Meme Strategies for Replicating into Minds

In addition to the survival-oriented memes that are still with us, there are some more types of memes that don't seem to particularly help or hurt our survival, but by their very nature are fit to spread effectively-these are memes that are fit simply because they are variations on the idea Spread this meme:

- Tradition. A strategy-meme to continue what was done or believed in the past is automatically self-perpetuating. It doesn't matter whether the tradition is good or bad, important or irrelevant. Say you have two adult service clubs, the Kangaroo Club and the Slug Club. The Slug charter stresses tradition-conducting meetings on Saturday mornings, employing a little ritual of emptying the saltshakers before lunch, and so on; the Kangaroo charter stresses novelty and variety. In 20 years, the Slugs' tradition meme is still likely to be around, carrying with it the Meet Saturday morning meme and the Empty saltshaker meme. The Kangaroos' original memes will have died in the name of variety.

Once a tradition gets started, it automatically continues until something more powerful stops it. People infected with tradition memes are programmed to "repeat this meme in the future and spread this meme to future generations!" Traditions die hard.

- Evangelism. Any meme that explicitly involves spreading itself to other people has an added advantage over other memes. Evangelism is often combined with the mission meme, making it even more powerful. It makes little difference whether the thing being evangelized is true or false, good or bad; evangelism works so well that it has become one of the most prevalent memes on Earth. Evangelism tells us to "spread this meme as much as you can!"

Then there are memes that become entrenched in people's minds and are extremely resistant to attack:

- Faith. Any meme that entails believing in it blindly can never be dislodged from your belief system by any attack or argument. Combined with evangelism, faith makes for a powerful mindvirus envelope that can be stuffed with just about any content.

- Skepticism. Questioning new ideas is a defense against new memes. The opposite of faith, skepticism actually has a very similar effect on the mind programmed with it. Skeptics are resistant to new ideas just as the faithful are. A faithful and a skeptic can argue forever and never learn anything.

Other memes are fit because of the nature of communication. Imagine a group of people playing the game of "telephone." One player starts by whispering a sentence in the next player's ear. That player whispers whatever she hears to the next player, who continues the process until the message, usually garbled beyond recognition, finally makes its way back to the originator, who bursts out laughing at the way his message has evolved. This is meme evolution in a microcosm! What kinds of memes survive the ordeal?

- Familiarity. Unusual words or phrases quickly metamorphose into familiar ones: "pate de foie gras" might quickly become "putty defogger" in one game. The familiar spreads more quickly than the unfamiliar because people have distinction-memes for familiar things already and therefore notice them more.

- Making sense. Memes that make sense spread more quickly than ones that don't. People are quick to accept flawed explanations that make more sense over more accurate ones that are harder to understand. You see this happen all the time when famous quotations get distorted through evolution: does music have charms that soothe the savage beast or breast? Playwright William Congreve said the latter.

My favorite example of meme evolution through the universal game of "telephone" is Emerson's quotation from his essay Self Reliance: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." This one gets mangled so much that I even have a book, about quotations and facts commonly misquoted, that misquotes Emerson in its supposed correction!*

Emerson's quote points out the danger of falling into the Truth Trap. The hobgoblin of little minds-what keeps people from making the most of their lives-is allowing the random memetic programming you got since you were born to direct your life consistent with itself. Understanding memetics gives you a chance to look inside at what programs you are running and, if you choose, to reprogram yourself powerfully and consciously to point your life in whatever direction you desire.

The strategies memes use to promote themselves.