模倣子 Religion Controls the Memetic Big Other

 

Memetic Glossary 

It may be true that human beings are memetically predisposed to, or are even "forced" to, sense the presence of a "Big Other," which could be loosely described as "what (all) other people think of me," or more to the point, "what will other people (as well as I can guess) do in response to any of my own possible hypothetical actions or inactions?" The (macro)memetic take is that this is all that humans really do, all the time, i.e., strategize our place in society, our action-response relation to others. If one does not accept that basic macromemetic premise, then the following may make little sense, but here goes... We can each model about two hundred other individuals (Dunbar number) in our brains, which allows us to control the anxiety to do with those relationships, and after that it's just "Society" that confronts us. Religion, i.e., a codified set of beliefs and "laws" and a narrative, a story, about our, and our people's, relationship to a God, or gods, or the metaphysical explanation of what supposedly lies behind the natural world, may be less like the project of Science, i.e., to "understand" the world, ultimately to provide useful source material for endeavors such as Engineering and Public Policy which seek to construct complex systems that actually "work" or solve problems in the material world, and more one of bridling, controlling the scope and power of, systematizing, attaching well-marked, well-closed memeplexes to, this innate, inchoate-yet-overwhelming sense of a Big Other that all humans feel as a direct result of our nature as meme-exchanging beings, or innate drive and need to socialize. So if this line of reasoning is true, then the creation of religion with all its minutia and mythology and arbitrariness, and ultimate metaphysical irrationality and disconnect from the vision of scientific inquiry might be seen as a kind of "we HAVE to build a nuclear fission bomb NOW so that nobody build a hydrogen bomb later." Probably a really bad analogy, and I would welcome anybody's coming up with a better one. Religions are obviously memeplexes, and behave like large systems of viruses. But religions competing with one another? What does that look like, memetically? It seems to have a lot to do with things like "who has the coolest hats?" but it's probably to do with which solves the roping in the Big Other problem most efficiently and other such. With memeplexes, it's often the ones with the most outward complexity, but which below the surface have the most economical memetic transactions, and this usually has to do with how well-marked and well-closed the memes in question are, and also the effectiveness of the pairing between "logical" and "illogical" memes. Religions don't have to be rational or logical (duh) but it's still a good idea to occasionally pair the nutty dogma with stuff that actually works.