The Meme Machine

170 THE MEME MACHINE
persuades its followers to be more altruistic will spread because of the altruism
trick-.
I was once cycling in a park in Bristol when my bicycle chain fell off.
Before I could jump off to put it back two young men raced up to me, politely
offered help, expertly put the chain back on, and stood smiling kindly at me.
‘Thank you very much’, I said, feeling a little bewildered. For I had never seen
them before and I was not a ravishing sight in my Felix-the-cat bike helmet.
God was soon on their lips, quickly followed by Joseph Smith and Salt Lake
City. The Mormon faith is ably and deliberately spread by the altruism trick. It
doesn’t work on everyone, but it works well enough to keep the memes alive.
The altruism trick works like this. Take a political party, a religious sect, a
cult, a local benevolent society, or any complex belief system. Incorporate
within it the idea that its followers should do good works. These good works
will then make the followers more likeable and so people will copy them –
copying in the process all the other memes in the belief system. Of course, this
mechanism does involve actual ‘good works’, as did Geldof and Diana. Others
only give the appearance of doing good, or just persuade their followers to think
they are doing good. Others exploit the sense of obligation induced by giving
gifts – the proselyte does you a good turn, you now feel obligated to him, and
the obvious way to repay this obligation is to do what he wants, that is, to take
on his memes (or at least give the appearance of doing so). There are many
variations on this basic ‘altruism trick’. I will consider how some of them work,
as well as further implications of Allison’s (1992) beneficent norms, when
dealing in more detail with religions.
Note that this trick effectively makes people work for the memes they carry.
People who join the cults or adopt the ideologies give away their possessions, do
good works, or help others, because this helps copy the memes that have
infected them. Other people then copy them and they also begin to work for the
memes. This is one reason why memeplexes that use this trick have survived in
the past and why there are so many of them around now. This is the second time
we have met the idea of people working for their memes (the first was in relation
to sex and spreading memes rather than genes) and we will meet it again. In this
sense we can say that the memes are driving human behaviour.
If this seems frightening then we need to ask ourselves why. What does
drive human behaviour? Much of the antagonism towards Darwinism,
sociobiology, and indeed any science of human behaviour, stems from an
apparent desire to see ourselves as magical autonomous agents in charge of our
own destinies. I shall tackle the basis of this view later, but for now just say that