RE: virus: Reinventing the Justice meme

Richard Brodie (RBrodie@brodietech.com)
Fri, 12 Jul 1996 14:29:33 -0700


KMO wrote:

>Having said all that, I value justice for its own sake. I would rather
>live in a community of people who genuinely valued justice than in a
>society of rational egoists who behaved as if they valued justice.
>Even if
>I were at some disadvantage in the society that genuinely valued
>justice,
>I'd take that over the situation of living in a society that pays lip
>service to justice while seeking to maximize the advantages of a select
>few
>at the expense of the ignorant and the easily manipulated.
>
Two points:

1) As philosophers/theologians, let's not forget that the masses of
people do not go through the same painful moral questioning that we do.
Their morality is achieved for the most part through simple programming.
What memes do you want to program the masses with? Remember, if you
don't do it, someone/somevirus else will!

2) There is evolutionary pressure for diversity (that's why it's silly
to have these rah-rah campaigns in favor of diversity--it happens by
itself!). Realize that spreading a particular meme automatically
increases the fitness of competing memes. You'll never have a
homogeneous group of Americans all believing in Justice. The closer you
get to homogeneity, the more pressure there is for people to generate
Injustice, Rebellion, and Apathy memes (for example).

Richard

Richard Brodie RBrodie@brodietech.com +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
>