On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 17:14:43 +0200, Hans Reese <reese@castel.nl> wrote: >On Sun, 22 Jul 2001 19:26:00 GMT, elrond1@home.com (Gregg) wrote:
>>She is paid in coin more valuable than money--social attention--even
>>though in her case she has lost the ability to distinguish between
>>pats on the back and being smacked on the head with a dead fish.
>I agree. I couldn't resist giving her a short reply a little bit up in this
>thread, but one thing I forgot to mention: she is repeatedly trying to push
>your "meme"-button. I read what you wrote about memes, and I love the
>concept. Actually I have read a bit about memes years ago, and the whole
>theory makes perfect sense to me. But I digress... ;-)
Memetics had a massive hole in it before evolutionary psychology came along to fill it. The helpful memes were just things people learned from others that helped them in one way or another to their genes goal of reproductive success. But what on earth could make a person whack off their 'nads? That took some thinking, and eventually was tied up with the endorphin reward pathway that is also at the root of drug addiction. Social attention translates into endorphin release because social attention is the way we social primates keep track of our positions and progress on the social scale, and high status for almost all of human history was the key to reproductive success. Some people get so hung up on the rewards a cult gives them as to be as irresponsible as any drug addict or worse, because few drug addicts whack off their balls or blow themselves up for some cultish cause. Scientology is, I think, as bad as a cult can get and last a while. The Rajanish cult sucked people dry in a much more intense fashion. The Heaven's Gate crew killed themselves when the leader thought he had cancer. Both are gone or nearly so. Aum killed a dozen and injured thousands in gas attacks. I don't know how they are doing. There are cults in history worse than any of these. Typically the worse they are, the shorter they last. Scientology may be worse than usual for a cult which has survived this long because it used part of the government, the courts, to attack the social mechanisms (media and government) that alert people to the dangers of cults and similar social movements. When the net came along, they tried the same here--with unanticipated results to say the least. >My question is: how on earth can anybody take memes as a button to push on
>YOU?
Darned if I know. But life is full of little anomalies. >I should probably ask Diane, but I have yet to see a constructive reply from
>her. Oh, sorry, this last remark could be taken as a personal attack or
>insult. I must have just missed those posts; my mistake... ;-)
Doesn't matter. She takes insults as rewards. Keith Henson