Burdens of Meaning

Epistemic status: riffing, partially vibes based, but seems very real to me.

Meanings and views can be harmful or at least burdensome to those receiving them. People, overwhelmingly in my circles, but perhaps very broadly in modern culture, are carrying a bewildering tangle of competing views, motivations, and felt responsibilities.

Memes are subject to selection pressures which are decorrelated with human flourishing and spiritual integrity. Cultures can become diseased, and perpetuate their disease indefinitely, or carry harmful patterns which are only partially functional. That said, it's not clear what "functional patterns" would mean in this context, in particular, there are many configurations of culture which are functional in the sense that they stably perpetuate a relatively robust society, even if they are needlessly costly to their members, or otherwise spiritually corrupted.

Indeed, this is part of the question which this book poses: what patterns, practices, and views are oriented towards truly wholesome and spiritually upright lives and cultures?

Sometimes these harmful patterns are deeply structural, but some are relatively coincidental, and decay or fizzle out given enough time, or contact with another culture. Eg., many cultures have beliefs about cleanliness re food, excrement, or especially sex and menstruation which are lost relatively rapidly upon contact with western norms (though often displaced by other harmful norms about cleanliness from western culture.) Often cultural contact stresses many of the basic patterns of social organization, so very saliently there are often major changes in the structure of family, economy, and political power during periods of intense cultural contact, both, yes, in the context of western colonialism¹ but also otherwise.

Spiritual practice, especially in styles adjacent to the trauma-healing-and-personal-growth memeplex, often has a very intense relationship with this dynamic. Sometimes practice and community are seen as explicitly oriented toward cultural change (whether insular or global), and very often they're seen as oriented towards personal freedom from dysfunctional, harmful, or spiritually depraved patterns culturally. These have various antecedents historically across cultures, and even the "shedding the insanity of the default culture" schtick seems to have been present well before the modern period, saliently in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra.^{2 3}

Practices and systems of belief which are meant to be comforting and liberating often transmit a memetic packet of very mixed spiritual integrity, at least from my perspective, and in general pairwise between most perspectives and any other. Often these are some coincidental hodgepodge which happens to have been reified by the tradition, but often the helpful and harmful qualities are interlocking, or two sides of one coin. Eg., many traditions of faith and devotion can provide both clarity of purpose and a relaxation of fear and anxiety, in the same motion as infantilizing their members and diminishing their capacity to think critically and with autonomy.⁴ Similarly, views meant to inspire discipline, rigor, and uprightness often use patterns of shame and internal self-abuse to achieve them, resulting in an obvious kind of lopsidedness among their practitioners.

Worse, from my perspective, many memes explicitly intended to be empowering or healing on net mostly just tangle a person further, rather than assisting them in untangling thoroughly. (I discuss this dynamic in much more detail in a later chapter.)

Memes don't necessarily form a coherent ecosystem. This is both because a culture's collection of memes isn't particularly well optimized, even in very small traditional cultures, and because in the modern memetic environment our minds are the competitive battlegrounds for many egregores and orphaned memes, which are not selected for being cooperative with one another inside of their hosts.

So, people end up with an incoherent mess of beliefs and feelings which are often tugging in every direction, and which may not admit any clear way to synthesize across them, to try to become sane, etc.

Many cultures have something to the effect of a "memetic immune system," which can help keep the roiling mess in check. However, most such immune systems, besides being only partially effective, are basically just conservative—the point here being that they are structured to protect the existing equilibrum, and are not oriented towards truth, wholesomeness, integration, etc. I discuss what I see as a desirable goal for practice in a later chapter as well.

By default however, with the weak and incomplete kinds of immune systems that most people learn, one ends up vulnerable to infectious agents which implant desires, prescriptions, and anxieties, without concern for their effects on their hosts or the hosts' communities. (Keep in mind of course that memes, like viruses, are incapable of malevolence, which of course doesn't render them harmless.)

There's a kind of sensitivity and care that's possible here, which, I'll claim, it's good to cultivate in interacting with others. While I think information per se is much more neutral (eg. just learning that a perspective exists, etc.), in general my stance is to try to track what the effects will be on a given person of some memetic packet I might send, and to try to be careful to what their goals and constraints are, even interacting casually.

I want to mark this claim explicitly, and I strongly endorse that you, dear reader, should do your own discernment here. To be clear, both this whole section and really the whole book are in some ways an intense memetic object, but, hopefully, they're oriented towards helping people unravel, and empowering their autonomy and discernment, on the whole.

Footnotes

1. Western colonialism is obviously extremely relevant to this discussion, and in many casess anthropologists and historians have had to do a lot of work to try to reconstruct what pre-colonial cultures were like, but this shape seems to be true of many other phases of contact in human history. ↩

2. Not to be confused with western neo-tantra, see a footnote in the section on awakening. ↩

3. Though, in a very different frame from the modern hippy one. ↩

4. Some people would disagree with this example at least in principle, and believe that faith, surrender, and devotion are possible with no epistemic content whatsoever. ↩