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Whatever the Future of the Real Virus, the 'Coronavirus Meme' Has Already Gone Pandemic!

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Whatever the Future of the Real Virus, the 'Coronavirus Meme' Has Already Gone Pandemic! Antidote! Whatever the future of the real virus, the ‘coronavirus meme’ has already gone pandemic! Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex H o w d o b r a i n s b e c o m e infected by memes? M e m e s a r e i n f o r m a t i o n viruses that ‘infect’ human brains. They go from brain to brain, from brain to book to brain, from brain to tweet to brain. And so on. Memes influence human behaviour. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex For example, whatever the future of the real virus, the ‘coronavirus meme’ has already gone pandemic! Your brain is already infected and so is mine. Coronavirus infection numbers grow faster every day and at the time of writing around 100,000 are now infected w h i ch i s s t i l l s m a l l by global virus standards … yet 6 billion brains are infected with the coronavirus meme which is big by global meme standards. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex So, how do brains become infected by memes? Knowledge is powerful. If you read and understand this booklet about ‘Meme Theory’ it can help to act as your antidote to meme infection. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex There are lots of memes spreading around which are plain wrong, causing panic, sucking up precious r e s o u r c e s , d a m a g i n g businesses and infecting brains in unhelpful ways. Knowledge about memes and how they infect your brain is real protection. Brains that have this knowledge have greater protection than brains that are still ignorant about memes. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex This booklet is designed to give you real knowledge as a kind of antidote to meme infection. The knowledge is curated by the author from ‘The x10 Memeplex’ (Prentice Hall 2000) by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started … There is no doubt that religion has dominated the thinking of the last millennium. Before that, religion played a central part in human culture. There is also no doubt that, owing to their religious memes, many people have been influenced in their behaviour—some for human welfare and others for human sacrifice. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex In ‘The World’s R e l i g i o n s ’ Ninian Smart, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, writes about the rich cultural diversity of human religious memes: ‘So long as humans are brought up in different paths, so they will see the world differently, and for each path some things will seem natural and right and Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex others not. But the paths cross. We can benefit from that. For example: we can see social justice, which Marxists struggle for; human freedom, which liberals emphasise; love of God and fellow humans, which Christianity preaches; brotherhood, which Islam promotes; calm and mysticism, which go with Buddhism; de votion and pluralism, which Hinduism points to; harmony with nature, which Taoism commends; Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex ‘the cultivation of interpersonal behaviour, which is a lesson from Confucianism; holism in life, which we find in Africa; finding meaning through suffering, which Judaism has had to emphasise; the importance of inner sincerity, which we find among the Sikhs. These and many other spiritual and moral values are not, of course, mutually incompatible’ Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Yes, it’s true, many religious memes can be compatible but the trouble has been that they are usually antagonistic. If only the world’s religions had a history of tolerance. If only each different religion had demonstrated a respect for other religions. If only the most ferocious wars ever fought had not been religious wars. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex One thousand years ago the Christian memes fought their blood-thirsty crusade against the infidel memes. Today, the evidence is strong that the battle is far from over. But, there is hope. As we have crossed the threshold of the Third Millennium we find that there is a parallel to religion—science. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Both religion and science fulfil a basic human need which is to try to understand things. Religion uses inspiration and science uses observation. Religion uses faith and science uses experiment. Religion uses Absolute Truth and science uses evolving fuzzy truths. Religion uses authority and science uses questioning. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Susan Blackmore of the Department of Psychology, University of the West of England, notes in ‘The Meme Machine’: ‘We cannot get away from religions, but using memetics we can understand how and why they have such power. All the great religions of the world began as small-scale cults, usually Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex with a charismatic leader, and over the years a few of them spread to take in billions of people all over the planet. Imagine just how many cults there must have been in the history of the world. ‘The question is why did these few survive to become the great faiths, while the vast majority simply died out with the death of their leader or the dispersal of their few adherents? Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex ‘Richard Dawkins was the first to give memetic answers, although his ideas on religion have been frequently criticised. He took Roman Catholicism as an example … millions of people all over the world profess themselves Catholics and pray to Jesus, his mother Mary, and God the Father. They spend vast amounts of their valuable time and money supporting and spreading the faith to their children and others, Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex ‘and the catholic Church is among the richest institutions in the world. Dawkins explains how religious memes, even if they are not true, can be successful’ I have written about this at length in ‘Software For Your Brain’ and will do so only briefly here. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Because of the righteousness involved it’s easy to be accused of religious intolerance. Yet its precisely because of the historical intolerance shown by many religious authorities that one needs to address the issue. The distinguished biologist, Sir Peter Medawar, once wrote: ‘The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify entrusting our moral accountability to religious belief.’ Many of our current business memes are still derived from religious memes. For example, the binary absolutes of ‘right vs wrong’, ‘good vs bad’, ‘men vs women’, ‘salesman vs customer’, and ‘managers vs employees’ are all religious- based memes. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Many of these costly conflicts are a big inhibition to business growth, wage increases and profits. Because our culture owes so much to religions I intend no offence whatever to sincerely held religious beliefs, but I feel i cannot avoid the topic of religion in a s e r i o u s , o p e n - m i n d e d discussion of memes. Memes, and not just religious memes, are here to stay. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex THE FIRST REPLICATOR Q W H AT I S T H E M O S T POWERFUL TRICK IN THE UNIVERSE? A REPLICATORS! Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex LONG, LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY (BILLIONS OF LIGHT YEARS) A MOLECULE SOMEHOW HAPPENED THAT WAS DIFFERENT TO ALL OTHER MOLECULES THAT HAD EVER EXISTED. THE UNIQUE DIFFERENCE WAS THAT THIS MOLECULE COULD COPY ITSELF. IT COULD REPLICATE. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex ONCE REPLICATION GOT UNDERWAY—OVER FIFTEEN BILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTIONARY TIME AND BY AN ONGOING PROCESS OF TRIAL AND ERROR—FROM THIS SPECIAL MOLECULE EVOLVED DNA AND GENES AND SUBSEQUENTLY EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER LIVED ON THE PLANET. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex The designer energy behind natural selection is replicator power. Replicator power is the breathtaking process behind the Grand Operating Design of our biosphere. For fifteen billion years replicator power has been on the job. If genes couldn’t replicate, then you wouldn’t be reading this booklet right now because neither you nor I nor the coronavirus meme would have ever existed. Antidote! by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson © 2020 author of The x10 Memeplex Genetic replication is a very clever trick and is certainly the most powerful fact of life that we know of. FROM NATURAL SELECTION TO VOLITIONAL SELECTION ‘NATURAL SELECTION’ AS CHARLES DARWIN SHOWED, IS HOW THE FITTEST O RGA NIS M S A RE T HO S E SELECTED BY NATURE TO SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO REPRODUCE AND PASS ON THEIR FITNESS.
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