The Power of Words

I first learned of the concept of memetics when helping brainstorm ideas for my friends at Holistic Design when they were working on Sathranet.  I had been a molecular biology major in college, so the idea of looking of ideas from a biological perspective was something that I could not get rid of.  The idea fascinated me.  Later, when I spent time helping some of those same friends at the Mythic Imagination institute, I came to think of memes not just on a 'viral' thing like the Macarena but complex things like institutions...a Eukaryotic organism made up of interlocking ideas that was complicated.

But in biology, there are disciplines beyond even that, climatologists and wildlife management and even urban biologists....

I think we can get to the micro level and try to engineer institutions, we need an understanding of how institutions work with each other, what keeps them together and how many you need for a stable society.  Case in point, we created a government in Iraq and Afghanistan...and it didn't work out too well.  Ignoring the standard libertarian bullshit, it was more than just because we had a tin ear during the process.  It was because we imposed our idea of what a government should be in an environment where people already had preconceived ideas.  That is terrible engineering and Feng Shui in general.

We have all of this knowledge about how the mind works and  how people work even at a macro level but we choose to ignore how it all fits together.  We only cared about putting a government together, but not about the other things that make a democratic society work, like credible parties (yes I said credible parties, because it isn't like our own democracy is working now is it?) or those little old ladies that volunteer at the election areas or the honest brokers in the areas of America that are actually honest.  But that's just politics. A chamber of commerce of small business owners to make sure government responds to business and people and cosponsor infrastructure projects that helps the people at large.  Charitable foundations from guilty dead rich people who help fund the arts and cement areas that the government hasn't noticed.

But that's all complicated, you say.  Well, maybe.  But National Park managers don't just focus on the animal that people care about (say bears) but all the things that it eats, that eat it, or that eat the things that eat the things that eat the things.  If we can do it for a fucking national park, why the hell can't we do it for societies and government?

We are not only really not trying, but we're not studying it in a systemic way.  There are no competing theories about how to do it, much less actual study.  Oh, sure, these guys have created a whole bunch of institutions to shape society...

But they aren't doing so with the intent of shaping society.  Note, they are pretending to shape society, liberals think they are doing it to shape society, but they are really doing it just to get rich. Because they have gotten a great ROI on their investment but their model has warped their followers in ways they never desired or predicted...

One of my favorite books for summarizing complex ideas is Outliers...

One of the chapters focuses on how an airline tried to get its pilots to reduce error and faced little success until one guy was smart enough to figure out the problem was that in Korean, the language is very hierarchical, so the pilot and the copilot did not cooperate.  The copilot would never correct or inform the pilot of anything.  So they switched to English...suddenly pilot and copilot were much more egalitarian and the accident rate plummited.

So I think that forming a culture matters about the language that is spoken, at the least words that are chosen (ie never using lying conservative words) or the language itself.  Latin used to be the lingua franca of the intellectual elite.  Maybe we need to start teaching that again.  But better...

Esperanto was designed at the beginning of the 20th century as an easy to use language that encouraged openness, peace and understanding.  Maybe we should use it as the language of government.

Yes, in the novel 1984 they chance the language to that of compliance.

Its not like Fox News hasn't already done that.  Vocabulary usage among conservatives is considerably different.  But is communication with those who have no desire to communicate but only infect really worth your time? Can you have a rational discourse with an emotional being?

I'm not trying to convince you to push a rock up hill or not push a rock up a hill.

What I AM saying is that to solve this problem in the long term, we need to look at society, what makes it work, and how to build and maintain it and I think cultural memetics...or whatever the hell you call it..is the way to go.

Soon I might explore the right words.  Or not, but eventually.  What it is, and what it is not.  But I think the language, and chosing the right language for each institution might be one mechanism for doing that.