Cultural Dogmatism
A while back in my evolutionary psychology class my teacher introduced the idea of memetics. This idea is so obscure my writing software is rejecting it via red underline. In any event the school of thought was extremely intriguing, and I hope to share it with you today as well as join the fight against cultural dogmatism.
In every biology class that is a biology class and has been a biology class since the great Charles Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection, such a theory is indoctrinated into the curriculum and ultimately subjects of the classes' heads. The overall idea can be summarized in a very simple manner. Nature is painted as an employer looking to hire those who can survive its many dangers. Selection occurs through the use of natural disasters, predators, sickness and anything else it can muster, ultimately unveiling who can brave all of the mentioned challenges presented by the ecological location an organism is located in. Those incapable either die or fail to pass their genes down to offspring via any form of reproduction. The result is the traits required to survive are passed down, continuing the battle against nature and those insignificant are pushed out of the gene pool. The main requirements for such a process to take place is a skewed ratio of low resources to high population and genetic diversity. From there the incompetence weeds itself out.
I breeze over this because I assume the majority of my readers are familiar with it, and I would rather spend time introducing new ideas to the system. This background will be sufficient to comprehend the rest of the article, but if you would like to read more, google is a search engine and you have a plethora of scholarly journals at your fingertips and a world of knowledge beneath your feet.
So what does this have to do with memetics? Take the overall framework of selection proposed in nature and plop it over humans and ideas. Now, think of humans as nature, sifting through ideas, theories and culture to find the ones most suited to take up space in your brain. By you reading this article you are already creating opinions about me, memetics and, save you deem it unworthy, may perpetuate them through sharing with your friends, discussing it with teachers and putting the same ideas I introduce here forward when opportunities arise. The alternative is you discard these ideas as preposterous, write me off as a supercilious teenager without a clue and move on with your life. Congratulations! Whether you like it or not, you just participated in idea selection and there is nothing you can do about it. This process happens every day! From music to pictures and memes all the way to presidential candidates, you are force fed ideas in classes, shared conspiracy theories with your radical libertarian friends and sift through everything taking it in based on your regulation process and standards you design.
This article will hopefully introduce a crazy idea which you could accept and drastically improve your ability to sift through all the information your glorious brain collects each day, ultimately benefiting the hive mind and the world as a whole by becoming a force of effective curating.
But first, lets talk about racism!
When we disregard humans because of their race, what we're doing is weeding possibly good people out of our lives because something intrinsically scares us about their differences, despite the fact that it has no correlation to their personal dichotomy, which is how you ought to judge them. Imagine how many humans, and packaged with them, ideas and values, the world could have destroyed due to such an unreasonable reason! By blocking something out because it's different, it holds back all the more important things that could have enhanced our lives and ultimately society as a whole.
This developed because back in the day, physical differences meant the organism in question most likely wasn't part of the group the observer was. The real correlation between violence and danger was a group system. Other clans of people were dangerous because they wanted to win, and put everyone else down. It was advantageous to be able to label others as out groups to justify unlimited violence against the perpetrators to gain an advantage evolutionarily. All other physical traits were just an indicator of whether or not this was the case. Think sports teams; where shirts, hats and vanity accessories are essentially skin color and such. Today however, it carries extremely negative impacts much less than it does help us resist meeting the sharp end of a knife.
Alright, now to the point. When discussing natural selection, I highlighted a major requirement for it to take place. Genetic Diversity. For nature to select, it needs choices. For us to accurately review and decide upon the best, there needs to be a lot of contestants. Any statistician knows that more sample size means more radicals in the data- good and bad. By stamping out ideas and cultural movements, we lower our choices and entrench an attitude that can be just as damaging as classic racism.
This behavior manifests itself in everything from hating any kind of political change to making fun of people who listen to Justin Bieber or play Pokemon. So fight it! Accept ideas, consider them deeply, accept that yours could be wrong and keep an open mind! Search out and discover everything, perpetuate even ideas you don't agree with to allow the scope of possibilities to widen with ever more options, increasing the worlds chances to find invent the best sort of itself it can be-
Just ask Charles Darwin about how ideas thrive in certain cultures better than others if you disagree.
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