Harming strangers

Meme is a useful modern word isn’t it? From Wikipedia:-

A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." 

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

So obviously there are meme-carriers too. In the case of political memes the carriers are rather like Typhoid Mary but more harmful and less easy to deal with by incarceration, although the idea is undeniably attractive. The Typhoid Mary analogy is quite strong because I’m sure there is often a touch of malice too, a furtive desire to harm strangers.

Harming strangers though? Is that really what political meme-carriers do?

Well I think it’s what some of them do, especially in the broader political arena. Maybe it’s the primitive warlike aspect of politics this need to harm outsiders. An ancient first strike philosophy perhaps.

So where are meme-carriers taking us these days? Progressive meme-carriers with their fascist politics lurking like hungry piranha in the shallows of a collective soul? Because their hunger does seem to be pack-like. Or maybe that should be shoal-like if I stick with the piranha metaphor.

To my mind, most seem to be politically correct pseudo innocents who have imbibed the head rotting fears of Malthusian finger-pointing - as yet without an armband. So we end up imbecilities such as the furtive malice behind climate change where bad people supposedly cause bad weather and lots of other nasty things too.

What does it all imply for those the climate meme-carriers seek to harm? That’s you and I by the way.

Well I’m sure hardly anyone has ever believed the strong climate stuff, the swivel-eyed greenhouse doom-rants from uncertified loons. I’m sure it grew from Malthusian memes which have been with us since the late eighteenth century.

The core Malthusian meme infecting many policies and many areas of life is of course a fear of over-population. Too many people is the partly covert cry. That’s the root cause of the impersonal harm we are talking about here. Not just harming strangers, but reducing our teeming numbers by means as yet to be admitted. Energy starvation perhaps?

In the deepest, darkest recesses of their minds, I think many carriers of the Malthusian meme wish we were far fewer in number but do not really know how to articulate their totalitarian yearnings.

Who goes and who stays for example.

Malthusians - still ghastly

Sir David Attenborough on the need to control the global human population. Malthusian fear is over two hundred years old and all those earnest faces in Sir David's congregation suggest it isn't going away any time soon.

As with so many fears, fear of over-population it is somewhat irrational but also has a certain appeal. In many daily situations there are too many people. Traffic jams, crowded cities, crowded beauty spots, crowded beaches and so on and so on. It feels wrong to me too, but not all that wrong. It's supportable.

As I see it, there is an obvious problem in making a political issue of it. As ever it's the people. Take a look at the list of patrons for Population Matters, a list headed by Sir David. 

Paul Ehrlich for example - world class expert in being wrong. For me it's the company these people keep as much as anything else. It's not their ghastly self-importance - I can live with that.