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Memes and Outliers

 

Most people spend all their lives enacting memes (i.e. ideas) of their society without questioning them. And by most I mean almost all. At any given time, it is actually just a handful of individuals who introduce new memes that are radical and change civilization in a profound way. The rest of the populace just continue enacting these memes. 

And I was surprised to realize that almost all of these ideas/memes that dominate the lives of people have evolutionary origins i.e. they are memes that have as their basis evolutionary programming. e.g. below things dominate lives of almost everyone -

Food - which encompasses gathering, cooking, eating, restaurants etc.

Sex - which encompasses looks, appearance, attraction, social games, pursuit of sex etc.

resources - money which encompasses accumulation of wealth, jobs, working towards getting more money 

Family and friendships - forming social connections, staring a family, having children etc.

Violence/Conflict/Resource competition - wars, sports 

The only major meme that doesn't have evolutionary origins is the one below

Entertainment and Art - movies, theatre, plays, netflix, novels

and of course Religion and Culture

there is an interesting interplay between cultural memes and evolutionary ones - a lot of cultural memes, if you dig deep, have evolutionary roots. 

and even today, if one deviates from evolutionary memes, one is considered an outlier e.g. someone who chooses not to marry or not to have children or not to accumulate wealth, or not care about his social status. To me, this again just shows that we are barely at the start of progress in philosophy. For evolutionary memes were selected for one sole purpose (or 2 if one is to be exact) - natural and sexual selection on a genetic level. So in effect, compared to the knowledge we have, or the knowledge we could accumulate, these are crude ideas objectively speaking. And most human brains are still run by this crude evolutionary operating system, albeit the manifestations are different across cultures.





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