meme
/mēm/
)) 1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
◦ a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users. ((
Just to be clear, since most people are captured by one Meme or another, no country is real, I only refer to America since it is my country of origin. The borders of these countries are not real and do not exist – I say again, the borders of your country are unreal, they are a meme whose only reality is within your mind and the collective mind as a concept. This here has nothing to do with statism vs totalitarian world domination which is quite real and, I feel, best understood by understanding the linguistics involved. The memes fire off constantly and pointedly exploding in each mind like a weapon of mass destruction and it is only by really understanding of this panoply of consciousness that we can free ourselves from these linguistic methods of mind control.
Memes are not simply funny or quirky pictures for amusement or political assassination. Here I want to consider with some depth what is now called a meme, those pictures with words that crowd our online social sites, for these memes carry a power that is perhaps unappreciated due to their ubiquitous nature and often seeming banality.
We could even say that “God” is a meme so best to conceive of it as a packet of information that is passed on (downloaded) in a compact form and go ahead and think of that old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words, only much broader, such that a meme can be potentially worth a million words (if it is a good one!) and worth even far more than words for this is how potent a meme can be like some explosion in the mind, when downloaded, that detonates expanding exponentially into a mental reality, a conceptual reality, a complete and potentially vastly complex paradigm.
Our reality itself may be nothing more than a meme but I profoundly digress.
Think of having a conversation about God with someone say at a café and it goes on quite a while and feels good and perhaps productive even in some meaningful way but then when considered in retrospect, you may find that neither of you really connected as much as you thought because that meme, “God” is a highly complex noun and if first some care and attention is not given to confirm with each other what each actually is thinking of when they speak of “God”, you can subtly but actually diverge and end up not connecting at all simply because while each of you uses this same word, that again is so ubiquitous as to be assumed to have a common meaning to all, you both miss each other as surely as two ships passing in the night. Substitute Love for God in all of that or Freedom, even, or Democracy with the same potential result. When you really think of it, it is a miracle that we do as well as we do.
The study of conceptual semantics goes into this most pointedly, I believe, going in depth into the nature of meaning in and through words. Poets understand this innately that an entire poem can hinge upon just the right word in the right place because the word carries more than its dictionary definition. Words carry nuance and suggestion, emotion even, which is why I love poetry because through poetry, like visual arts, music and dancing, poetry can bust out escaping from the prison like containment of words transcending expository writing to more closely express the living flesh, blood and bones of reality itself.
A word man, though, I constantly must remind myself that the map is not the ground and words, memes or not, are never the ground and always the map of the ground and this distinction may sound ridiculous but it is in fact the distinction between the soul and the body, between life and death. In all of this, I try to go back to some point of divergence so that we can perhaps regain control of not our language really, but our minds. If we can regain simply the control of our own minds that is rightfully ours if anything is, then maybe we can access reality more concretely and then communicate more concretely and even – a lad can wish! - walk back from this “Green Screen Reality” that has been laid for us all like some collective trap before it leads us witlessly befuddled by a hall of mirrors of memes into a transhumanist technical totalitarianism called the metaverse that just like some Kafkaesque roach motel, we can check into but can never check out of, Friends.
Maybe you are right, after all, and the entire “World” is wrong.
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