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Sex, death, and

the selfish

meme: Nature abhorsan Asshole

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by John MacBeath Watkins

In theory, the first bacteria to appear on earth is still alive. It has divided billions of

times and adapted to new environments, and billions of its cells have fallen to immune

systems or other hostile environments, but it has been able to change without dying.

Creatures like us, who reproduce sexually, cannot manage to rearrange our genes so

readily. To adapt to an ever-changing environment of bacteria and other changes in our

environment, we had to find another way change our genetic structure quickly. While it

might be more efficient for all the members of a species to be child-bearing, we cannot

afford to reproduce parthenogenically because we need to adapt our genetic structure by

mixing our genes. We must reproduce and die off to keep up in the evolutionary battle with

other organisms such as bacteria.

Richard Dawkins, in his influential book, The Selfish Gene, argued that in essence

that makes individuals the servants of their genes. Genes are biological strings of

information that use us to reproduce; a mother that lays down her life to save her children

is acting in the interest of passing on her genes, even at the expense of her own existence.

In that same volume, Dawkins gave us another concept; the meme, a string of

information that uses the minds of human beings to replicate itself. The implication is that

if you lay down your life for an idea, you are acting in the interest of the selfish meme. We

have, in fact, an existence in a symbolic worldthat is nearly as important to us as our

physical existence.

This is important in our society because we live in a new Gilded Age, in which an

ideology much like social Darwinism minus the bogus biology has taken root. It justifies

great social inequity based on the notion that we should be selfish, that greed is the way the

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world works and successfully greedy and selfish people are to be admired. In the war of

each against all, they are the victors.

In part, this is the just worldfallacy applied to an unequal society, a Panglossian

approach to bad outcomes. In this fantasy, the world rewards those who deserve to be

rewarded, so the existence of their wealth is evidence of their virtue, and we live in the best

of all possible worlds. But it has also become a meme in its own right, taking over minds

like a virus, changing behavior like some parasites do, and ensuring its continued existence

even at the cost of the host organism.

Mind you, our minds are in large part made of memes -- they are the software in

our brains. But there is code and there is code. Sometimes, memes are malicious code

intended toserve those who write it. Agnotology, the science of producing ignorance, is

one example of this. The Soviet effort to distribute copies ofThe Protocols of the Elders of

Zion in the middle east to make any effort toward peace less likely to succeed is the meme

equivalent ofStuxnet. They were in essence hacking Muslim culture instead of their

computers.

In any case, the existence of the selfish meme means that self-sacrifice to continue

the meme that makes us who we are makes as much sense as self-sacrifice to continue the

genes that make us who we are.

This makes a mockery of Ayn Rand's thesis inThe Virtue of Selfishnessthat

altruism is destructive and one should never sacrifice one's self for others.

From the Ayn Rand Institute website:

Manevery manis an end in himself, not a means to the ends of

others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2010/12/agnotology-science-of-our-time.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishnesshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishnesshttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/02/trial-by-combat-individualism-social.htmlhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/06/stolen-kremlin-documents-show-soviet.htmlhttp://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2010/12/agnotology-science-of-our-time.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness

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nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rationalself-interest,

with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of

his life. Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruismthe claim that

morality consists in living for others or for society.

Yet why would every man be an end in himself? His end will come soon enough,

and his children and this impact on the minds of others will carry on who he is into the

future. Self-sacrifice in the service of the survival of his genes and his memes is entirely

rational, far more rational, in fact, than actions compatible with any commonly understood

definition of selfishness. It is certainly more rational than rejecting any claim that morality

consists of living for others or for society.

The question is not whether we should sometimes put the greater good ahead of

ourselves. The question is, what memes do we allow to be part of ourselves, and strive to

pass on as part of our legacy? A meme that says doing things well is both satisfying and

useful will lead to greater success for any descendents and intellectual followers we might

leave behind.

But as Stanley Milgram's famous experiment showed, people will do great evil if

they think it serves the greater good. You don't get death camps, killing fields, or suicide

bombers in societies where everyone is acting selfishly, you get them in societies where a

malicious meme has taken hold. Marx made the mistake of thinking that because religion

has done bad things, the solution was to get rid of religion, and because property has been

the source of much misery, the solution was to get rid of property. Rand made the same

mistake with religion, and substituted altruism for property in the things she wished to

dispose of.

But religion, property, and altruism are all useful things for a society to have. It is

because they are powerful and necessary that they have to capacity to do great harm or

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great good. They must be challenged to show that they are doing good instead of harm, but

to assume that they must be done away with is akin to thinking software is bad because

some software is malicious.

Since a certain amount of selflessness is needed to assure the reproduction of your

genes and memes, where do we draw the line on selfishness? I've come up with John's

Law:Nature abhors an asshole. In its simplest form, this means that selfishness must meet

social standards of decency to be okay, even at the cost of personal sacrifice. Those social

standards, after all, are memes that have evolved to further the survival of the society that

carries them.

In addition, there is a special case where the ethics of Ayn Rand might make sense.

If the individual won't die, and can go on forever, as the bacteria referred to earlier, it might

make sense for such an individual to act selfishly at all times.

Which means that Ayn Rand developed an ethical system suitable for bacteria, but

not for people.