The Meme Machine

THE ULTIMATE MEMEPLEX 231
the Buddhist it is the root of human suffering. Either way it is an untruth. There
is no doubt that having a clear sense of identity, a positive self-image and good
self-esteem are associated with psychological health, but this is all about
comparing a positive sense of self with a negative one. When we ask what good
is done by having a sense of self at all, the answer is not obvious.
The selfplex
Memetics provides a new way of looking at the self. The self is a vast
memeplex – perhaps the most insidious and pervasive memeplex of all. I shall
call it the ‘selfplex’. The selfplex permeates all our experience and all our
thinking so that we are unable to see it clearly for what it is – a bunch of memes.
It comes about because our brains provide the ideal machinery on which to
construct it, and our society provides the selective environment in which it
thrives.
As we have seen, memeplexes are groups of memes that come together for
mutual advantage. The memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the
group than they would on their own. Once they have got together they form a
self-organising, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other
memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not. In a
purely informational sense a memeplex can be imagined as having a kind of
boundary or filter that divides it from the outside world. We have already
considered how religions, cults, and ideologies work as memeplexes; we can
now consider how the selfplex works.
Imagine two memes. The first concerns some esoteric points of astrology:
that the fire element in Leo indicates vitality and power, while Mars in the first
house indicates an aggressive personality, and transits of stars should be ignored
unless the aspect is a conjunction. The other meme is a personal belief – ‘I
believe that the fire element in Leo . . .’ Which meme will fare better in the
competition to get into as many brains, books and television programmes as
possible? The second will. A piece of information on its own may be passed on
if it is relevant to a particular conversation, or useful for some purpose, but it is
just as likely to be forgotten. On the other hand, people will press their beliefs
and opinions on other people for no very good reason at all and, on occasion,
fight very hard to convince others about them.
Take another example: the idea of sex differences in ability. As an abstract
idea (or isolated meme) this is unlikely to be a winner. But get it into the form ‘I