The Meme Machine

THE ALTRUISM TRICK 169
memeplexes. Remember that the essence of any memeplex is that the memes
inside it can replicate better as part of the group than they can on their own.
Some simple ones will show the principle. For the first type we need to assume
that people want to be liked. This is part of the principle I have been following
that people imitate people they like more than people they do not. Imitating
people you like should be a good way to become liked yourself and being liked
should ensure that people are nicer to you.
Now, let us take some actions a parent might try to persuade a child to do,
such as keep clean, say please and thank you to Auntie Dawn, or stay a virgin
until after marriage. Why should children obey the instructions? They might
obey out of fear or coercion, but a common trick is to turn the instruction into
‘Good children keep their clothes clean’, ‘Nice people say please and thank
you’, or ‘Good girls don’t have sex before marriage’. These simple memeplexes
consist of just two parts; the instruction and the idea of being good. ‘People
won’t like you if you do that’ is another, as are hints that nice people vote
conservative, people like us eat dinner at eight, or kind people go to church.
More complicated memeplexes can build up around the kinds of altruism I
considered before, such as kindness to animals or recycling, and lots of other
memes can jump on board. The recycling symbol is a little scrap of information
that has been very successfully copied around the world. The names and logos
of all the charities are other examples, as are the collecting boxes that are rattled
in the street, the practices of having charity shops, of distributing special bags to
collect goods in, and many other activities that thrive in the world of charitable
giving. As memeplexes evolve and become more complicated, new niches are
created in which new kinds of meme can thrive. In the examples I have given
here, the spread of charitable giving opens up niches for all sorts of other memes
to thrive.
You can even sell music and fashions using altruism. Bob Geldof really did
give money to the starving in Africa but he sold millions of records at the same
time. Princess Diana’s memorial fund really is funding her charities but it is
spreading millions of Diana memes in the process – pictures, stories, personal
reminiscences, speculations and scandals, videos of her life and times, not to
mention the words and tune of Candle in the Wind.
These are simple examples, but they are sufficient to show that meme-driven
altruism is an obvious meme-trick ready for exploitation. It should not,
therefore, surprise us to find that many of the most powerful and widespread
memeplexes use it in various forms. Pre-eminent are the religions. One of the
mechanisms is simple, once you think about it memetically. A religion which