Meme-O-Graph

I haven't posted much lately for three reasons...

(1) I've been doing some arcane research pertaining to my rather mystical memetics and the notes are still in very raw form. I don't understand some of them myself.

(2) In addition to my cancer (which is, incidentally, an excellent example of a self-erasing replicator), I have several new health issues sapping my energy. On the plus side, I get to take Warfarin for the blood clot. It tickles my sense of humor to take rat poison as medicine.

(3) Although there are some regular readers of this blog, I get very few comments. This makes me wonder if they're human or just robotic crawlers enticing me to visit a scam site. I get a lot of those. Two of them successfully gave my computer a virus. Bravo, I guess.

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Although I hear a lot of talk about memetics, I rarely see it presented as a close and personal reality. It seems that most of the articles I read about memetics are written as if the author isn't affected by them — at least, not very much.

Do they think they're immune? Do they think memes only happen to other people?

In this blog I have often proposed that each of us is a confluence of influences and that “free will” is a misinterpretation of what actually occurs. But I'll admit that whenever I think deeply about this that my mind (okay, my ego) insists that certain famous people really have risen above the memes.

No, I'm not talking about Jesus or The Buddha or people like that — that's a different situation than the one I'm considering here. I'm talking about famous people like Leonidas, who brilliantly upset the plans of Persian emperor Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae. Surely such a person, upon whose actions history pivots, is above mere memes!  Or so argues my ego. But my rationality says no.

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My rationality can't seem to explain memetics to the rest of my mind, such that the knowledge becomes internalized. That would be a highly enlightening step forward, would it not?

Is there some way to represent these facts visually? I rarely see memeticists actually depicting the flow of memes throughout history. They just talk about memes. How about a nice little picture so we can see the Big Picture?

Well, okay! I've attempted to make such a picture, and here it is.

I apologize for using color instead of shapes to mark different elements. The meme-o-graph won't make as much sense to someone who is color-blind. If I do another I'll try using different shapes.

I've never before seen a flow chart like this! Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right places on the internet. 

If you study the chart you might wonder why I use the same color for both people and cultures. This is because they are all tsotls. In fact, all meme processing entities (as the chart calls them) are tsotls, though not all tsotls process memes.

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It was interesting making the chart, but even more interesting simplifying it. As I sought to line things up and make them tidy, avoiding crossed lines where possible, I found myself moving entire cultures within Microsoft Paint. (Yes, I still use that ancient program.) It might sound like dull work, but somehow it ended up being a kind of meditation.

I'd like to see more charts like this, done by other people, which show how people and cultures express their set of memes, as cogs of the meme machine that is humanity. Maybe, if it's presented clearly, people will go beyond merely talking about memes and start getting what they are about.

And by “they” I mean both the memes and the people.

Humans (and other animals) are more than meme robots, but there are memes that can make us serve them. If you want a chilling example of this, consider what it's like to live in North Korea these days. Then look around you. And within you. Do you think you're immune?