The Meme Machine

42 THE MEME MACHINE
it up. Even when we are already thinking about something absolutely gripping
any other idea that is even more gripping may displace the first from its position,
improve its chance of getting passed on, and so increase the likelihood of
someone else being infected with it. On this view the practice of meditation is a
kind of mental weeding.
There are other analogies in the world of biology (although we must
remember they are only analogies). Take a forest, for example. In a forest every
tree has to compete for light, so genes for growing tall trunks will do well and
tend to spread in the gene pool, as all the trees carrying genes for shorter trunks
die out in the gloom below. In the end the forest will consist of trees that all
have the tallest trunks they can manage to create.
Who benefits? Not the trees. They have all invested enormous amounts of
energy into growing the trunks and are still competing with each other. There is
no way that they could come to a gentleman’s agreement not to bother with
trunks, for if some of them did, a cheat could always succeed by breaking the
pact. So forests are a common creation all over the planet. The beneficiary is
the successful gene, not the trees.
Returning to our poor overactive brains, we can ask again – who benefits?
The constant thinking does not apparently benefit our genes, and nor does it
make us happy. The point is that once memes have appeared the pressure to
keep thinking all the time is ineffable. With all this competition going on the
main casualty is a peaceful mind.
Of course, neither the genes nor the memes care about that – they are just
mindlessly replicating. They have no foresight and they could not plan
according to the consequences of their actions – even if they did care. We
should not expect them to have created a happy and relaxing life for us and
indeed they have not.
I have used this simple example to show the way in which I want to use
memetics to understand the human mind. Later I will use the same approach to
ask a closely related question – why do people talk so much? You may already
think the answer is obvious, but before we explore the many ramifications of
this one I want to add an important word of caution.
Not everything is a meme!
Not everything is a meme
Once you grasp the basic idea of memes it is all too easy to get carried away
with enthusiasm and to think of everything as a meme – to equate memes with
ideas, or thoughts, or beliefs, or the contents of consciousness, or anything you