Decluttering your mind
Question why you believe
Systematically identifying and questioning the memes you are running is difficult, but in my experience it is worth trying. In that same way that we can identify that the most successful organisations are those with a simple and consistent set of memes, we can imagine that the happiest, most stable people will be those with a simple and consistent set of mental memes. Therefore, eliminating useless memes should lead to a clearer, less stressful life.
That raises a question of what a ‘useless’ meme is. We identified that there is no point in discussing whether a meme is ‘good’, ‘moral’ or ‘true’, all that really matters is whether or not the memes replicate and whether or not they stick.
All we can do is to identify whether our set of memes is consistent with reality and supportive of a worthwhile life.
The first test here is whether these memes are consistent with reality- in other words, is there anything, other than your belief in them, that would indicate that they are ‘true’. For me, the next test is that they are valuable (according to whatever mechanism you use to ascribe value), and the final test is that they do no harm to others.
If you've read the section on religion, it won't come as a surprise to you that I am an atheist, and that's because I have not found a religion that passes even one of these tests: many religious beliefs are demonstrably false and religion has caused untold harm throughout history….and I don't even think that it's particularly valuable, except to those who struggle to cope with reality,
And that leads me to say that this process of questioning your internal programming may, of course, cause you to realise that your religion, ambition, political belief or whatever it is that has been driving you all these years, enslaves rather than liberates you. I’m not going to apologise for that: every belief we hold that is not true prevents us from seeing things that are true.
Similarly, if you know what you want out of life, then you can take a look at your beliefs and decide if these memes help you get there or if they limit you - remember, they are just imitated fragments of information and only some of them will have a basis in reality.
‘What you want’ will differ from person to person (as we saw with the previous section on nurses and lawyers) and from culture to culture (as we saw in the articles on culture and national identity), but remember that it’s your choice how to spend your life, not your society’s.
This not a call to abandon absolutely everything that you believe in. After all, I run ‘cricket’ and ‘constitutional monarchy’ memes. Both of these are arguably useless, but I run them anyway as they are mostly harmless. The important thing is that I made a choice to accept them, rather than being unknowingly controlled by them.
Prune your memes
Mentally walking away from your beliefs is difficult, and you may need some help pruning your memes. A structured form of pruning is cognitive therapy, an increasingly common treatment for depression, anxiety disorders and phobias. The idea here is that our thoughts drive our beliefs, which in turn drive our behaviours and our biological responses, rather than the traditional psychiatric view that behaviours drive our beliefs.
Cognitive therapy, originally developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s and neatly summed up in the best-selling textbook Mind Over Mood by Greenberger and Padesky (1995), is more than just ‘positive thinking’: it leads you to identify the core beliefs that are making you unhappy and then actively examine the evidence for and against those beliefs. Identifying and replacing false beliefs is a tremendously effective form of therapy against depression, and examination of actions and their causes is a useful treatment for problems caused by feelings of anger, guilt and shame.
There are approaches to meme pruning other than this highly analytical one. Sue Blackmore, the high priestess of memetics, is a Buddhist, and she has written an essay called Consciousness in Meme Machines (2003) on the experience of meditation as a meme-weeding technique, designed to let go of thought and leave only sensory experience. She reports that the ‘sense of self’ disappears with repeated meditation.
Avoid bad ideas
Even if you do not wish to evaluate the things you already believe in, you should certainly test new memes you are exposed to - memetic infections can be as destructive as biological ones.
Similarly, I think that as individuals we should take care to only spread memes that we want the world to have more of. Challenge the chain letters (literal and figurative) that we are exposed to every day of our lives. Refuse to pass on bad or false ideas, and educate the people who passed them onto you in the principles of memetic hygiene - even better, point them at this site.
Just as we should avoid bad memes, perhaps we should avoid more< memes. The process of assessing incoming ideas is not cost-free: even if cognitive dissonance can be avoided, we would expect people exposed to a lot of memes - the highly social, those who read newspapers, watch television etc. - to be overloaded with potential change. They would suffer from tension far more than, say, someone living in a Benedictine monastery who runs a much less diverse set of mental programmes.
I'm not saying this is easy but you have the potential to put aside the baggage that your parents and teachers gave you, to reject the values that others are trying to impose on you. There’s not much you can do about your genes but at least you can choose what software you want to run in that organic computer of yours.
Make the choice. Believe less.