Introduction The Meme: Why We Do What We Do: The Ten Internal Commandments and the Humans are not Animals Meme: a Treatise

The Meme: Why We Do What We Do:

The Ten Internal Commandments and the Humans are not Animals Meme: a Treatise

The following is a treatise to reevaluate the biblical Decalogue and the meme at its root.  (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 attempts to interconnect the Ten Commandments, which is used as the apex example of a system of social and cultural constructs implemented by humans to shield humans from the reality that humans are no different than animals.  This is done in order to install a social hierarchy so that humans could 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. 

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 universe by reducing entropy.  This treatise attempts to show that it is this violation of natural entropy that shows why the Meme cannot ultimately be sustained.  This 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 that can serve as a substitute to communicate human interconnection.

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.

However discussing these realities is perilous.  We are a living super-organism.  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.  So in we must understand this interplay within our species to not look first to jealousy, hated, anger, greed, or maniacal individuals. 

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.  If unveiled, if absent the disguised contortion, then chaos may ensue.  We may become enraged in rebellion at how we are tricksters and tricked. 

We see glimpses in Arab Springs, Katrina rooftops , Darfur pickup-trucks, Kandahar caves, Occupy Wall Street encampments, Mogadishu Saturdays, Filipino typhoons, Birmingham fire hoses, Juarez murders, Kenneth Lay, Bangladesh sewerage treatment, the Catholic church’s deposit for an island off the coast of Grenada, 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 unassailable fact is the crux of the Meme and the conflict between religion and science; or is it a thought rather than fact?  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.  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.  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 this reality.  Less-complex animals are ready to eat or be eaten.  Death is the omnipresence.  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.

Humans bury this debate deeply within our id making taboos of cannibalism and improper burial.  We have 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.

So in tasting this peril, a portion of mankind manufactured the original Ten Commandments and to a degree all religion and various superstitions as a safeguard 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.  We grow to see life as a choice and an acknowledgement of love or fear in ourselves and others.  We conquer death as the Meme attempts to do, not through the Meme’s false eternities, but by relishing the volition to love in our gene-vehicles operable life.

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.  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.

The Meme has been crucial, if not indispensable.  However, like most mechanisms of evolution, 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 or suffer extinction. 

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 authors see 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.  Thoughts, bizarre logics, paradoxical behavior and reactions will 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 magnanimous the Humans-are-not-Animals meme is. 

Conversely once one sees the folly electing the Meme’s perpetuation, one can inform others to see the Emperor’s nudity and openly speak in a mature discourse on the alternative replacement evolving meme.  One will 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 emperor.  There are only us and our thoughts. 

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.  These are not meant to be an encompassing, complete, or restricted list, merely hubs for thought to grow.  

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}