Killing Memes

As a kid I mostly read nonfiction. Lies seemed, for the most part, a waste of time because they were poorly constructed and not reflective of things which could actually happen. The works of Arthur C. Clarke, however, were sufficiently well-constructed to satisfy the stringent standards of my youth. Looking back this is ironic because the actual 2001 was nothing like the book 2001. But in fiction one can encounter rational extrapolations of current trends and as yet unrealized possibilities. John Lennon sang about imagining a world with no religion, but Clarke wrote about it in The Songs of Distant Earth. In it robotic ships bring human life to other planets by growing people from embryos once a suitable environment has been prepared. The humans that grow up on these other worlds are tutored in every subject of human knowledge except religion. That meme which has been the root of so much human suffering is just left out. The book is about a particular planet that has lost contact with earth and developed successfully independently for a number of decades. In that period humans on earth refine intersteller travel to the point where they can travel between stars within a human lifetime. The first travellers to this lost planet are naturally a bit of a culture shock, but they try hard not to infect the planet with religion despite letting the occasional "god dammit" slip. At the time I was myself thoroughly infected with the Christianity meme, so the goal seemed like an ill-conceived one, but having since grown beyond that infection I have revisited the idea repeatedly. And I don't think total exclusion is a realistic strategy. We certainly didn't eradicate smallpox that way! I have found in my own experience with children that inoculation is far more effective. But how does one obtained a weakened strain of an idea? Well, a good portion of the success of religion memes is due to all the cultural reinforcers built into them: everyone in your social circle believes the same thing (humans tend to self sort socially on beliefs), there are ceremonies regularly throughout the year, holidays are recognized by businesses and the local government, etc. Thus any major world religion not practiced by a large portion of the local population will do. I have found Hinduism to be particularly effective in America. Then when children encounter the dominant strain of infection in your area they will naturally see the similarities among religions and the infectiousness of the meme will be nullified. But religions are probably unsustainable in places where they no longer have enforcement powers or special status granted by the local entity which exercises force. Imagine if that church downtown had to pay the same property taxes as the skyscraper next door. How long do you think the tithes of parishioners would sustain that bill? Imagine if disbelief wasn't punishable by death in countries where sharia law still holds sway. One of the great American innovations was the separation of church and state, at least nominally. (I live in a state where atheists still can't legally hold elected office, regardless of the fact that their election is unlikely.) Removing this synergy is one of the things that makes governments changeable in people's minds - they don't have a mandate from heaven to rule. But the government meme is a harder nut to crack. At its core, a government is an organization which initiates force. It steals and calls it taxes. It kills and calls it war. It assaults and calls it policing. The government meme is like Islam in country where sharia law holds sway. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental truth about all governments illustrated excellent by this comic Kim Dotcom posted the other day: What if everybody stopped paying their taxes? How would the government function? Well, the government meme naturally evolves reinforcers just like religions, but with the added bonus that they can use force. Governments can initiate violence to quell disbelief in government. That fundamental truth is scary enough to lead people to do many things they wouldn't otherwise do. Tax collection has been the main function of all governments throughout history, but just going up to people and taking their stuff is hard, i.e. expensive, work. The current system in the US is much easier on the government. Companies pay employees for their labor and they pay the government for the employees' labor, the sustaining fiction being that the employees' incomes are being taxed. This is known euphemistically as "withholding". Companies are in the business of making money, and so shareholders or business owners are unlikely to throw their money away destroying a company by making a political statement. Disobeying the government is a death sentence for a company, so any companies that resist just aren't around anymore. At the end of the day, taxation only succeeds if you can kill what you're taxing if it doesn't obey so that the others are afraid and do obey. Sharia law knows this, and so it requires the death of nonbelievers. By moving taxation to something they can kill (companies), modern governments have regained the same unfettered power to grow as their predecessors. Ayn Rand had an idea for killing the government meme she illustrated in Atlas Shrugged: stop participating in the economy. If a sufficient fraction of the people running the companies stop running those companies, the companies will stop making money and choke off the government that feeds on them. Destroying the world to save it is a bit too nihilistic for my taste though. Gandhi had another powerful idea: nonviolence. If we change our culture to make violence unacceptable then government will lose its main weapon. This is why government and the media companies which sustain it work so hard to enshrine violence as good and necessary. How many police and law dramas are there on TV today? Why are we constantly at war? The validity of government force must be continually justified by examples. So what idea can defeat an entity trying to equip every small town's police department with a tank? What is the cure for the government meme? I don't know. As long as stealing the product of someone else's labor is easier than producing it with one's own labor governments will have relatively stable equilibria to occupy. Revolutions can be useful to get rid of the evils of the current government, but they tend to only replace the old government with a new one. Take the Soviet Union for example. Their government meme was Communism, a particular brutal stable government which requires the mass murder of its citizens. All it took was one leader (Gorbachev) who was unwilling to initiate mass murder for a revolution to happen. But Russia then switched over the American model, allowing companies to form and then killing off the disobedient ones. The current Russian government meme still has a bit of the flavor of the old one though if you happen to own or run a large company. I have lately been toying with the idea that outlawry may be part of the cure. If enough people completely disregard government and exchange goods and services on the black market then that could choke off a government as well. There is significant personal risk in being undocumented in a police state though.