the solution for everything" (that sort of Russian doll nesting happens everywhere, by the way).
8. It's very ACA/AA in the end. Memetic Design and Engineering teaches us to let go of all ideas about "intent" or "thinking" and focus on what people are doing and saying, and what they might be able to do and say. What do we say in AA? "Go to a meeting." "Keep going until you start to want to, then keep going." "Get a sponsor." "Read the literature." "Eventually you'll start to understand what we're talking about." "Keep coming back." NONE of these involves strategizing how I'm going to recover, in fact, we smile at such a sally (I love that one!). "Don't ask WHY it works, just ask HOW it works, and do it." I feel desperate and cornered -- what can I do? I can do the dishes and go to a meeting. Do I think it will help? HELL NO! Can I do it? Yes, I can. Is it drinking? No, it isn't. Okay, that plan will accomplish a useful objective.
8.1. Besides, and this is very Macromemetic as well, if I KNEW that something would work, and thought I could understand how, I would deliberately not do it (this goes for Buddhists as well, by the way). Going to meetings, reading literature, getting a sponsor are of course contagion vectors for memetic injection, obviously.
8.2. Finally, we see how "getting the person to do something that furthers our memetic system is good, and necessarily undermines whichever other memeplex is out there." For AAs, it's drinking and hanging out with other problem drinkers. For fascists, it's not kicking in windows, not voting for fascists, not marching with other fascists and going to rallys, and not saying and doing other fascist stuff.
9. So, yeah, education and religion, in theory they are just conservative forces within a cultural system, as opposed to a force for change (that the shop-worn homily "what we need is more education/religion" exists is ringing testimony thereto). As far as "Good men need only do nothing" goes, if you recognize it early enough (like the laws in post-Nazi Germany allow, i.e., certain ideologies are simply illegal now), "The best thing is for Good Men to do something else" (which may be nothing) and to get as many others to do the same -- by making it a more attractive option.
10. So yeah, if I want a kid to have a happy life, be able to do what they love and get paid enough for it, to be able to play the piano, understand the Universe, by all means educate them. Ethics is a valid thing to teach them, however, it's been shown that ethics students tend to score below average on actual ethical behavior, to take just one example. "Education is the answer" is a member meme of the education immunomemeplex, as often as not deployed by those who don't believe in it, don't practice it themselves, don't have an idea of what it might look like, or how to "reform" it. It does resonate with practically everybody, however. Pol Pot is a rare example of somebody actually throwing it completely out the window.
Macromemetically yours,
Jay
PS: A lot of Gandhi's approach was "non-cooperation." A very macromemetic approach, of course (a lot of his strategies inform my theories). The bullies depend on you to do most of it for them, and bring your own place setting, buy your own cotton back spun and woven in Manchester mills, and to bully other Indians into participating, and when a large number of people stop doing that, make their own salt, make and wear khaddar (homespun), the colonial megamemeplex simply ceases to function, and unless the colonizer actually comes out in force, nobody gets hurt. And if people getting hurt still doesn't get things going again, there is nowhere left to turn.
The nonviolence of Gandhi, like that of the civil rights activists, affirmed a unity of peaceful ends and means. Thomas Merton, reflecting on Gandhi’s nonviolence, wrote:
Non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people from foreign rule . . . the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action . . . is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved. [1]
Training in nonviolence helps us admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.
Authentic spirituality is always first about you—about allowing your own heart and mind to be changed. It’s about getting your own who right. Who is it that is doing the perceiving? Is it your illusory, separate, false self; or is it your True Self, who you are in God?
As Thomas Keating said:
We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. So love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Love is all; not [love as] sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest.
From: Center for Action and Contemplation <Meditations@cac.org>
Date: July 25, 2020 at 11:12:52 PM PDT
Subject: Richard Rohr Meditation: Inner Unity
Reply-To: Meditations@cac.orgThe nonviolence of Gandhi, like that of the civil rights activists, affirmed a unity of peaceful ends and means. Thomas Merton, reflecting on Gandhi’s nonviolence, wrote:
Non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people from foreign rule . . . the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action . . . is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved. [1]
Training in nonviolence helps us admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.
Authentic spirituality is always first about you—about allowing your own heart and mind to be changed. It’s about getting your own who right. Who is it that is doing the perceiving? Is it your illusory, separate, false self; or is it your True Self, who you are in God?
As Thomas Keating said:
We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. So love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Love is all; not [love as] sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest.
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