The Meme Machine

184 THE MEME MACHINE
prone to it than disbelievers (Blackmore and Troscianko 1985). Similar
arguments apply to the memeplexes associated with clairvoyance, palmistry,
Feng Shui, divination with pendulums, and dowsing with twigs. Literally
thousands of experiments have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that
the claims of astrology are false (Dean et al. 1996) and yet one-quarter of
American adults believe in the basic tenets of astrology and 10 per cent read an
astrology column regularly (Gallup and Newport 1991). I think these disturbing
facts are better explained in terms of the power of the memes to replicate
themselves than by writing off so many people as simply stupid, ignorant or
gullible.
Note the powerful use of the altruism trick in some New Age phenomena.
Crystals imbued with special powers are created to help you; the ancient
Egyptian food supplement will improve your life and fill you with natural
vitality; a consultation with the colour therapist will harmonise your energies
with the universe. The psychic is a spiritual person who is there only to help
you (and does not really want to charge a fee). In fact, these methods of
divination are just ways of appearing to see the future or read a person’s mind,
but they are routinely associated with goodness, love, compassion, and
spirituality. ‘We rarely ask the obvious question – what is ‘spiritual’ about
astrology or a crystal ball? There is no obvious answer and yet these methods
trade on that association. Bookshops categorise them all as ‘Mind, Body and
Spirit’. This is not good news for true compassion or spirituality. It is very
good news for the moneymaking memes of the New Age.
I have deliberately chosen to tackle what some people might consider to be
the most trivial memeplexes first. They may be trivial but they exert
phenomenal power in modern society and are responsible for the movements of
vast amounts of money. They shape the way we think about ourselves and,
perhaps most importantly, they cause many people to believe things that are
demonstrably false. Anything that can do all this deserves to be understood.
The stakes are even greater when it comes to alternative medicine and the sale of
ineffective therapies.
The sale of health
One survey estimated that every year Americans make 425 million visits to
providers of unconventional therapy, spending over 13 billion dollars, and that
50 per cent of Americans use such therapies (Eisenberg et al. 1993). Often
alternative or complementary medicine is more narrowly defined, lower