Legal systems
The freedoms of citizens are determined by our legal systems, which act as an arbiter of last resort on what is acceptable behaviour. The laws themselves are nothing more than evolved memes and it is important to understand that, just like political systems, there is no inherent 'truth' in these legal systems. They are just an illusion that we have all agreed to participate in so that minor disputes might be resolved without recourse to weapons.
Children the world over are taught 'law-abiding' memes (albeit to different extents, as we will see in the section on culture) and so I'm willing to concede that there may be a genetic component to the tendency to follow society's rules. I am more interested in the nature of those rules, which spectacularly fail the test of universality, as anyone who has travelled extensively will know.
Laws and legal systems are nothing more than memeplexes that are copied (with mutation) from one culture to another, and disseminated by means of law schools.
There may be no underlying truth to legal systems, but that does not mean that you can ignore them with impunity. The legal system represents a set of memes that our society has agreed to be bound by - if you decide to flaunt them, you risk punishment by that society.
Consider the idea of property ownership: this is almost a universal concept, but it is entirely fictional and not at all 'natural' for a group of nomadic apes like us. At some point in the past, a big bloke with a sword put a rope around some land and said 'that's mine'. In time, this hallucination must have spread, and now society agrees that people can own land, to the point of empowering a land title office to record who owns what.
Of course, simple organisational structures such as dictatorships and tribes have no need of a legal system more complex than 'do what I say, or I'll have you killed'. Democracies, however, have created complex legal systems to protect them and to give the elected representatives something useful to do. Thus codified legal systems, as we recognise them, were born at the same time as democracy, about 2500 years ago.
They can be divided into several groupings:
- the first is civil law, where the legislative body sets the laws this structure is used almost everywhere in the world, albeit with several sub-variants;
- common law, where the legislative body sets the laws and the judiciary can change them by setting precedents : this is used in most of the English-speaking world; and
- ideologically-based law: these are a direct offspring of the ruling memeplex, and include Socialist law as used in China and religious legal codes such as the Sharia and Halacha.
Regardless of the type of legal system used, we have some common and very strong sets of memes here, such as a legislature to set the laws, a judiciary to implement them, often a jury to decide whether or not the law has been broken, police to catch lawbreakers, punishment, and (in common law codes but not in most civil law codes) the idea of adversarial prosecution. If convicted you face punishment, such as confiscation of goods (fines) or liberty (imprisonment). Confiscation of life, once common for minor crimes such as stealing, is becoming increasingly unusual.
Economies and economic fictions
As this site is about the practical uses of memetics, many of its readers are from the business community. I therefore want to talk about the sea of financial memes that our businesses swim in. We are all aware of the concept of an economy, a set of activities related to the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services.
The idea of an economy is pretty much universal - it is certainly as old as farming and we know that as soon as we were able to produce a surplus, we and looked around for something useful to do with it (and it's a shame that we invented useless layers of consumer like aristocracy and priesthoods). However, the nature of the economy and the rules that govern it are, once again, just a set of inherited values carried by memes.
Take money: Iron is a useful metal with many practical applications. It is strong and hard and you can build tools and machines with it. However, we decided to base our financial systems on Gold, which has relatively few practical applications. And those coloured scraps of paper and discs of metal in your pocket have no practical applications at all, and even less intrinsic value than they would in their raw form.
If we all woke up one morning and decided to base our economy on the intrinsic value of commodities, we would choose to trade in derivatives of oil or iron, and those holding gold would see how truly worthless it is. In short, money is useless: there is no way that you will persuade anyone to take a few pieces of paper in return for a six-pack of beer, unless everyone believes the pieces of paper are of value. So money, like the legal and political systems, is another of our consensual hallucinations. A day's work in the factory is worth about twenty six-packs, but these are difficult to carry home, so we take the coloured paper instead and hope it holds its value.
We inherit from others our belief in that money has value and that economies are real, and the carriers for these beliefs are therefore memetic in nature. If we stopped believing, say, that the loans behind Collateralised Debt Obligations were any good, why then the whole economy might collapse! Oh, wait, it did...
Not every society uses the same coloured pieces of paper, so we need the concept of exchange rates. For many complex reasons, the value of things relative to each other changes over time, which introduces the concept of inflation. That means that our six-pack of beer and its surrogate (money) isn't worth what it used to be so we need to introduce a whole load of other time-based concepts like loans, interest, futures and credit cards. Then we get into corporate ownership (another meme) which carries with it loads of other memes such as shares, dividends, stock exchanges etc and required the development of a regulating memeplex called accountancy, which carries concepts like fixed costs, accruals, depreciation and profits. There is also a suicide meme called bankruptcy that kills companies if they run short of pieces of paper.
The importance to us of these memeplexes is evident by the emergence of standards and regulatory frameworks, such as the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, to ensure their copy fidelity and act as an immune system. These frameworks are tied into the legal memeplex and if you don't follow the rules you get sent to prison.
The financial services industry, of vast importance to most developed nations, exists to exploit an imperfect understanding of these complex memes, and the stock market is as much a weighing machine for memes as it is for true corporate value. The near collapse of the global banking system in 2008 was because confidence was lost in the banking system, because people defected from the idea that loans were safe investments. And a large proportion of most corporation's share prices is made up of intangible value, an attempt to place value on concepts such as 'goodwill', customer loyalty, innovation, patents etc - and if you are starting to say that these aren't memes, ask yourself if there is any underlying truth in these things, or if they are just valuable because people believe in them.