Yet, whenever I mention memes in public, social theorists and God-fearing Christians alike immediately object. The powerful few who managed to escape the war and fascism relatively unscathed came to promote a perverse social theory that advocates vigilance above all else. Social scientists were taught in graduate schools that the masses, too stupid and easily swayed towards social policies as destabilizing as Nazism, must be led by a benevolent elite. The masses must be carefully monitored and analyzed through polls and other testing, and then adjustments in public relations strategies carried out accordingly. It s no wonder that social scientists from this school and there s more of us affected by this re-education campaign than we care to admit reject the assertion that culture itself is an articulation of evolution or that, worse, technology is an articulation of cultural evolution.
Memes can t be real, they argue, because if they are all is lost.
If the meme concept is correct, they fear, then culture war must be civilization s template. They believe that only the fittest social ideas will survive, and that those fittest ideas in the sense that the stupid masses will promote them are fascism and race war. What the social theorists don t realize is that evolution doesn t always favor certain individuals over others. Natural selection occasionally goes into effect if there s not enough stuff to go around. But very often the easiest way to promote the survival of an individual is to promote the survival of rest.