GENE <> MEME

The either/or is really the easiest form to evolve.
Binary logic, and why it evolved first, is reflected in other natural phenomena, such as male/female, where from single-cell division the first method to evolve is a binary one.

Either/Or thinking is a reflection of the on/off neural switching between neural pulse interacting with neuron and not interacting with it.
This either/or becomes the either/or of dualism.

The first method to develop for interpreting fluid, dynamic, reality, would be one based on this either/or. The primitive organism evolved a rudimentary form of perception to distinguish between edible and inedible, later to become friends or foe, based on the simplification/generalization of same/different.
This first step was attracted to the known, the experienced. The slightest pattern it has perceived before became an indication of sameness.
What was different was too unknown to deal with, until it became known, by finding a pattern it can then store in memory, passing it on as a behavioral automatism.

The mind is a forager of patterns, dedicated to an organism, a self-organizing, process, and as such it is attracted to the known, the same.
Sameness is attractive to it, both because it understands it and can use this understanding to deal with it, and because it becomes less threatening because it is known.
This attraction to the known, the same, the pattern, becomes ingrained.

The tiniest (re)cognized, (re)called, pattern of sameness attracts, disregarding all divergence.

This either/or scenario can then be used to place on one side, or the 'either', usually the past, all that frightens, dissatisfies the mind, and on the other side, its opposite, the 'or', full of hope and expectation, as well as a veiled threat.

In relation to reality - the dynamic - both represents a nullification, but in relation to each other, these man-made projections, can stand-in for any idea, and any abstraction.
The nihilist can be on the either or the or camp, but whatever the case may be, the degree of dissatisfaction with reality, nature (past), a mind feels the more absolute its conceptions are.

The emotional tendency would be to go towards the abstraction that offers the most relief from the dynamic, real.
This is to be expected.
The modern, average, nihilist, thoroughly disenchanted, desperate, afraid of the real, is drawn to the nihilistic view that completely rejects the dynamic, the real, the uncertain, the forever outside will and understanding.
Nihilism can now become a tool for manipulating this normal human emotional tendency.

Therefore, the most popular ideologies in our time, are those who offer a world-view which dismisses, disregards, offers forgetfulness, a redefinition of the past, an escape from the determinism of the immutable previous, sum of all nurturing.
There are some true, pure, honest nihilists who express their hatred of self and of the world that made them possible openly, and who hope to eradicate themselves and the world, in a last act of rejection and hate.
They are in the minority.
The most popular form of nihilism is the current, modern one; the one finding a common ground with its eastern equivalent of this Neo-Buddhism, preaching an end to rebirth as its highest goal.
In the west the nihilistic tradition can be culturally traced back to the Semitic spiritual dogma, and further back to the monotheistic Zoroastrianism which still retained some pagan Aryan elements.

Reality, being that it is dynamic, flux, ever-changing, need not be induced to change, for it IS change. Change happens whether we want it or not. We, to use Heidegger's image, are thrown into reality, and change, or whatever we call, Flux, is what we must deal with and cope with.

The antagonistic nature of life is in this dealing with the perpetual change that needs no effort to come about, unless we place this effort, this force, in some imagined divine, or call it Will, as in 'will to power and/or 'will to life.'
Life resists change, as part of its self-organizing within the disorganizing, its self-maintenance within the dynamic fluidity, as part of its self-ordering within perpetual disordering.
Life is about preserving the status quo, and if the idea is pushed to its absolute ideal, it leads to God, the state of absolute immortal, order.
The opposite, to this pole, part of a binary system, is to abandon one's self to change, to flux, to the chaos. It is a death-wish, a need to disappear, to disintegrate and dissolve, to stop resisting, and avoid feeling the need/suffering this resistance produces.

The Modern Nihilistic dogma, no matter how many forms it takes, still abides by the shared premises and often displays its common ground by suing the same methods against those who expose it and confront its comforting annihilation stories, with that happy ending, turn, at the end.

Consider the case of change.
Change is constant and inescapable.
The past is set, immutable, determining, and unchangeable.
The past stands in contrast to the present and coming future, simply by being outside of willful intervention.
One cannot change the past and how it manifests in the present, but one can use it to direct the Becoming towards a preferred future.
Denying the past is a sure way of failing, in whatever future one envisions as being "best".
One cannot change, direct, control, what one has no understanding, or knowledge of.

We immediately see the problem with modern nihilism, as it presents itself through individual cases.
The past is not only denied relevance, and rejected, but it is rejected partially and selectively, oftentimes constructing a caricature of the past, nature, which is contradicted by sensual reality itself. This is why appearances must also be rejected as having any relevance.
Appearances, being the product of the sum of an organism's past, must be dismissed, so as to enable the cherry-picking involved in redefinitions and reinterpretations of a past/nature only partially accepted and understood.

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For the nihilist, delusional one, change is an indication of openness and honesty.
Change is so hopeful that though, in relativity, change does not happen at a rate which would prohibit life, consciousness, or the recognition of patterns which hold true for vast spans of time/space, but it must be immediate, and only some of the time.
This is the immediate gratification factor entering into the equation.
The nihilist, being sheltered, must be gratified immediately and easily.

For him changing his mind is not only a correction necessitated by his ignorance and his inability o perceive patterns which have merit over longer periods of time/space, but it is a necessary part of him adjusting his needs, harmonizing his interests, with new discoveries concerning reality which he cannot avoid - particularly when they come from authority figures and institutions which also offer him the defensive responses to these new insights.
Instead of exposing him as a fool who must constantly adjust his previous mistakes to new data, he takes this as a flattering indication of his intellectual integrity.
The weakness becomes a strength.

Conveniently nothing new is ever proposed which challenges his moral, spiritual, and metaphysical positions.
Here generalization/simplification, comes to his aid, and complexity, ignorance, is used as a reason to remain fixed in all except the tactics and details.
Complexity is reason enough to avoid passing a judgment that may contradict his desired world-view, and ignorance is his favorite way of dismissing views that challenge him.
If ll fails the emotional tract is always on stand-by. A sharp accusation, a subtle insinuation, a delicate implication, and he is set free from responding, placing his comforting self-annihilating, positions under scrutiny, risking the exposure of his own emotional, fear-based, and oftentimes sexual obsessions.

For the common, average, modern, nihilist, change is a prerequisite to any discussion.
Not change forced by reason, but change for the sake of change.
The world is too complex for it to perceive any pattern with longer lifespans that his own, unless they are given to him, and supported by an authority.

In every other case, not to change is a sign of close-minded stubbornness.
he sees it in others, when he cannot offer them a reason to doubt themselves enough to change their minds, but he never sees it in himself, when he is unable to support any of his views without using emotion or deferring to an authority.
In his mind the other must give-way, because he gives-way himself, even if no reason is given; it is a gesture of good-faith, in his mind, because he feels so insecure about himself and his won positions that he needs this humility, on the other side, to settle him down.

The typical Nihilist's defense handbook includes many tricks.


Some examples:


---Mock Humor
When corned the nihilist will begin feigning exaggerate mirth, expressed by laughter, as a form of ridicule with no content.
No content need be provided afterwards.


---Mock Indifference
When corned the nihilist will feign exaggerated boredom, expressed by yawning, as a form of ridicule and dismissing what he implies he knows all too well.
The only thing he knows well is the response to a position he is unable to contradict.
His contact with the position is accompanied with an established response to it.  


---Personal Insinuation
Before he falls back to the usual ad hom counter argument, he will resort to subtle insinuation concerning the opponent's personal life, and/or his motives.
A female, or an effete male, obsessed with sex, will go straight to the sexual innuendo. He wants to dissuade and hurt, by going for the weakest, most central, part he can recognize in himself.  
Once the seed is planted that the other's motives are questionable, all other nihilists will seize the opportunity to ignore or dismiss the opposition without having to offer any reason or argument.
The Nihilist will question the other's motives, being unable to justify a position without an emotional return; he accuses it of an alternative motive, and then summarily dismisses it on those projected emotional grounds.


---Negative as Positive
The absence of an absolute, in this case the absence of absolute knowledge (omniscience), absolute certainty, is for the nihilist a reason enough.
When what is proposed satisfies a need, adheres to an emotional requirement, he sees in the absence a way of maintaining his own positions; when they contradict his personal needs and cause a negative emotion in him, he finds in the absence a reason to dismiss.
In the latter he can excuse all lapses in logic and evidence, no matter how glaring, whereas in the former they become inexcusable, no matter how small.
In the latter he defends, expecting the other to offer the same in return, whereas in the former he remains stringent, unforgiving, critical, and aggressive; because he receives nothing he expects nothing in return.
For the nihilist there is no gradation in value judgments. There is only an either/or, based on the projection of absolutes, based on binary, dualistic, thinking.
Uniformity in weakness, ignorance, is sustained by this either/or paradigm; uniformity in hierarchies, equality, is sustained, by this either/or scenario.
It is the negative, in this case the absence of an absolute, that justifies the equality of all. The nihilist relies on the absolute nil to find hope in the coming absolute, singular, one.
If Paradise is absent, the coming Utopia is on its way; if God is dead, then He is immanent.
 


---Dissatisfaction
For the nihilist emptiness, boredom, unhappiness is always an either/or proposition, with no gradations.
One is either absolutely happy or absolutely unhappy, and since he has himself as the only example he can draw from, he assumes that because he is miserable, and because happiness, in the absolute sense, is highly suspect, that all share in his own misery.
Therefore, for the nihilist  ambition, hope, are the only source for his contentment; he must draw from the immanent, coming, future, just around the corner but never here, to gain sustenance and strength for dealing with his misery.
For him comfort, resulting in a lower grade of activity, is incomprehensible. He can only male sense of it by referring it back to his own condition, and see it as unhappy.
For the nihilist not wanting to change, so as to preserve an already present state of relative contentment, is beyond his capacity to relate to. He is always driven towards change, changing himself, because he is always unhappy. For him this striving towards, is the only source of potential contentment, because he can find none in the present, or the past - he seeks it in some coming future.


---Self
The nihilist is so dissatisfied with himself, with the end result of a historical becoming, that he must search for gratification in others.
He despises himself so much that any distraction from self will do.
He is so void of anything to feel proud of, to find meaning in, to find purpose, his past so disgusting to him that he uses the term as an insult against others - "primitive", "passe", "old" - that he must find hope for something more, something to fill the void either in some coming future, or in some other.  
The other becomes his only source of self-worth, and so he must always please others, be validated by others, find value in others, measuring his own worth by how many others find him valuable.
for him an activity is only important and worthwhile when others appreciate it, and he gauges this by how many of them do so - quantity rather than quality.
He is so dependent on others, the immediate otherness, for his self-esteem, and for dealing with reality, that the mere possibility of separating self from otherness makes him feel terror.
For this reason, the nihilist can only see illness in whoever is not like him, or he finds in the other a motive like his own: attention whoring as a form of constant self-validation.
His own emptiness, seeking constant fulfillment, in others, becomes, for him, the new standard of the healthy - he calls it love, and must purify the concept by detaching it from nature/past, or form anything egotistical/selfish.


---Dependence
The Nihilist is more dependent on others, than the average mind would be.
It's not only his stunting of growth, turning inward, his retarded development, keeping him in the condition of infantile neediness, suckling on the communal teet, which is to blame, but it is the discrediting of the world that closes him off from anything that would lead to maturing.
Once the nihilist has had his own senses demeaned, all he can do is turn to other minds for guidance.
Atrophy, over time, does not only further strengthen this dependence eon others, but it also makes his senses incapable of what they could when they first developed. He has had his sight, for example, so ridiculed and slandered, that he began to mistrust his own eyes; he blinded himself. Now, after years of self-blindness, he is unable to see anything but shadows, which only reinforce his submission to an ideal that makes sight irrelevant.
He now goes to other eyes to tell them what he must see.
Their motive he never questions, not does he doubt their intent, if they tell him exactly what supports his own state and turns it into something desirable, something noble, something to be proud of.  
Nothing he sees, hears, feels, is to be trusted, in fact it is all illusion, and superficial, and it is comforting to him, but what remains?
The word: The word is the replacement to the senses.
Comfortably blinding himself, feeling safe and secure in the sensory deprivation chamber of his own mental “panic room,” the nihilist either turns esoteric, shunning the world altogether, or he turns towards the only other source of stimulation, of data input, left to him: other people.
Esoteric, in his case, means towards the communal decree, the shared belief, the popular conception. He turns inward, becomes esoteric, in the sense that he now confuses the world of man, the artifices man creates, for the real world, the one existing independent of human intervention and contrivance.  
The fact that he can now pick and choose which source he will attach himself to, sucking it dry, like a baby on the breast, makes this solipsistic, sacrifice, all the more seductive.
It's not that there is a reality we must discover, and deal with directly, but now all he needs to do is give himself over to relativity, to perspectivism, and find that appropriate perspective for him; the right parent, the correct, most motherly mother.
Cocooning for the nihilist is not a cost, it is a privilege. He can buy any shell he wants, and then crawl into it forever: technologies for him are god's embrace.
He engages what he calls ‘reality’ through these motherly kinds of minds, or, if he dares, in a moment of bravado and testosterone induced courage, he may take a peek at the more fatherly, cruelly loving, types.
Direct contact with the world, crawling out into the sun, from his cave, is only possible in theory. What he calls the “outside,” the real world, is no more than part of the artificial shell that surrounds his delicate mind with comfortable lies, and well-wishes, and reasons to turn his shame into pride, and his blindness, into a new kind of sight, a new-found enlightenment.  


---In-Dependence
His in-dependance becomes a form of dependence, but a detachment from the world which cares not for the delusions he has grown accustomed to.
He is not liberated, but in-dependence.
His freedom is really a freedom from reason, and an emotional attachment; a freedom from the past, from nature, and an attachment to human codes, words; a freedom from reality, and an attachment to human artifices, like justice, equality, or to redefined, purified concepts, nature produced as survival tools/methods, like consciousness, love, humanity.
His rejection of reality becomes a full acceptance of the words he is given, after they've been deified, cleansed of all primal, natural, base, intentions.
He has detached, liberated, himself from the vulgarity the indifference, the uncertainty, and cruelty of the world, and totally submitted to the cocooning, maternal, embrace, whose motives are never doubted, and words suffice to create this feeling of bliss - a child forever clutching at his mother.
Any attempt to explain these words, these human abstractions, by referring them back to the natural world from where they sprung from, via the human brain, is considered a vicious assault upon the innocent child, cruelty against the naive.
The word, if it is to serve as a detaching code, must remain sacred.
It must have no traces of anything natural, anything motivated by the animalistic, the earthy, and the worldly.
The word, the mother's lullaby, is meant to sooth, to relax, to relieve stresses, to save and to protect.
Not even a father's harsh directness will be tolerated in this children's room.
The nihilist wants to annul the world outside of this beautiful setting; this technological embrace.
Everything is possible here, even reinventing your sense of self, your identity, in other words the past.


---Either/Or
No matter how above primal dualisms a nihilist thinks he's grown, he will always revert back to their simplifying grace, when he is faced with a dilemma.
The nihilist's litmus test is the proverbial glass half-full or half- empty choice, this either, or.
The choice must be made to reveal the psychology of the thinker who being forced into the choice must choose, using his innate predispositions to guide him.
The fact that fullness and emptiness presuppose a bounded space/time, as represented by the glass, is far too diluting for this simplifying test of contentment.
For the nihilist the choice is easy.
The glass is always half-full, expressing his happiness, and the fullness he feels when focusing only on the liquid which promises to quench his need.
Need, directed by emotion, is how the Nihilist directs his reasoning, and his value judgments, such as it is.
The nihilist will always focus on the quenching parts of reality, ignoring everything else.
For him the liquid contained within an artificial boundary, excluding all else, suffices to remain happy in his selective perceptions.

---The Word
The spoken and written word is, for the average nihilist, the ingredient constructing sheltering, cocooning, metaphor.
The word is the fabric that binds him and protects him from the world – against the world he has the word, though it be, love, happiness, Jesus, Marx, equality, fairness, justice, unity, oneness, humanity, as the binding words and have, evil, discrimination, injustice, suffering, fascism, Nazi, Hitler, Nietzsche, as the rejecting words.
The words used define the shelter being constructed and its relation to reality.
There are words who try to attach human conceptions to reality, to nature, and then there are words that try to detach man from them.
The motive can be discerned in two ways: by how the word refers to a sensual phenomenon or defers to another human construct, and by the usage of the word, its place, its repetition, its emotional appeal, the imagery it produces.
The more detached from reality a word is, the less it refers to the sensual but refers to other human construct, the more void of substance it is; the more empty it is.  

The words themselves need not be precisely defined, actually not defining them precisely makes them stronger in their emotional application, but they must be shared under the auspices of not only a common dictionary offering the word’s basic meaning, but, more importantly, under the authorities which lend the word gravitas, associate it with an emotion, an image, a construct, but also place it within a narrative.
As such, the nihilist’s thinking always goes through these narratives, offered by famous, established, institutionally acknowledged, names – a name also being a word associated with a being, a face, which may or may not be present to accept or to reject the usage of his name and the narratives associated with it.
The world is of a secondary affair, because all goes through words.
The senses, already reduced to a cosmic lies, a trick only there to fool the nihilist, have also been surrounded by concealing, manmade, constructs – particularly in urban environments. Urbanization is growing environmental condition, and conditioning, and nihilism prevails amongst the bourgeois, raised within urban environments.
For the nihilist all opinions of the world, of this fluid, dynamic, indifferent to human words and constructs, reality, must pass through narratives, associates, justifiably or not, with famous human figures: narrators of reality, using words.
All conceptions of reality, now pushed into the distance of experience, must fall within established storylines.
This is a convenient factor in the nihilist’s psychology, because once reality is reduced to words and narrations, it can be manipulated, purchased, sold, accepted or rejected, according to need; it is now a product to be express personal tastes.
The original unyielding to human needs, indifferent, world has now become a word more easily manipulated and used.
The reduction of reality, as a sensual experience, to a word, a conceptual construct begins with the creation of the word God.
At that point the fluidity, dynamism, uncertainty, of reality, is linguistically formed into a static, absolute, symbol.
From then on, the overturning of reality by using words becomes easy, particularly amongst the nihilists who have the least to be grateful for when it comes to their presence, their appearance, their reality.
The words are not symbols for expressing reality, symbolizing and representing it, but little strings to be woven into a new skin; a new layer, a new garment, loose enough to include anybody, and strong enough to exclude the cold, harshness or all the unwanted aspects of reality.

The gene is “selfish,” as Dawkins calls it, in that it has evolved to propagate itself, sometimes to the detriment of the organism it produces.
The individual is a vehicle for its propagation.
Similarly a meme is selfish, and is also a method of propagating itself, oftentimes to the detriment of the organisms that participate within its organization.
The meme does not evolve to satisfy personal desires and needs. It may even contradict them if its own existence is in question.
The meme takes over the mind, inhibits its resistance, and hijacks the will.
As such, a mind free from genetic influence may question its own existence, and a mind liberated from the shared meme may question the ideas and morals and principles of the common man.    

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With this in mind the sexual frenzy associated with the mating season, or with lust, can be understood as a behaviour indifferent to the well-being of the particular organism, because the goal is genetic propagation.
Furthermore, a parental self-sacrifice is clarified, though the particular organism may lack the consciousness to know what death is or what genes are.
If we apply this to the meme, then nihilism becomes comprehensible, as an internal method of harmonizing, and the sacrifices of the individual organism in its defence, become an expected aspect of memetic control.

We also gain an understanding as to how and why a mind freed from survival necessities, and which has evolved in awareness, may consider intelligence a detriment to evolutionary goals, as well as towards memetic principles.

A meme is the product of a people's evolution within particular environments, experiencing particular circumstances.
It reflects this genetic inheritance.

Some memes become seductive to peoples outside this genetic pool, resulting in cross-fertilization.
Such memes go beyond their envirnment, their historical contexts, by inseminating/impregnating, other, weaker, more impressionable memes.
Through this fertilization the memes alters form, just as a gene combines with other genetic material to bring about a new organism, but unlike the genetic fertilization process with memetic fertilization there is no 50/50 sharing.
The more dominant meme will always exceed in effect the meme being dominated, although the effect will never be overwhelming. The impregnated meme will always change the dominant meme by its contact with its own, and the adaptation of the weaker into the stronger.

There are two forms of seduction: the masculine one where it overpowers, dominates, by its sheer essence...and the feminine which seduces, entices, with its open promise.
The second type is long-lived because it requires less effort to maintain passivity, and congruity using this tolerance to dominance.
The so called Modern progressive memes are characterized by this feminine openness to cross-fertilization.

The organism absorbs nutrients from the world outside its wilful domain.
It does so unconsciously and automatically, at first, later evolving the ability to direct this absorption of energies more efficiently, by discriminating, and discerning what types of energies it can absorb and which it cannot or threaten to absorb it.

The epidermic shell offers it the choice, which we call will, to direct itself towards an object/objective, analyse it, absorb it, process it, and then simplify it into parts divided into useful and not useful - in the second group it includes the elements which are toxic, dangerous, destructive to its, self-maintaining, self-organizing, unity.

There are three reasons the organism cannot absorb, use, energies it absorbs:

1- It cannot process them, lacking the mechanisms and the energies to break them down to a simplified form it can absorb - absorb meaning integrate its elements, its activities, into its own processes.
2- It cannot recognize them. It fails to understand the manner in which it can absorb those energies, having evolved only to absorb particular types of energies, in particular forms.
3- The energies are toxic, contrary, to its own processes.
They either destroy the processes attempting to integrate them, or they require more energy to be simplified down to a form which would make them easy to integrate.

For the memetic organism, the SueprOrganism, the same holds true, only now the energies are replaced by codes, data, information, which refer to abstractions, ideas, concepts.
Abstractions are interpretation of stimuli, or (inter)actions.

Just as energies assimilated into an organism are stimulants, or (inter)actions which can or cannot be integrated into the organisms internal processes (internal ordering, interactivity) - it interprets their processes into its own, with varying degrees of success), so too are data packages, unities, groupings, which are interpreted, by the brain (the brain takes over the role of stomach), into usable simplifications/generalizations, that can then be integrated into its own internal structures, its own ordering, or expelled, for the reasons given before, as toxic excrement.
In the case of the SuperOrgansim, the organism is its cellular multiplicity.

The meme is what the gene is : a set of preprogrammed instructions directing its processes to organize, and (re)act to stimuli, and directing it towards what and how to integrate external to it energies/data.

The gene uses the senses to analyse the energies in its envirnment.
The meme, also, uses the senses, but it then filters them through the cognitive parts of the brain for further analysis.

The gene uses the stomach to break down energies in preparation for integration/assimilation.
The meme uses the brain for this work.

The gene absorbs energies via the cells.
The meme absorbs ideas via the organisms.

The gene eliminates toxins or energies it cannot process or absorb through the anus and urethra
stomach to break down energies.
The meme uses institutions to incarcerate (quarantine, in the hope of finding a use or of the organism altering its toxicity), or it isolates, as a pressure tactic (using the social instinct to pressure), or it destroys. In the first two methods pressure is akin to a stomach's acidity trying to break down resistant elements in its isolated, from the rest of the organs, pocket.

The organism's cells, those micro-parts constructing the organs that are carrying out these processes, are constructed using energies extricated from otherness in the manner mentioned before.
Similarly, the SuperOrganism's micro-parts, its organisms (members, citizens etc.) are, also, constructed using the elements gathered and processed in the manner mentioned before - we call this indoctrination, education, training.
To guarantee that the parts the SuperOrganism depends upon do not veer off the required activities, behaviours (necessary when a brain is present), a set of mechanism are in place, from birth, to ensure the smooth and predictable outcome: morals, social etiquette, religion, dumbing-down (restriction of critical thinking or thinking beyond the acceptable parameters), law & order institutions, peer pressures, more recently, sophisticated methods based on insight into human psychology, resulting in more advanced methods in human husbandry, and, finally, Nihilism, as a method of eliminating all external sources of behavioural direction, the elimination of all elements which inhibit integration (sexual identity, race identity, bloodlines, analytical ability outside the trained methodologies and so on).

Once the organism (the organic cell) has been successfully integrated into the internal ordering processes then any distinction outside this function, whatever specialized role each cell is called upon to play within the entirety, is superfluous.
Therefore, separating humans into groups based on particularities about the individual inhibits utility, within the SuperOrganic structure.
The SueprOrgansim does not care if the cell is male/female, of a particular genetic type, has its own judging faculties, tastes, or heritage... all it cares is about functionality.
All cells, all organisms, are judged by their ability and effectiveness in filling in a particular role, a function, a job.
Their identity is reduced to only that part of their potential, and nothing more about it matters or should matter.

Now we begin to understand why feminism arises, why race is something "evil", why interpersonal divisions are considered passé, why sexual orientation is irrelevant, why education is so important in equalization and why equalization is even possible.
Equalization simply means that if you can become part of an organ offering a service to the SueprOrganism, and you do not cause problems, then nothing else about you matters...nothing except your performance within this specialized role.
The organic cell has no individual value. What it is, how it feels, what it likes is inconsequential if it can participate in a function within the organism - its entire value is wrapped up in its participation in one process within a structure it need not know or understand, but only identify with by connecting with others, like it, in its immediate environment... its peers.
Its entire becoming is evaluated and judged by this role within the SuperOrganism.
The larger, more complex, stronger the SuperOrganism, the more pride, self-worth, it feels via the others that surround it and are included in its condition.

Everyone else is cancerous... or excrement to be quarantined or flushed out.

The question now arises:
Which cells are part of the brain in this emerging SuperOrganism?
Their power is not absolute, but directive.
They have a closer proximity to the neural networks carrying stimuli from external sources, via the sense organs, and internally, via the organs.

Their role is not that of a God, although it appears so to the lowly cells (particularly functioning as members of the anus) but of middle-man, intermediary.
They are, themselves, ignorant and weak. Their advantage is that they have more access to the data, the stimulations, that they carry, as part of their function.
Is there a central directing group of cells?
We'll leave that question unanswered.

Another question is:
Does the size of the SuperOrganism matter?

I would think so.
The complexity of the organism, and this also includes the SueprOrganism, makes its constituent parts slightly less important, depending on the size and complexity of the emerging unity.
A more complex SuperOrganism would require more efficient part, more docile, dumb, simplified, specialized, cells - otherwise it could never reach its level nor maintain itself there.

Therefore, the larger the SuperOrganism the more simplification/generalization it imposes upon its parts. they are more expendable because they are easily replaceable, their role being so simple and general, even in special roles, that it can integrate another.
The larger, more complex, a SuperOrganism becomes, all the more internal order it demands; all the more cohesiveness, efficiency resulting in synergy, and specialization, it requires, further diminishing the importance of any particular cell (organism),within it.
The organism (cell), within the SuperOrganism, is now forced to focus its (inter)actions, and even the, so called, free-thinkers, the "philosophical" ones - remnants of a previous state which has not been eradicated yet, retaining internal inefficiency - are diminished by educating, integrating, training, them to think in increasingly simplified ways.

The illusion of free-thought is maintained because it is fact. Data is available, openly, but how it is processed has already made the data non-threatening.
Once assimilation achieves a certain level of efficiency, of cohesive integration, the free-flow of stimuli is not very important, because the cells have no capacity to integrate it, on their own, in a way which would contradict their specialization.
The cell may still (re)act to hunger or cold, but it has no capacity to act outside the orders it is given from the brain-cells. Free-press, the internet, books, are all permissible, at this point, because none of the data, information, will be understood, or could be understood, in a manner outside the prescribed, the given, the educated and trained.
The cell can only think within the limits of its functions, its job, and anything else it leaves to other experts, other cells that tell it how to (re)act, and what to do.

Why is art and philosophy in such a bad state in our modern times, when information is accessible, on a level unprecedented in history, and we live in, seemingly, free systems?
Well, the above should give you a clue.

Another aspect of all of this is the role Nihilism takes so as to make the entire process easier to accomplish and, more importantly, to sustain.

Nihilism... is the cell, in the case of the SuperOrganism the individual organism, detached/detaching from the world outside the premises of its role within the skin, the boundaries, of its participation.
To increase efficiency one must not only eliminate all individual identifications, but also the sources that may trigger their re-emergence.
Keeping the individual organism, within the SueprOrganism, away from any environment that might inhibit its integration and specialized role, is not conducive to internal integrity.
Feminization is the type required, to achieve internal efficiency – and only after the SuperOrganism has reached a certain level of complexity – and Nihilism is how it maintains this internal ordering.
Disconnected from its previous, its historical, its natural role, the individual settles for whatever it can find.
The weaker ones find any alternative terrifying, because within these predictable, specialized, sheltered contexts they can, at least, find longevity; outside this "body" things become sketchy, less predictable, more threatening. Over time, dependence grows, due to specialization, making every single participant a defender of the status quo.
Only those few who have not been incarcerated (quarantined), eliminated, can persist... now under the label of cancerous cells – the autoimmune system kicks-in excluding them.

Of those, only the clever mask and pretend, and persist...waiting for the body to weaken.
The process repeats.

Now the final question:

Given that none of this is avoidable, which kind of SuperOrganism would you choose to participate within?

Keep in mind that social behaviour is an evolutionary outcrop of weakness... just like love is, as its necessary glue.
Also keep in mind that the weaker you are the more complexity you will seek to immerse yourself within, feeling less vulnerable and more invisible within it.
When it comes to humans, as a species, the choice is not between being a herd animal, a sheep, or a cow, with the solitary bear being the alternative... but between being a sheep and a wolf.
Both congregate in groups, but not of the same size, and because of this, not producing the same nature.
The weak, the feeble, the cowardly, will always seek refuge in multiplicity, and then deny it, wanting to seal the outer pores, close the skin, with the delusion of oneness.
Oneness is always a context, reflection the mind's integration within a particular meme.

How do you see this split in the long term? Will it become a divergence of species?

For a memetic split to become genetic, a long period of isolation would need to occur. If space as a frontier is opened, it would happen.

If frontiers remain closed, as they are, then this will remain underground.
Pretences, lies, hypocrisy, will be necessary.

The split is already on its way.
It begins, as it always does, from the males.
Females need more coaxing...more seducing. Even the above average ones.
But females are not that important, because males can propagate despite female simplicity, as they have for a very long time, using their superior mind.
The rest will be excluded.
What dilution may occur will be reversed when females of a higher quality choose males closer to their level of appreciation.
The immediate meme will be supplanted, in some cases, by longer term mimetic awareness.
As always, what is superior, or different, will be preserved along masculine bloodlines.

If, and when, frontiers become accessible, then then split will surface, it will become more direct, resulting in spieciation along mimetic lines.

Compliance with moral norms: a partly heritable trait?

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Election poster from the 1930s for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]). Is the welfare state more workable if the population is more predisposed to obey moral norms?
 

Do we differ genetically in our ability, or willingness, to comply with moral norms? Please note: I'm talking about compliance. The norms themselves can vary greatly from one historical period to another and from one society to another.

Apparently some people are more norm-compliant than others. This is the conclusion of a recent twin study from Sweden ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]). A total of 2,273 individuals from twin pairs were queried about the acceptability of four dishonest behaviors: claiming sick benefits while healthy (1.4% thought it totally or fairly acceptable), avoiding paying for public transit (2.8%), avoiding paying taxes (9.7%), and accepting bribes on the job (6.4%).

How heritable were the responses to the above questions? The heritabilities were as follows: 

Claiming sick benefits while healthy - 42.5%
Avoiding paying for public transit - 42.3%
Avoiding paying taxes - 26.3%
Accepting bribes on the job - 39.7%

Do these results indicate a specific predisposition to obey moral norms? Or is the genetic influence something more general, like religiosity or risk-taking, both of which are known to be partly heritable? To answer this question, the authors ran correlations with other factors:

Quote :

Significant correlations were exhibited for age (r=.10, p=.00), sex (r=.12, p=.00), religiosity (r=.06, p=.00), preferences for risk (r=-.09,p=.00) and fairness (r=-.10, p=.00), locus of control (r=-.03, p=.01), and charitable giving (r=.09, p=.00). However, these significant correlations were relatively weak, suggesting that our measure is not merely standing in for these demographic and psychological differences between individuals. There were no significant correlations with behavioral inhibition (r=-.00, p=.81) or volunteering (r=.01, p=.29).([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

The jury is still out, but it looks like compliance with moral norms has a specific heritable component.
 

Population differences

Does this heritable component vary from one population to another, just as it seems to vary from one individual to another? The authors have little to say, other than the following:

Quote :

Replication in other countries should occur, as the exact role and extent of genetic and common environment-influence could change in different national and cultural contexts. Such a multi-country approach could thus offer some clues on the generalizability of our findings.([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

Swedes seem to be better than most people at obeying moral norms. Only 1.4% think it acceptable to claim sick benefits while healthy! Maybe that's why they've been so successful at creating a welfare state. So few of them want to be free riders on the gravy train:

Quote :

Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were the intellectual parents of the Swedish welfare state. In the 1930s they came to believe that Sweden was the ideal candidate for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. First of all, the Swedish population was small and homogeneous, with high levels of trust in one another and the government. Because Sweden never had a feudal period and the government always allowed some sort of popular representation, the land-owning farmers got used to seeing authorities and the government more as part of their own people and society than as external enemies. Second, the civil service was efficient and free from corruption. Third, a Protestant work-ethic—and strong social pressures from family, friends and neighbors to conform to that ethic—meant that people would work hard, even as taxes rose and social assistance expanded. Finally, that work would be very productive, given Sweden´s well-educated population and strong export sector. ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

This is not how most of the world works. While studying in Russia, I noticed that the typical Russian feels a strong sense of moral responsibility toward immediate family and longstanding friends, more so than we in the West. Beyond that charmed circle, however, the general feeling seems to be distrust, wariness, or indifference. There was little of the spontaneous willingness to help strangers that I had taken for granted back home. People had the same sense of right and wrong, but this moral universe was strongly centered on their own families.

In sociology, the term is amoral familialism. Family is everything and society is nothing, or almost nothing. It was coined by American sociologist Edward Banfield:

Quote :

In 1958, Banfield, with the assistance of his wife, Laura, publishedThe Moral Basis of a Backward Society, in which they explained why a region in southern Italy was poor. The reason, they said, was not government neglect or poor education, but culture. People in this area were reluctant to cooperate outside of their families. This kind of "amoral familialism," as they called it, was the result of a high death rate, a defective system of owning land, and the absence of extended families. By contrast, in an equally forbidding part of southern Utah, the residents were engaged in a variety of associations, each busily involved in improving the life of the community. In southern Italy, people did not cooperate; in southern Utah, they scarcely did anything else. (Banfield, 2003, p. viii)

Quote :

 

Where did Western societies get this desire to treat family and non-family the same way? To some extent, it seems to be a longstanding trait. English historian Alan Macfarlane sees a tendency toward weaker kinship ties that goes back at least to the 13th century. Children had no automatic rights to the family property. Parents could leave their property to whomever they liked and disinherit their children if they so wished ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).

Indeed, Macfarlane argues that "Weber's de-familization of society" was already well advanced in Anglo-Saxon times ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]). This picture of relatively weak kinship ties is consistent with the Western European marriage pattern. If we look at European societies west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, we find that certain cultural traits predominate:


- relatively late marriage for men and women
- many people who never marry
- neolocality (children leave the family household to form new households)
- high circulation of non-kin among different households (typically young people sent out as servants) (Hajnal, 1965; see also [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])


Again, these characteristics go back at least to the 13th century and perhaps much farther back (Seccombe, 1992, p. 94).


Historians associate this model of society with the rise of the market economy. In other words, reciprocal kinship obligations were replaced with monetized economic obligations, and this process in turn led to a broader-based morality that applied to everyone equally. In reality, the arrow of causation seems to have been the reverse. Certain societies, notably those of northwestern Europe, were pre-adapted to the market economy and thus better able to exploit its possibilities when it began to take off in the late Middle Ages. The expansion of the market economy and, later, that of the welfare state were thus made possible by certain pre-existing cultural and possibly genetic characteristics, i.e., weaker kinship ties and a corresponding extension of morality from the familial level to the societal level.
 

References

Banfield, E.C. (2003). Political Influence, New Brunswick (N.J.): Transaction Pub.

Hajnal, John (1965). European marriage pattern in historical perspective. In D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley. Population in History. Arnold, London. 

Loewen, P.J., C.T. Dawes, N. Mazar, M. Johannesson, P. Keollinger, and P.K.E. Magnusson. (2013). The heritability of moral standards for everyday dishonesty, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 93, 363-366.
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Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.
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Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial
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Norberg, J. (2006). Swedish Models, June 1, The National Interest.
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Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe, London: Verso.

Translating gene to meme...


Organism <> SuperOrganism

Cell <> Individual/Person

Cell Type <> Job/Career

Sociopath <> Cancer

DNA <> Nihilism

Fertilization <> Education

Brain/Organs <> Institutions

Body <> Telos/God/Order

Reality/World <> Mind/Body

Personality/Psychology <> Politics/Identity

Faeces <> Pollution

Illness <> Ideology contrary to the socio-economic norms

Freak Show
Genetic sampling is in the nature of the feminine disposition.
Females, as genetic and memetic filters, are also siphoned through which new genes are sampled and introduced into a population.
Nature depends on selection - trial and error - to differentiate within fluctuating environmental conditions.
Female promiscuity, shallow and demanding, follows the rule in natural economics which deals with flux by diversifying investments.
Paternalism is the conserving attempt to preserve order, by controlling female promiscuity and its gene sampling.
The male is the idealist, the female is pragmatic.

She samples ideas, just as easily as she samples sperm - encoded memories.
The male seeds and leaves, letting nature sort things out, but the female's higher investment forces her to be more selective in her sampling: the quality of the sieve determining how much will pass through, and from what direction.
We look down on easy women, calling them sluts, because they show so little discrimination - their sieve holes so open, like their legs, that any genetic mutation can slip through into future generations' we admire strong women because their sieve webbing is tight, or shaped to only allow particular kinds of material through. Such women determine the future of the group that holds them in high regard.

Modernity promotes the open legs of the indiscriminate whore, who, unlike the slut, does it more than for pleasure, because her value must be paid in socially acquired money - the value she puts on her sieve opening determines her price, separating the lady from the cheap whore.  

Feminization is why sampling in the arts has become the new memetic norm.
Mutations accumulate when sheltering prevents culling, and feminine willingness determines what type of mutations will be permitted to add to what has already passed through.
Modern desire to tolerate all mutations indicates this feminine desire to sample, to let males compete, or pay for access, separating them into those who can impress and/or pay the price for entrance.
What is propagated is not necessarily fit, within natural contexts, but only socially viable, in agreement with the systems ideals, which are represented by female sexual selection - the shape of her sieve webbing.
Mutations accumulating, triggering what has already there, due to centuries of natural selection - a soup of possibilities, moderns thrive on.
Whatever freakish monstrosity emerges will be tolerated, recycled, and in time forgotten, as we forget last months pop-tune, with that RAP holding the sampled melodies together, as if it were original. Little strings of word associations, like DNA sugary bonding the sampled parts together.

Males can only sell themselves as worthy of female investment risks.
It is the female, with her genetic and memetic programming that decides the future - based no a genetic or memetic ideal.
Feminization leans toward memetic criteria, converting female intuition into a rationalized sieve.
The sieve netting holes given shape, and size by the nature of the particular female.
Her quality of mind determining the level of investment she is willing to give to her intuited or rationalized choices.
Paternalism sought to control this natural mechanism by subjugating females to man-made ideals, but it has lost control.
We are now returning to a more primal state, compounded by technologies and learned techniques.
Nihilism attempts to break the binds of female genetically determined choices, and make women pure memetic filters, adjusting their sexual choices to fashion trends, or changing social conditions.
We are presently in the midst of a process of female conditioning.
but nature is not so easily denied. Intervening on natural processes produces byproducts, pollution, unforeseen collateral effects, and natural corrections, we call 'disaster's to express our dissatisfaction with manmade artifices, built over generations, being destroyed in a matter of minutes by natural forces.              
We see the external structures of human interventions, but not the genetic ones.
Women being conditioned to allow mutations through that would not have passed through in natural environments accumulate, like a dam across a river bed, or on the side of a mountain, or houses built in the passage of a water creek.
Mutation after mutation, directed by a social ideal, accumulate, hoping to withstand the devastation of natural readjustments, breaking through manmade structures, sweeping away the best built artifices as if they were nothing.
In the meantime we can enjoy the freak show.

Imagine the attrition produced by an organization of patterns, striving to maintain itself within an interactive fluctuating cosmos.
The Greeks called this agon - struggle of being, the consciousness of this attrition.
They called a life, bios/vios {βίος}, root for bia/via {βια} violence, root word of the English biology.
Ordering, also called becoming, within disordering, increasing randomness, experienced as the arrow of time, as linear time...such ordering requires constant, unending, struggle...and this is experienced, even by the simplest life-forms as need.
Need as the experienced of flux - lack.
Lack of what?
The absolute:

Dictionary wrote:

ab·so·lute
ˈabsəˌlo͞ot,ˌabsəˈlo͞ot
adjective
1.
not qualified or diminished in any way; total.
"absolute secrecy"
synonyms: complete, total, utter, out-and-out, outright, entire, perfect, pure, decided; More
2.
viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative.
"absolute moral standards"
synonyms: universal, fixed, independent, nonrelative, nonvariable, absolutist
"absolute moral standards"
noun
1.
PHILOSOPHY
a value or principle that is regarded as universally valid or that may be viewed without relation to other things.

Dividing needs into their two distinct expressions, as due to lack, the experience of becoming, and the due to excess, a byproduct of the first, experienced as desire, we can use the metaphors of eros/thymos as the attraction/repulsion of interactivity.

Primary Needs are those produces by existence.
An organism struggling to maintain itself, intact, within cosmic flux.
All life feels this as the tug of lack, as need/suffering.
Suffering interpreted, in organisms wit more sophisticated nervous systems, as pain.
We can include hunger, thirst, exclusion in this category.
Implosive.  

Secondary Needs are those produced by Primary Needs, when the organism is successful - fit.
Excess accumulated due to the successful satiation of primary needs.
We can include, growth and sexual desire, in this category, adding creativity as a mere sophisticated expression of this.
Explosive.

Place these categories within genetic o& memetic contexts, these needs acquire a symbolism.
They can be abstracted and synthesized, projected as wants, symbolized by an ideal, represented by a word, or a human artifice, such as a car, or clothes.
Wants/Desires are primary and secondary needs combined and given a objective, representing their satiation.
Meme focuses genetically produced needs using a symbol, represented by this symbol/word.
Meme is the externalization of an internal sensation.

If we take, as an example, the automobile, as a human artifice with memetic value, we can find there the promise of gratifying both primary and secondary needs.

Wants can be manufactured, as they are abstractions of a combination of primary and secondary needs.
The buyer need not be completely aware of what motivates him to purchase the symbol, or the technique/technology, but only see it as a necessity within a manmade environment, requiring manmade tools and symbols, and practices.
A man may know he needs a car to go to find work, to go to work, to pay his food and house bills, in order to survive, but he need not also be aware of the secondary needs being met when he chooses a specific car, with a particular symbolism.
He need not understand sexual signaling, self-handicapping, to be willing to pay extra for a particular automobile, or when he chooses particular clothes to crate a specific cultural image, in agreement representing a specific memetic ideal.
All he, or she, needs to know is that it feels good, that it is popular, in fashion, that it promotes his/her social status etc.

Gratification of secondary needs need not be direct. In fact the more vague, indirect, they are, the more effective they become.
The dancer need not know, or be aware, of the signaling his/her dancing represents, because this will make the performance less effective - less graceful, efficient...so on.