Memetics
A meme1 is a piece of cultural information, and memetics is their study. Memes include everything from written language, to manufacturing techniques, individual songs, and religious rituals.
Memes have properties that make them similar to organisms, in particular to a variety of species that require hosts. These include parasites, bacteria, viruses2 and even technically mitochondria. Host-dependent organisms may be helpful, harmful, or neutral to their hosts.
Memes reproduce, mutate, and are selected like ordinary biological organisms, though through different mechanisms. Memes are also subject to different selective pressures from biological organisms. Memes, of course, will die out if they don't reproduce. A meme's fitness is determined, among other things, by its transmissibility, persistence, the effects that it has on its host, and by how it competes with other memes in its niche.
Memetic survival and reproduction strategies
In particular, there are a number of strategies available to memes, like there are to biological host-dependent organisms:
- Gut microbiota are ~impossible to get rid of without modern antibiotics, and are helpful to the fitness of their hosts. They are usually transmitted by mothers to their children, and are about as resilient as their host populations are.
- Memes like "shoes" or "agriculture" or "money" probably belong here.
- Some kinds of infectious agents are endemic within a host species. This can either mean that most members of the species are infected for most of their lives (like HSV-1, which >50% of adults have) or that the agent moves around a larger population, being eliminated by individual members but often returning, like the common cold.
- The former is maybe comparable to superstitions, and the latter maybe some kinds of harmful dieting fads.
- Some kinds of infectious diseases often kill their hosts, but are highly transmissible, eg. bubonic plague, maybe less so COVID.
- Probably suicidal terrorism isn't really an instance of this?
There are more possible examples, but I don't want to strain the metaphor too much. In any case, the reproduction strategies and lifecycles of memes are varied and often not comparable to infectious organisms at all.
One interesting parallel with biological reproduction and memetic reproduction mechanisms is lateral gene transmission. Bacteria (among others) can share genetic material "laterally", not just asexually but between two living members of different species. Memes, and especially complexes of memes ("memeplexes") can integrate content from others, rather than by direct inheritance, eg. Doc Martens boots being created as a work boot and adopted as a punk fashion symbol, or traditional western militaries integrating strategies from insurgency movements. Besides lateral transmission, memes have other interesting kinds of reproduction and evolution, eg. memeplexes can merge with others, say in syncretic religious traditions.
Memes live in, or run on, human minds. They feed off of mental and emotional energy, and they compete with other memes for attention, or "mindspace."
Many memes can coexist, both in a single human mind and in a larger culture, and often exist in a kind of ecology. A "memetic monoculture" would die very quickly, a human culture can't consist singularly of weaving baskets, people need a reasonably large collection of practices, skills, relationships, and institutions to survive.
Below are some important kinds of memetic competition. Memes will starve or die out, if:
- they can't feed, meaning that their individual hosts stop practicing them or remembering them
- eg., traditional crafts dying out, or secularism eroding religion
- their lineal transmission is stifled, hampered, or forbidden
- eg., children no longer wanting to learn a minority language, or a practice becoming illegal or taboo
- they explicitly conflict with other memes
- though, this can go different ways, and sometimes conflict can be energizing and sustaining
Egregores
The term egregore1 is used to refer to super-organisms or collective entities formed of many people. Egregores form when people see themselves and their community (understood broadly) as a cohesive identity, capable of collective action and needing protection. These can include religions, ethnic groups, corporations, social movements, etc. Egregores can often overlap with others, or might be contained completely within another larger one.
Egregores can be seen as eusocial memetic superorganisms
The metaphor here goes as follows: multicellular organisms contain separate cells with their own metabolic structures cooperating to form tissues, then organs organs, and a larger organism. In particular, most individual cells are not gametes, and individually their direct lineage will end when the entire organism dies, regardless of if the organism successfully reproduced. Then, eusocial species (like bees) form large cooperative colonies where most individual members (workers) do not reproduce, even if the colony is successful and propagates.
Then extended further, egregores are like eusocial colonies of memes, not composed exactly of the human hosts, but composed of memes and existing in the collective mind-space of humans. Similarly to cells and worker bees, the memes will shift around, die, and be replaced, even while the larger super-organism (the egregore) keeps going, surviving both all of the individual human hosts and the memetic cells.
cell:multicellular organism::eusocial individual:eusocial colony::meme:egregore
Egregores are mostly "immortal" (in the biological sense, technically "non-senescent"), and like individual memes they can reproduce "laterally," as well as merging with other egregores. They do sometimes experience mitosis, but they don't usually reproduce sexually.
Egregores having something of their own identity, and "want" to persist, often despite the consequences for their host members, eg. stereotypical harmful cults. Egregores and can slough off both component memes, and sometimes hosts. Sometimes these are flushed out like dead cells, but egregores can actually use controlled cellular death to strengthen the larger organism—almost every religion has its martyrs.
In an extreme form of this, egregores can often "outlive" whatever nominal organizing principles they represented at the time of their founding. Very common and powerful egregores in modern times are those constructed in terms of some ideology or religion, but often those egregores can persist despite an almost complete change in the contents of the ideology, whether by hostile takeover or by drift. An egregore can also sometimes persist through a complete turnover of its (human) members.
Nontheless, egregores are still usually at least moderately cooperative with their hosts, and many are quite positive. In any case the basic pattern seems to be necessary for human survival and reproduction, unlike mostly solitary species like bears or spiders.
It's important to note that egregores don't need a particularly "coherent" ideology to function, and likely in the ancestral environment, and still in some parts of the world, egregores were structured mostly around kinship and diffuse communal recognition, without need for an ideology to justify them. A lot of the content and structure of ideologies has more to do with sustaining an egregore than being particularly adaptive beyond the functioning of the egregore, let alone "right" or "true." A particular shape of society often has some kind of homeostatic property to persist in that shape, among other things because on average it has been selected for to have such properties, and those that didn't have died out rapidly.
For better and for worse
Broadly speaking, both memes and egregores are selected for (as in, differentially survive and reproduce) having properties that do not need to be closely aligned with our values personally or communally. Smallpox could persist for millenia despite being an obvious drag on productivity and wellbeing, but remained endemic until the development of modern vaccionology.
More specifically, because memes and egregores "live in" or "run on" human minds, they can leverage all sorts of patterns of belief and feeling to justify (and protect) themselves. These justifications neither need to be aligned with the effects of those memes on their hosts, nor again even "true" or coherent. In particular, often the contents of a metaphysical system, or individual metaphysical claims, are part of the buttresses and defense mechanisms of memes and egregores.
The fitness or persistance of a meme does not necessarily have much to do with its wholesomeness or helpfulness for its human hosts.
A meme, memeplex, or egregore can't be too toxic for its hosts, lest it die off with them, but like many endemic infections it can be a major burden on the health and wellbeing of the host species while still allowing them to carry on. Sometimes this kind of burden can be seen as a kind of "excess" or "miscalibration", but often the toxic effects of infectious agents are part and parcel of their reproductive strategy (both for biological organisms and memetic ones).