What's the Minessence Group's Take on Memes?

Memes are ideas, tunes, inventions, retorts, ways of doing business, ways of asking for help, and ways of saying hello. (Palumbi 2001, p. 243) 

Over the past few decades there has been a shift in thought concerning the evolution of human culture. Ever since Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, coined the term “meme” as the selfish unit of societal evolution analogous to the gene’s role in the evolution of species, there’s been a groundswell of people focussing on the evolution culture via memes.

     Dawkins suggested that memes, composed of memory and imagination, were the basic replicating units through which human culture evolved. Yet, memes simply do not fit the model of classic Darwinian evolution.

     Ideas are not passed on from one generation to another in a linear fashion as are genes. Most often, each person adds their own slant to an idea or may simply not understand it properly and pass on some distortion of the original (Chinese whispers). Also, people’s values have a profound impact on the transference of ideas. Values filter what people give attention to—people don’t even notice, let alone pass on, ideas which would make no contribution to what they value. People may also deliberately make a conscious choice to pass on, or not to pass on, particular ideas—knowledge is power. 

     The main distinction is: Darwinian evolution is about the survival of the species which, by chance, have adapted to change in a way which avoids their extinction; whereas, the survival of ideas depends on complex values dynamics:

The impact of conscious selection at the stage of idea mutation and transmission blurs the distinction among the three elements of Darwin’s engine and suggests a very different way of looking at ideas than Dawkins’s notion of evolving memes. Picked over as carefully as meatballs at a cheap buffet, ideas are sorted by the finicky process of conscious selection. They are created, used, and discarded by active minds seeking their own advancement or their own comfort. What other element of our lives do we consciously improve for better function and pick carefully among to fill our cultural shopping carts? We can also consider ideas as tools.
     As tools, ideas may be practical or not. They may have general or specific uses. Others may shun them or adopt them with gusto. Sometimes they seem to have a life and independence of their own, like the wooden handle of an axe that becomes polished through use to fit the hands that wield it. But in the final analysis they remain tools, ways of manipulating the world or understanding it. They do not evolve like genes because like tools, they cannot really replicate themselves—they can be made only on demand by brains, and only by this agency can they spread through to other brains. This does not say they always benefit us—akin to the way many of us have tool boxes stuffed full of things not currently doing us any good—and it does not claim that they can never do damage—like an unchaperoned gun. But the function and rapid change of ideas does not require their independent evolution...(Palumbi 2001, p. 252)

Q. If memes are not the mechanism by which culture changes, what is? A. Changes in the culture's values-system, i.e. changes t its strange attractor.

Nothing Will Ever Change Until There's a Change of Worldview

Or, as Pirsig says....

...to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motor cycle because it is a system is to attack the effects rather than the causes; and as long as the attack is upon its effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systemic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There is so much talk about the system and so little understanding. [Emphasis added] (Robert Pirsig, 1974, p. 94)

For change to occur, people need to make different choices in familiar situations. Since values lie behind all our choices, this means people need to undergo a values shift. For a values shift to occur, people's world-view must change. The diagram below shows the main things which shape a person's world-view:

Two of the most powerful influencers of worldview are emotion and the media:

Emotion

The fastest way of shifting people's world-view is through deliberately provoking a "significant emotive event"--brain washing techniques are an extreme example of this. If you think people would never resort to these techniques, think again! The question we must ask is, are techniques which deliberately provoke "significant emotive events", ethical?
     The debate around this issue could rage on for years, however, the debate can be completely side stepped. How? Well it turns out that, though creating significant emotive events is a very effective way of modifying a person's world-view, those provoking the event have no control whatsoever over how the person's world-view will change. If you cannot control the outcome, then what's the point of employing the technique?
     How can one be so sure that you cannot control the outcome? It's a basic principle of chaos theory. When you provoke a significant emotive event in a person's life, you create a bifurcation in their meaning-system (i.e. the way they'd made sense of the world until that point in time is broken down--bifurcated!). The brain's system of making sense of the world--it's meaning system--is as about as complex as system as you can get --in fact it might very well be the most complex system in the universe. Chaos theory tells us that when a bifurcation occurs in any complex non-linear system (not just the most complex in the universe) no one can predict the outcome.

     So this means, if you deliberately provoke a significant emotive event in a person's life in order to impact on their world-view, you have no control over, nor any way of predicting, what new world-view they will have after the event--how useless then is this as a technique make any change?

"We can't be what we can't see."

Worldview is everything. It shapes our values.

Then, our values determine our choices in life.

In influencing people's worldview, what works best?

What works as both an effective and an ethical means of world-view modification, is the use of a combination of dialogue, experiential learning, and structural change. The key to change is firstly gaining real rapport with people. For genuine rapport to exist, people must really know that you are able to see the world through their eyes and thus really understand why their values are important to them.

---

Change = Rapport + Information

---

How can I change my world-view and leadership style?

Make sure you have effective strategies in place to have your foundation values met. It is important that they are a foundation, not an Achilles’ heel.

Taking on ever more challenging activities, and gaining the skills to be competent with them, will impact on your world-view, and hence, leadership style. Of particular importance are those activities which require interpersonal, imaginal and system skills.

To move to a new paradigm (world-view) you have to fully embrace the language of that paradigm. So, if you see people as human-beings and not as cogs in a machine, you must refer to them as something other than your most valuable "assets" - you could not be a human "resource" manager, you would have to, say, be a human "relationship" manager. Thus, attention to linguistics is part of the answer.