Friday, August 28, 2015

Introduction: The Meme What and Why We Are


The following is a treatise to analyze the underpinnings of sociological consensus rooted in the evolution of human consciousness to better understand the rules the empowered use and will use to perpetuate dominance to uncover what we are.  The treatise utilizes the biblical Decalogue and the meme at its root as a popular dominant playbook to decipher the structures of social decision making cascading across humanity for one human’s best attempt at a metaphysical interpretation of why we do what we do.  (A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.)  Each old testament commandment is stated in truncated veiled catechetical format followed by a more specific scriptural account.  These traditional legalities will be juxtaposed with a single word capturing the essence of what the original commandment pertains. 

This treatise is one flawed human’s small offering to decipher at least part of what the universe might be by interconnecting the Ten Commandments, which is used as an apex example of a well-known system of social and cultural constructs implemented by humans to shield humans from the reality that humans are no different than animals and see behind the veil of what we are.  We are no different than anything in the universe, living, inanimate, particle or energy.  We are all interconnected and in this we are not special because we are the same, merely an arrangement that for purposes of this treatise is stated as we are no different than animals. 

Other cultural examples of fundamentalist texts or legal superstructures exist which serve similar function as the Bible’s Ten Commandments, namely the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Buddha’s Noble Truths; however for the purposes of this treatise the Ten Commandments will be used as the primary example with others mixed where the limited knowledge of the author allows flirtation.  Some of the basic premise in ways goes back to Democritus 400 B.C. an Ionian with atomism and Aristarchus 300 B.C.  Other parts are an extension of science unmasking god in questions posed in the early 1600’s by Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes to Newton to Rousseau to Paine and Hume moving into the 1700’s to Kierkegaard to Darwin in the 1800’s to Freud to Jung to Einstein  in the 1900’s to Dawkins, Barthes, Derrida, and Hawking etc. in the modern era.  None of this is new merely a common continuing journey. 

The words are Socratic to prosper criticism and discussion, not dogma or absolutism, merely suggestions to prompt open discourse about human behavior and existential purposes layered in our behavior.  There is hope by seeing our similarity to, rather than elevated superiority over our animal nature that we can be closer to what our bond with the universe might be.  

In the end these are just one man’s thoughts standing on shoulders of books and voices, not saying this is right, but what the limited perspective of individuality in a blip of a life has shown to this individual.  I think as humans we all take a stab at trying to figure out what this all is; what are we doing here; existential crayon basics laughing that maybe 42 makes as much sense as anything.  That process shifts with age, this is where I am at now; so please do not take it too seriously.  If it leads you somewhere or prompts discussion or change, great; that is about it.  No one knows.  Hard data is presented where I have found it in the books of smarter humans than me who seemed to go through a formal citation process; do your own research and most of all continue to think for yourself and laugh. 

Humans choose the Meme in order to install a social hierarchy so that humans can live in consistent coordinated coexistent societies (rather than as singular vagabonds killing, stealing, and deceiving each other when convenient) for the long-term benefit of the species.  The Meme on the most rudimentary level is born from a complex-being’s fear of death inside the self. 

The treatise intends to point out the myriad of human decision making trees that serve to protect this “Humans-are-not-Animals” meme (the Meme), identify the detriments and benefits to society created by the Meme, and consider the potential ramifications on the mental evolution of humans if this meme was reduced to lower thresholds by exploring religious, economic, political, and psychological aspects.

This piece is intended to extract the pith of psychological manipulation in each numerated Commandment in the long-standing addendum to people influenced by the bible as an extension of the Pentateuch and reexamine the benefits and detriments of the content, phrasing, and consequences upon our planet.  The single-worded headers are intended to convey a neo-Decalogue of internal commandments generating not out of what one is commanded by an external authority, but by what one understands inherently by being a complex life-form and therefore abides and carries out rationally, logically, and willingly under a comprehensive autonomous station of volition.  A better understanding of these core psychological concepts and how each relates to wielding our volition represents a path to usurp human-hunger for the Humans-are-not-Animals meme.

The commandments will be shown for why they are connected to the central Humans-are-not-Animals meme.  The treatise will show how the Meme is so successful as it attempts to keep humans out of chaos and disobey the laws of the atomic universe by reducing entropy.  This treatise attempts to show that it is this violation of natural entropy that explains why the Meme cannot ultimately be sustained.  We are ordered machines designed to manufacture entropy.  Repressing this natural dissipation of ordered energy goes against the nature of the universe.  Heat must be free to release.  Beings must be free to choose. 

This violation of natural entropy may lead to humans accelerating human extinction if the Meme is not recognized for what it is if humans do not elect an alternative dominant meme based on empathy that universally acknowledges the fallacy of the first meme that can serve as a substitute to communicate human interconnection absent fundamentalism placing faith in volition and how we choose rather than the Meme or an idea of a theist’s god.  If we can begin to understand what choice is, the role choice plays in the atomic and in the journey/universe beyond the atomic we can then see what we are.

The treatise is an extension of many pieces I have read or been exposed.  Foundationally I encourage one to read Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion as a starting point for much of the framework of the psychological discussion included into the context of religion’s role in the psychology of humans.  This treatise hopes to continue large elements of the discussion held in that brief but powerful text. 

The treatise often presents humans in roles manipulating and being manipulated.  This manipulation is most often subconscious through vast historical infrastructures of self-identity and social standing imprinted by humanity upon ourselves.  There is no monster, only ideas which we either choose to believe or not. 

The treatise delves into the most dangerous ideas man has ever conjured, the ideas which hold society from chaos and mobilize the masses.  We are inherently cognizant on a species-level that humans must organize in a hierarchy.  We cannot all be ant queens.  We will all die.

Discussing these realities is perilous.  We are a living super-organism carrying out both physical and internal (spiritual) journeys.  We need exploitation in a sufficient measure so that we are not every man or woman scavenging alone in a wasteland or living day to day under a carnivore/herbivore arrangement of kill or be killed.  We see this in herds of buffalo and prides of lions creating order within and between each other.  So in we must understand this interplay within our species to not look first to jealousy, hated, anger, greed, or maniacal individuals, but between the nature of order and chaos in what entropy and choice are. 

We must look inward to what and who we are as a collective and as individuals wielding volition knowing that it is in each of our individual best interests to participate in a system of balance for mutual survival and love if we can muster.  This is where we uncover the genesis and value of the Meme. 

How do we as a cooperative society convince the bottom rungs to participate in a system designed to exploit the Poor if the complexities of the human mind recognize what is actually taking place?  The most common answers have been religion, patriotism, racism, and fundamentalism.  (The capitalized word Poor will be used in this treatise as a term to indicate the lowest classes of society in terms of financial wealth and social-power.)

Many may cry foul.  The ideas are like a shockwave piercing the shell of superego burrowing into ego and rattling who we are, why we do what we do, who is to “blame”, and scratching the mane of our animal-like id craving genetic replication.  We begin to question our addiction to the ego.  True growth is a continual shedding of the ego to recognize what we have always been.  If unveiled, if absent the disguised contortion, then chaos may ensue.  We may become enraged in rebellion at how we are tricksters and tricked balancing only in volition. 

We see glimpses in Arab Springs, Katrina rooftops , Darfur pickup-trucks, Kandahar caves, Occupy Wall Street encampments, Mogadishu Saturdays, Filipino typhoons, Boko Haram incinerated towns, Birmingham fire hoses, a box cutter on United 93, Michael Brown’s death, Juarez murders, Boris Nemtsov gunned down outside the Kremlin, Kenneth Lay, Abu Ghraib, Bangladesh sewerage treatment, Singapore billionaires, Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier banners, Tahrir Square 2011 & 2013, the Catholic church’s deposit for an island off the coast of Grenada, Israel debating extracting Nepalese earthquake surrogate mothers to gay Jews, L.A. Riots, Monsanto seed patents, Tiananmen tanks, and nightly newscast screen crawls. 

The self-initiated beguilement is the glue holding civility from splintering in a shamble of raw fear.  Nothing is really stopping craven wanton greed, destruction, and anarchy.  Nothing can stop death.  Humanity has always been only held by volition.  This is the crux of the Meme and the conflict between religion and science.  The power, importance, and role of volition is the key to unlocking purpose in the universe linking the atomic with the spiritual in the flow of energy between order and chaos.

Is there a god?  If there is, is this god a safeguard?  How do we define god?  This is why humans are so passionate on the subject of god and by consequence religion.  Controlling the concept of god is foundational to the Meme.

We hunger for the comfort god represents against this inherent risk to being a living organism.  God represents order; death represents chaos.  Our cerebral cortexes crave this electrical-power-surge protector as we plug into the human-living system.  Less complex animal brains do not require such assurances operating on instinctual acceptance of physical reality to maintain the ordered system of a body and when possible to replicate an additional ordered system into being.  Less-complex animals are ready to eat or be eaten.  Death is the omnipresence and a release or transfer of order.  Animals do not costume the idea. 

The Meme informs us we are more complex and this vulnerability is inapplicable because of god and our unique-being status.  These are buffers to the entropy we create and establish permanence to the ordered machines we identify as self.  This self-assigned exclusivity is an offshoot of our suspicion that our concurrent mental journey to our physical may represent a spiritual interconnection which humanity struggles to define as we awaken through our concept of time under Newton’s laws linking increased entropy to the direction of time’s arrow we perceive.

Humans bury this debate of our uniqueness from animal status deeply within our id making taboos of cannibalism and improper burial.  We invented religion to pile layers over this risk in our superego so that we do not obsess in a deluge of fret over what is possible at any moment as a rat happens upon a snake.  The quest to be special shrouds us from the idea that it was never about the human body or individuality.  Shedding the Meme allows us to see that humans are animals and also acknowledges atomic equivalency in the physical, but may also be a path to seeing a spiritual commonality in all.

Culpability is only to the self as a member of the interconnected whole all life (human, animal, plant, microscopic, alien, etc.) belong.  Post death the illusion of individuality and specialness is lifted in the alleviation of biological consciousness.  This is our ordered machine dissipating its energy flowing entropy and dispersing into the whole we are always a component.  Universal atomic and spiritual equivalence are constants on separate planes independent of biological life or death.  Death changes nothing but the perception of a constant now in the form we inhabit in the now.

Our need to remain what we identify as “self” post-mortem is a function of the insecure ego.  So it is our true charge to understand the arbitrary and so often irrelevant mirages of our physical journey to tune into the paradigm of the concurrent mental-spiritual journey beyond time.  The Meme and fundamentalism represent divergent benefits and detriments in achieving this true awareness entwined in most religious pursuits which can both unite and paralyze humanity.

In tasting this power and peril, a portion of mankind manufactured the original Ten Commandments and to a degree all religion and various superstitions as maps to avoid chaos and safeguards to distance ourselves from these unsettling innate cogs to life.  To point out superstition’s absurdities is to jeopardize that fragile skeleton and bank on trust and love rather than deception and fear. 

We grow to notice things that are in many ways once seen unable to be unnoticed moving forward.  This may mirror Buddha’s awakening through ending the Dukkha, Hindu reincarnation (sanskara) to understand a zero karma balance, enlightenment, finding Jesus, Allah, self-realization of a common infinite god like Yogananda or whatever hat a human may seek to adorn, but underneath is a consciousness of what we are trying to achieve in full nudity without the confines of the hat. 

We grow to see life as a choice and an acknowledgement of love or fear in ourselves and others.  We recognize the constant malicious potential in our being and choose between empathy or vengeance when encountering the maliciousness of others.  Vengeance seeks order; empathy seeks entropy through trust in unconstrained volition.  We conquer death as the Meme attempts to do, not through the Meme’s false eternities preserving a manifestation of the ego, but by relishing the volition to love in our gene-vehicles operable life awakening to the illusions of self, justice, time, and separation we create to interpret both the atomic physical and the parallel timeless physical-less nature of what we are.

When we see into the workings of the Humans-are-not-Animals meme, we see how the Meme often influences us to choose fear and views love as human weakness to assuage our hunger for genetic survival and its psychological mirror of the ego in the traditional concept of soul acting like an eternal ego-purse.  We segregate, classify, and partition life into subcategories until we distance ourselves far enough from the initial love or fear decision that we are blind to why humanity operates the way it does. 

The Meme’s greatest benefit to human-evolution is that the Meme freed the human-mind from expending the preponderance of our conscious and subconscious thought on eat or be eaten and hour to hour survival as well as temporarily explaining scientific phenomenon.  This unlocked the computing-power of our collective cerebral cortexes.  The Meme communicates the illusion of an enforceable social contract.  This is the catalyst of our complex-brains domination of other Earth-species through mental evolution.  We trade eat or be eaten in physical sense of chomping human ribs for hoarding planetary resources on a macro socioeconomic level that risks accelerating human extinction. 

We must reevaluate our present needs, like a dinosaur into a bird, and shed the excess hindrances to provide a fresh allotment of freedoms to set our minds further along the spectrum-grindstone of the universe.  We are to do what all life is called, evolve as an ordered machine that produces entropy or suffer extinction.  That evolution must transcend the physical.  Physical extinction is inevitable to all biological life in the multiverse within the mathematical laws of each universe.  The common charge is an evolution of empathy which recognizes one’s interconnection to the totality of all existence beyond time, species, planet, universe as the interconnected all.  Empathy is the ultimate iteration of entropy. 

To continue this evolution we can imagine that life can be deposited in one of two baskets on a scale to add weight to the imbalance.  Currently the Meme has the preponderance.  Thus the Meme dominates.  This treatise will act as a guide on how the author sees events, points of view, reactions in the arenas of human life to either be pro-Meme or anti-Meme.

This treatise urges humans to develop awareness to group stimuli and human behavior according to pro-Meme or anti-Meme.  One may find the world of human behavior suddenly more thoroughly explained or chalked full of one man’s written bullshit.  That’s up to you.  Thoughts, bizarre logics, paradoxical behavior and reactions may appear connected through a formerly-hidden variable to complex-human life’s equation, which was previously unspecified, but is now glaring in how simple, yet pervasive the Humans-are-not-Animals meme is.  That is what it helps me see into a place beyond syllogism.  Once the Meme is seen then what we are can be seen.  It is like peeling layers to witness and be in what we always are.  

Conversely once one sees the folly electing the Meme’s perpetuation, one may inform others to see the Emperor’s nudity and openly speak in a mature discourse on the alternative replacement evolving meme.  One may see that it is not a naked overlord in the parade, but the entire crowd naked looking not at invisible fabric, but at a nonexistent figurehead.  We are the emperor.  We are the crowd.  There are only us and our thoughts in a single blinking consciousness standing on the pinhead illusion of time. 

We are all suffering.  We are all divine.  We are all capable of grand evils.  We all cycle through loneliness, uncertainty, faith, love, wrongdoing, and a grand journey.  We are all hiding bruises and treasures.  We all seek to be accepted and understood to bridge a separation that does not exist.  Solipsism is true sadness perched in the kiln of loneliness.  We are all balancing love and fear.  We are one.

The ten internal commandments are a suggestion to frame the groundwork for a replacement evolving meme and offered as reflective touchstones for individuals to contemplate inherent morality and an individual notion of what many might call god.  The number is irrelevant as the count of fingers on human hands was when stones were etched.  This treatise is about why we do what we do and what we are as a means of expanding consciousness.  The human concept of god is a giant part of that discussion.  The posts of the commandments are not meant to be an encompassing, complete, or restricted list, merely hubs for thought to grow.  

(For the purposes of this treatise the term god will refer to a theist interactive iteration, which is interactive with space-time.  The non-italicized god will refer to a non-interactive variation that could also just be ‘us’.  The capitalized Commandment and number will refer to the section of the treatise.  Non-capitalized commandment and number will refer to the commandment itself in the Decalogue.)


Let us continue.

Love, Fear, Faith, Hypocrisy, Death, Empathy, Avarice, Knowledge, Energy, Prejudice

Each original Commandment is stated under the following two formats:
[Traditional Catechetical Catholic Formula]

{Exodus 20: 2 to 17}

To Commandment 1: Love

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