Memetic Immunity

A few pages ago, we identified that we have hundreds of memes thrown at us every hour, many of them new and worth considering. In order to avoid being overwhelmed we have evolved a set of mental filters, in the same way we have evolved a mechanism that limits the uptake of potentially nasty genes from viruses.

So we are not swept away by the quantity of memes coming at us every waking hour for the same reason that we are not killed by every sniffle we catch: we have an immune system. 

Our mental immune system stops us from adopting some very bad ideas. To quote Brodie (1996), ‘you don’t immediately know whether the programming you get from a given mind virus is harmful or beneficial.  Nobody ever joined a religious cult with the intention of getting brainwashed, moving to Guyana and committing suicide’.

It turns out that organisations have an immune system too, and that the strength of the immune system is one of the principal determinants of organisational health – too strong and the organisation is unable to change or adapt to new situations, too weak and it is wracked with fads and political infighting.  You see this immune system in action every time you hear the phrase ‘the way we do things round here’, and we will explore these ideas in more detail on this site.

Over the next few pages of this site we will look at how to weaken this mental immune system and how to slip memes past it so that they become part of the new organisational programming.  For now, trust me when I say that the chances of a meme being accepted are greater if:
  • it supports our genetic drives to eat, to reproduce, to hunt and to find shelter;
  • the idea is new, but not radically so, and comes from a source we respect;
  • the idea is simply presented and self-consistent (repetition also helps, if the idea is new);
  • the meme seems ‘true’, by which I mean that it fits into the set of memes we already run. This is why we would reject ideas that Zebras are pink or that God is an octopus;
  • the memes carry an emotional resonance – they make us feel better or play to our fears.
With simple memes, acceptance is entirely an unconscious process – we just find ourselves humming the Macarena after hearing it on the radio enough times.  For more complex memes, we have to go through a conscious process of evaluation and consistency checking which we call ‘thinking’.
Next: Ethos, pathos and logos; or a memetic lifecycle; or more on the criteria for meme spread
Can't catch me