Deep Thought for the Day

I just read this article by Naiomi Klein which more or less relates bubble debt capitalism with Sarah Palin in a weird but pretty credible way. Interesting and not too long.

Quick summary of the article's conclusions:

She ends up supposing that if our current economic mess gets resolved without massive reforms, the "happy days that'll be here again" will be more reflective of the reality Beautiful Sarah sold to a dimwitted constituency (i.e.,drill baby drill, only losers consider the consequences) than anything remotely rational. She even suggests that if if Wall Street's house - o- cards hadn't collapsed two weeks after most of us saw her for the first time, Sarah's views of the future would become our collective future.

This started me thinking about memes, maybe we are experiencing two memes slugging it out. The older I get, the more I believe it's important to look for memes and try to understand them. At a national scale memes trump facts most of the time. It can be tough to grasp memes, since even the concept and definition of memes gets a little fuzzy.

Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of memes.

"A meme (pronounced rhyming with "cream") is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures."
Remember from math or philosophy class,"postulated elements" are those things we (as a community) choose to believe without proof, for example, "given two points, only one line exists containing both points".

I see this contest as a struggle between two conflicting memes.

In the rational corner; the karma/Aristotelian meme, where everything has causes, and everything that happens is, in turn, a cause who's effect will be known at some time in the future.

In the Pulchritudinous Mrs. S's corner; the Rapture meme, where reality is neither continuous or sequential, and nothing that happens today has future consequences, since how could our paltry worldly consequences matter in the glorious light of Jesus's second coming, and all that business. BTW, latest intelligence says the second coming is soon. Jesus has been seen shaping up for the Big Day!



That's my story and I'm sticking to it.