The Meme Machine

246 THE MEME MACHINE
of one’s children, one’s partners, and one’s friends. And the memes are
responsible for other kinds of sharing and caring. These behaviours will all still
go on whether or not there is a selfplex cluttering the mind up as well.
Indeed, the selfplex can be blamed for much of the trouble. By its very
nature the selfplex brings about self-recrimination, self-doubt, greed, anger, and
all sorts of destructive emotions. When there is no selfplex, there is no concern
about the future of my inner self – whether people like me or whether I did the
‘right’ thing or not – because there is no real ‘I’ to care about. This lack of selfconcern
means that you (the physical person) are free to notice other people
more. Compassion and empathy come naturally. It is easy to see what another
person needed or how to act in a given situation, if there is no concern about a
mythical self to get in the way. Perhaps the greater part of true morality is
simply stopping all the harm that we normally do, rather than taking on any
great and noble deeds; that is, the harm that comes from having a false sense of
self.
Memetics thus brings us to a new vision of how we might live our lives. We
can carry on our lives as most people do, under the illusion that there is a
persistent conscious self inside who is in charge, who is responsible for my
actions and who makes me me. Or we can live as human beings, body, brain,
and memes, living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and
environment, in the knowledge that that is all there is. Then we are no longer
victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free – not because
we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know
that there is no one to rebel.