When Memes and Genes Collide

Many who actually spend any face time with me, would know that I've had involvement with the Henry George League aka Earthsharing aka Geonomics and various other yet to be effective mantels.
I've been over it before and the theory is fundamentally sound in its stated aims and purposes. If you tax 'inputs' like resources, from land to coal to the electro magnetic spectrum, you get a much better, fairer, equitable and productive system than when you tax 'outputs' like profits, wages etc.
I mean it is pretty much the profit model itself, minimise costs and maximise revenues to create the biggest profits, and yet the tax incentives work counter to this notion, such that accountants try to write up as many expenses possible and shunt profits around the world to minimise profitability (and thus tax liabilities).

But my crises of faith comes from that Keynsian notion, not from any Keynsian theory as such, but from his practice of observing what actually happens.

For example, there is no way Universities will ever be allowed to have a fair and equitable system that identifies actual intelligence when offering places. The wealthy would never allow a system that would judge their progeny on their merits.

In just the same way, I somewhat fatalistically am entertaining the notion that the economy that will blindly survive is one that protects and reinforces the priveledges of the priveledged and not one that actually maximises wellbeing.

It just seems from an evolutionary perspective, that there will always be somewhat of a 'ruling class', and in that light the fact that wealth is becomming more tightly concentrated (something like 56% of the worlds resources are commanded by 1% of its population) would just show that the system is becoming more efficient. A good thing from a cold objective point of view.

'The colony' has less queens and more workers. Genetically at least, it's just a continuation of the same march that first created social behaviours that gave birth to 'leaders'.

Take the common term 'landlord' it's derived from feudal serfdom, where the 'Lord' protected your miserable life from the relatively more miserable life of being pillaged and raped by some neighbouring chief/lord/frenchman. So in turn for maintaining this community security force, you worked not just your own lands but his. A pretty good deal, until they just all became his lands and you worked them, then regional stability came through so he barely even protected you from anything anymore, until present day where a landlord has a right to a share of your income whilst not contributing any actual value at all (or value worth the provision of housing).

Dawkins has a vast number of examples of 'the selfish gene' and how animals that are entirely parasitic (like the Cuckoo) can survive at an evolutionarily stable mass. Too many parasites and the system starves, too few and well... everybody wins except presumably the parasites, but if you have just the right amount both species, parasites and hosts can live on in a stable manner.

These 'facts of life' thus would point to a stable evolution process whereby you can have a parasitical ruling class that eats free lunches, and then everyone else who is glad to be part of a great system that holds up these great parasites.

Now, I don't want to sound like some communist or whatever, but its hard to put such a system of ours into terms that are flattering, though many have tried. You could call it capitalists, entre preneurs, captains of industry etc. Except hopefully we are in a day and age where we can see (certainly with the bail-outs of the financial institutions in the US) that the parasitical behaviour is pretty self evident.

Home owners aren't bailed out, the banks are. Or as Chomsky would put it 'privatised profits and public liabilities'.

My question is, where did the ruling class, the natural aristocracy go wrong?

I think nowadays, that if I were a ruling elite that could order popular nationalist movements by strangled in the cradle, that social reforms be stillborn all to protect my 'vital interests' that from what I've learned, I would be more concerned with rearing my memetic descendants than my genetic ones.

This is because history and genetics tells us that their is no surer way to drive a dynasty, organisation or empire into the ground than by 'keeping it in the family'. Your son is 1/2 of you genetically, your son's son is 1/4, your great grandson is an 1/8th, and after that they are to all effects about as close as a complete stranger, which I'd wager your cousins cousin is to you.

I mean your cousins are only 1/4 genetically similar to you and I'd bet you see big differences between yourself and them. In this day and age, in all probability they will think act and believe completely differently to you.

But genetics and evolution also teaches us, that at least for the early part of human development as a species, genes that tend to look after their offspring tended to be genes that survived. Whereas genes that abandon their young in infancy don't tend to do as well. At least not for a species like homo sapiens.

And that's what I mean by the 'leading' or 'ruling class' going wrong. Yesterday I talked about Xerxes I the great, son of Darius I the great, I have reason to believe that Xerxes was in fact nowhere near as great as his father, at least on the political shrewdness scale, but as history stands is probably one of the better progenys of a great man. Within two generations of Cosimo di Medici, you already had Lorenzo who basically squandered away the family fortune and the dynasty never really recovered (although that fortune was quite immense and served to buy us the renaissance).

But throughout history, the ruling class has been a memetic family much more than a genetic dynasty. One's genetic descendants are predictable, one's memetic descendants can crop up anywhere.

What are memes? Memes are 'self replicating ideas' coined and proposed by Richard Dawkins. So if a descendant is someone who bears in common a set of identical genes, a memetic descendant is going to be someone with a set of identical ideas.

Science gives us a good viewpoint, there's heaps of memetic ancestors, Des Cartes gave birth to a bunch of scientists that bore the 'light as particle' memes, Newton gave birth to a bunch of scientists that bore the 'light as wave' memes. The two competing families of memes fought like the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, until Einstein revealed the mutated meme 'light is like a particle and a wave' or 'photon' meme. (disclaimer, you shouldn't come to me for physics advice, it's been a long time since I studied it).

So too could you say loosely that Ceaser Augustus was a memetic descendant of Darius the Great, or Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan was a memetic ancestor of them. (except you probably couldn't because there was no meme connection that I'm aware of between the Mongolian Steps and the Meditaranean seas).

The point being that where one's memetic descendants will crop up is entirely random. Hence if you are a member of the ruling class, trying to errect a barrier whether it be a fortress of ancient times or the IMF and World Bank of the Modern era to lock any new members out, you inevitably will be handing the keys to the 'great beasts' you've been trying to keep out in the form of your genetically similar but memetically still born kid (George W Bush being a fine example) whilst locking out your rightful memetic heir who then becomes a disgruntled competitor.

I could suggest that those fighting against the 'ruling class' most effectively and passionatley are doing so because they are denied their opportunity to take their 'rightful place' but somehow I don't think that suggesting Noam Chomsky or Arundhati Roy are doing what they do because they have been denied the lavish lifestyles of the priveledged few doesn't really ring true.

What I'd be suggesting is the seemingly constant ability of random pockets of destitute oppressed to produce charismatic leaders that lead rebellions and revolutions against the ruling classes with varying degrees of success. Google may be taken as Microsofts memetic heir that succeeded in supplanting their canabalistic patriarch.

But where the whole 'ruling class' really goes wrong is that when painted into a corner, the memetic ancestors ruin the party by spoiling the punchline. They go and expose the secrets of rule to the great beast in a pyrrhic victory.

In time, if technology and information keep flowing, it will become increasingly hard to conceal the markets crimes from itself. Something that had it's hey day in the early 20th century, where south americans could be up to their ankles in mercury purifying silver and gold, and the pretty women that wore it half a world away had no idea, the jewellery untarnished by the inhumanity of its production. When one put a diamond ring on a finger half a century ago, one didn't get the hand amputated from a congalese slave by their warlord's gangsters taking a lead from their belgian forefathers.

As recently as a few years ago, chocolate lovers the world over were ignorant that cocoa was still harvested using slave labour. In other words it is hard to take the exploited amss known as the 'middle class' and employ them in propping up the upper class by using them to help drive the exploitation of the 'lower class' since now thanks to the internet and whatnot, we relatively all live on eachothers doorstop.

Which brings me full circle. The clash of memes and genes is what makes the ruling class fall short of 'the perfect crime' because their memetic heirs may crop up in the cradle of the mindless herd they have been most exploiting. The walls they erected to protect their genetic heirs cuts their progeny off from the vary world that stimulated their own memetic development.

What they want is not a system that I would tacitly suggest is designed so that their genetic heirs actually believe the memetic lies employed to curry popular opinion and secure their own rule, but one that provides the least resistance for their memetic heirs to supplant their genetic ones and inherit their command of resources. This is probably why the richest institutions in the world are private corporations and have generally been more successful as surviving as dynasties longer than many of the great family houses of history.

But it needs to go broader than the private sector, and thats way, in light of their being a ruling class, and from an ammoral perspective the system of rule (our currently flawed economics system) works well in concentrating wealth in the ruling classes hands, a fair and equitable system would most importantly provide what has always appealed to me about Henry George's crank theories, and that is equality of opportunity. A minimum of friction for those that want to take charge, because the smart have a bad habit of being stupid and handing the keys over to their kids, or turning to government to preserve a market for their product long after it stopped being of value to the human race.