The idea of memes is disconcerting. What if culture – even consciousness itself – were nothing more than an artifact of the interaction of “selfish memes, ideas capable of replicating and co-evolving with supreme indifference to their impact on human hosts? A meme-focused vision of culture and consciousness acknowledges that memes are not mere random results of the human experience but powerful control mechanisms that impose a largely invisible deep structure on a wide range of complex phenomena – language, scientific thinking, political behavior, productive work, religion, philosophical discourse, even history itself. A collection of memes might produce the paradigms that form the basis of any science and discipline. By the same token, a series a memes might create and support an ideology. Therefore raising some questions: How are these memes created? by who? under what circonstances? Is is possible to create memes: crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones? What if it were possible to construct a new science of the meme – memetic engineering – analogous to the discipline of genetic engineering? Such a science would allow us to manipulate memes and achieve consistent and predictable cultural manifestations?
• source: Meme • Cross-Ref: Paradigm • See also XlnkS52C