Beyond Selfishness

Fourth Revision

Kelly Olds

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Introduction

Like many people, when I was young, the thought struck me that everything that anyone ever did was always selfish. This had to be true: If someone does something, it can only be because he wants to do it, and he is thus acting selfishly. If a saint chooses to give all his goods to feed the poor, he does this to satisfy some urge and, therefore, he is acting for his own happiness. It may be that he covets treasures in heaven, that he is masochistic, that he wished to relieve feelings of guilt, that he values the poor’s gratitude, that he wants to be considered a good man, etc., but he does have some motive and since it is his motive, it can be considered a selfish motive. This seemed a rather clever idea at the time and for a while I thought myself quite the philosopher.

This idea seemed a bit stale by the time I had become an economist, but my studies seemed to reinforce this general view. Economists work with models that assume individuals maximize their utility. Most economists have no interest in philosophically examining what utility actually is, but they assume that everything humans consume or experience give them some sort of utility, positive or negative, and that humans try to amass as much positive utility as they can. An economist need not argue that humans are selfish in a narrow sense. Most admit the possibility of saintliness but deal with it in the same way as I had always dealt with it. It is assumed that the saint must receive some utility from giving away his goods to the poor and, therefore, he is maximizing his utility in the same way as the narrowly selfish would do. He merely has different values or tastes than those of the narrowly selfish.

Sociobiologists take selfishness further than this common-sense view. Their work seems to show that selfishness in a very narrow sense must prevail outside the family. They grant that unselfish behavior between genetic relatives can be useful in the struggle for existence, but a life-form that would habitually sacrifice its own welfare to help unrelated individuals without gaining anything for itself in return could not succeed in the struggle to survive. Unselfish behavior, such as that typified by saintliness, may arise but it is always an exception which will be weeded out in the long run. The most one can expect from a creature shaped by evolution is tit-for-tat cooperation—I will scratch your back if you will scratch mine.

Many people are critical of the view that people are selfish in the narrow sense

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sociobiology seems to suggest. Critics rightly point to numerous examples of behavior that do not seem narrowly selfish. Few of these critics, however, have a convincing theory as to how real unselfish behavior can thrive in an evolutionary environment.

Critics of the broader common sense view of selfishness, on the other hand, generally do not dispute the truth of this theory, but simply dismiss it as trivial and uninteresting. They argue that if selfishness is taken so broadly as to mean “doing whatever one chooses to do” then unselfishness is naturally impossible by definition. Calling a person selfish because he does what he chooses to do is a childish waste of breath since there is no conceivable alternative to this overly broad definition of selfishness.

This book argues that the broader common sense view of human selfishness, far from being trivial, is incorrect. The narrow sociobiological view, although offering some important insights, is even more mistaken. These views painfully distort our understanding of the world and slow our human progress.

Once one understands why the common sense view of selfishness and the sociobiological argument for narrow selfishness are faulty, one can begin to determine the forms human unselfishness will take. Areas in which human unselfishness will be more or less intense can be identified and the effects of this unselfishness can be studied. Understanding our human unselfishness should be important not only to the scientist but to the man in the street as well. Most of the important decisions one makes in life, whether they concern family, business, politics or religion, are ultimately based on one’s view of human nature. If one’s view is incorrect, one will make wrong decisions. Understanding unselfishness is particularly important given the troubles our mistaken view of selfishness has caused us throughout history.

The selfishness mankind perceives shapes civilization. History shows that mankind has never been able to comfortably accept the selfishness he seems to observe. Major world religions treat selfishness as part of mankind’s fundamental nature. Buddhism teaches that man is born with an unselfish Buddha-nature which is unfortunately confused by the illusions of this world. Selfishness, thus, is something that our ignorance imposes upon us, but it can be overcome. The Christian doctrine is different but it too sees the original nature of unfallen man as unselfish. Selfishness entered the human world through an unnatural rebellion against God. Both of these religions, and most other religions, are skeptical of humanity as it is commonly found. It is interesting, however, that religions do commonly claim the existence of an underlying natural unselfishness of some form. People have generally believed that mankind should be capable of unselfishness. Although to most people, selfish interest appears to be the ruler of this world, the

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human spirit so rebels at this condition that the ruler has never been legitimized. Attempts to establish a simple straightforward unselfish human brotherhood have

been numerous and often noble. Occasionally they have even had a partial success. Increasingly, however, the dark side of such efforts has become apparent. Our sense of selfish uncleanliness has directly led to the great tragedies of the twentieth century. The Communist, Fascist and Nazi movements have all been based on the denunciation of grasping individualism. They have sought salvation in unselfish solidarity either of class, nation or race. Many dream of a universal ideology based on this type of unselfish solidarity which would wield power for the benefit of humankind. Unable to tolerate the narrow selfish individualist games which modern capitalist society seems to offer, such people long for escape. Those that gain fulfillment and enjoyment from individualist games are accused, occasionally with justice, of being shallow.

Mankind is, and always has been, troubled by his selfishness. Selfishness has appeared to be both unavoidable and wrong. This predicament has left a long ugly scar across the face of modern culture. If nothing else our dreams have been unselfish, but our evolving society has not been in harmony with such utopian dreams. From childhood, we learn to compete for individual advantage often in ways that hurt people we like. We feel the mismatch between dream and reality intensify as society becomes more fluid and anonymous, less tribal and neighborly. We spend an increasing amount of time scheming for the sake of personal advantage. In our idealistic moments, this makes us feel unworthy. We perceive selfishness and are ashamed.

To overcome such feelings, some have attempted the ennoblement of selfishness. They see that our “selfishness” is necessary for life in the modern world and, therefore, argue that it must be good. If selfishness can be ugly, they point out, self-abasement can be even more so. Arguments along this line contain partial truth and are useful. Finally, however they ring hollow. We are not the selfish creatures we imagine ourselves to be and we can not finally accept selfishness as beautiful.

Our basic misunderstanding of the human condition is putting a ceiling on our cultural progress and constantly threatens what we have already achieved. Piercing the veil of selfishness is critical at this point in history. Most of the selfishness we seem to see, both within ourselves and as exhibited by others, is illusionary. We have learned to play numerous games in which we aggressively pursue our own self-interest but, whether we understand it or not, these games have evolved from the largely unselfish interplay of human minds. Such games are just games.

My arguments for this position are short and simple. Most of the points have been raised by others, some of whom may strongly disagree with my overall thesis.

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I have not the sort of mind which can trace back and footnote the origin of each thought but I have tried to list some of the more important thinkers in a bibliographical note at the end of the work. Although few of the ideas are new, they have implications which need to be much more widely understood.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, I show how unselfishness evolves. Biologists have argued that evolution will weed out individuals who are altruistic toward those who are not genetically related. This argument is true when the variation and selection that drive evolution is based on the gene. Unlike animal societies, however, human societies are largely shaped by cultural evolution. We do not inherit our behavior but learn it from others. The predominance of a behavior in human society will depend upon the ability of the thought patterns behind the behavior to propagate themselves; therefore, the behavioral thought patterns which predominate in society will not be those which most benefit the individual who holds them or that individual’s genes, but those thought patterns which best propagate themselves. Thus, cultural evolution creates a situation in which unselfish behavior between people related, or even potentially related, by behavioral traits is common. A person should not be viewed as a selfish individual, but as a committee of behavioral patterns, each pattern having its own goals which transcend the individual.

Showing the possibility of unselfishness is important, but most people do not believe mankind selfish based solely on biological argument. Most believe mankind is selfish simply based on observation. In the second section of the book, I argue that this observation is incorrect. People spend most of their time pursuing self-interest not because they are selfish but because each individual’s knowledge of the world is so limited. In some situations, the needs of our others are urgent and obvious and it is in just such situations that we are most clearly unselfish. In most cases, however, we have only a very imperfect guess as to what the needs of those around us actually are and which of these needs are most important in the long run. Such being the case, successful cultures are those in which complex games have evolved which allow individuals to do great good for society by concentrating their efforts within the tiny sphere in which they are most knowledgeable, commonly themselves and those closest to them.

Games of this type have evolved through trial and error. Only bits and fragments were consciously designed. We rely on these games but, unfortunately, we do not understand them. They still savor of uncleanliness. Until we understand and accept them, they will continue to make us feel petty. This second section deals first with voluntary cooperation which makes use of games of self-interest and then with how violence and government arise. It goes on to review some of the most obvious

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evidence for our unselfishness and explores its limits. Finally, it examines why under such circumstances our unselfishness is often hidden even to ourselves.

In the last section, I consider the implications of mankind’s largely unselfish nature. I believe a conscious acceptance of mankind’s nature would greatly, albeit gradually, change our society. Such change would not be without dangers but in the long run it could raise human civilization to a higher level. If our moral understanding does not advance, human civilization will stagnate. The “selfish” cooperation which humanity has evolved is nobler than the primitive solidarity we still cling to in our utopian visions. The tragedy of the modern world is not that we have failed to live up to our old ideals but that we have lived past them.

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Section I The Evolution of Unselfishness

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Chapter 1

Memes and Genes Physically, man is genetically-based creature. All of Earth’s life forms are

based on genes. Genes can be imagined as very complex programs that instruct the cells how to reproduce so as to build a biological machine. This program contains unimaginably vast amounts of information. Genes determine a human body’s design. They are passed on from parents to children. Genes are the sole means through which we inherit our parents’ physical traits.

Many people who have a passing acquaintance with biology think of genes as a sort of tool that an animal or plant uses to propagate itself. Sometimes this is a convenient way of thinking, but the relationship is actually the reverse. According to the logic of genetics, animals and plants are the tools which genes use to propagate themselves. This is more than just a chicken-and-egg problem. A gene can pass from individual to individual over many generations. The population of genes, thus, evolves through a continuing process of selection and variation. The genes that will be most successful in spreading themselves are those which can produce the plants and animals most useful to genetic propagation. The individual plants and animals do not evolve. Each individual is just a one-shot phenomenon.

Since the gene is the unit that evolves, it is the gene that is selfish. Genes are selfish in a special sense. Since genes do not “act,” they can not really act selfishly. Individual genes are simply partial blueprints for the creation of creatures. Over time, these blueprints have mutated randomly and produced many variations. The great majority of variations have died out. Only those variations survive which, in conjunction with other genes, produce creatures that prove capable gene propagators. This selection process has lasted billions of years. As a result, genes produce creatures almost as if the genes were acting to design the creature that would most efficiently serve the gene’s own need to multiply itself. As a side-effect, this creature will be designed so as to look after its own welfare. The creature is useless to the gene’s purpose if it can not itself survive.

The genetic creature, however, will not be designed to put its own survival ahead of the genes’. The creature is simply the genes’ carrier. Genes design animals that

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are genetically altruistic. The animals will sacrifice themselves for the sake of the genes’ survival. Even a simple animal will risk its own survival to produce offspring. More complex animals will sacrifice their own welfare for the welfare of offspring already born. A bear may risk her life to protect her cub. The instinct that drives her to this arose as a random genetic mutation. Since those genes which carried this mutation had an advantage, these genes gradually came to dominate the population.

There is nothing too mysterious about the process of evolution. The details of genetic evolution are still not well understood but the basic process of evolution—variation and selection—is a simple powerful tool for explaining the world around us, biological and otherwise. Evolutionary models have been used to understand the formation of phenomena ranging from galaxies to the human economy. Wherever units vary in ways that will affect their survival, those units will survive which happen to fit in best with the surrounding conditions. The conditions will allow one to predict what sort of units will remain in existence. These units will appear “selfish” in that they make the best use of their surroundings in maintaining or propagating themselves. Genetic evolution is merely that form of evolution which has been most studied by scientists.

Genetic theory works well in explaining animal behavior but does not seem to explain human behavior very well. Human life no longer seems to revolve around biological reproduction. Humans certainly do have a sex drive and they show paternal or maternal instinct but these, though important, are no longer the central facts of human existence. Some schools of psychoanalysis make very strong claims for the preeminence of the sex drive, but even if the sex drive were somehow the central factor in human behavior, it is no longer tightly linked to reproduction. Many people view pregnancy as merely a troublesome complication that can result from sex if one is not careful.

Some social scientists have explained the movement away from reproduction as a change of emphasis: a strategic move away from raising a large quantity of children toward raising fewer “high quality” children. The argument can be made that genes are spread more effectively under modern circumstances when parents produce a small number of children and then invest heavily in these children’s health and education. Genes have programmed their carriers to recognize this fact and these individuals act accordingly. But this still leaves much unexplained. A significant number of people are not interested in having children at all. Americans now put many resources into maintaining the lifestyle of elderly people long past their child raising years. The elderly may be useful to children but if this were the purpose of the resources invested one would assume the resources would come from families who could make the support conditional on help to the children. Instead, the money

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comes primarily from retirement funds and the government thus assuring older people of their independence.

Another puzzling phenomenon to those who wish to explain human behavior in genetic terms is the adoption of children. Adoption is one of the clearest cases in which the genetic drive to reproduce is foiled and the impulse it produces is used for a purpose in almost complete opposition to the gene’s welfare. This does not necessarily bother scientists who study human behavior within a biological framework. Biological evolution is slow and no one has ever claimed that genes are omnipotent. In a quickly changing society, the creatures that genes have developed over millions of years will not always react to new possibilities in ways that would be to their genes’ advantage. The question remains, however, what is it that is taking advantage of such weaknesses in our genetic programs?

To understand human action and human society, one must understand that the human mind is meme-based. The “meme” is a concept created by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins. He defines a meme as a unit of information residing in the brain which manifests and propagates itself in the form of learned behavior. What makes the meme important is that like the gene it evolves and, therefore, like the gene it has an independent life of its own. Richard Dawkins’ example of a meme in the animal world is learned bird song. Some songbirds exist which do not have a pre-programmed tune hard-wired into their brain. As they mature, they learn a tune from a neighboring bird of their own species. Usually, this tune will be learned correctly but sometimes a bird will make a mistake and a new tune will be produced. This is the variation necessary for an evolutionary process to occur. Selection comes about due to the many neighbors to which each bird is exposed. It is not clear why one bird chooses one tune over another. There is no obvious genetic advantage at stake. The bird simply adopts the tune that is somehow catchiest. Thus, over the centuries the catchiest tunes, at least to the birds’ ears, survive.

A more complex animal meme is manifested in the use of twigs by chimpanzees to fish termites out of termite hills. This is not an instinctive behavior passed on from parent to offspring through the genes. It is a socially learned behavior, an activity the chimpanzee picks up from others in its group. As centuries have passed, one can imagine this behavior becoming increasingly refined. Chimps could copy the termite-fishing behavior from other chimps occasionally introducing changes. The changes would not be purposeful; they are simply random. A chimp may use a stick of a somewhat different shape or strip off some twigs. If this variation happens to be advantageous, the chimp will do better than other chimps and will attract more imitators. The information pattern in the chimp’s brain that causes this behavior will spread quicker than less effective variations of the meme and increased efficiency will

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result. Other factors besides the usefulness of the meme, however, will affect its spread.

A meme which causes more highly visible behavior, such as the use of a bigger stick, may spread easier than memes that produce more useful behavior. Those memes will come to dominate in the chimp population that are best able to spread themselves for any reason. The most obvious advantage a meme can create for itself is to make the creature which carries it more successful but even in a simple case such as using sticks to fish out termites, other advantages such as visibility are possible.

Richard Dawkins thus has not only added to our knowledge of genetic evolution: he has extended some of the insight gained from the study of biological evolution to social systems generally. Social scientists developed the concept of evolution long before Darwin, but the study of evolution in human society has lacked the clear system that typifies evolutionary studies in the biological field. Researchers have been unable to identify what the unit of evolution in society actually was. Most researchers have studied social evolution as if it occurred at the level of the individual or the group. The idea that evolution is actually occurring at the level of the behavioral pattern within individual minds is still little understood. This key insight clarifies many puzzles in human behavior and will be looked back on as one of the most creative and important insights of the twentieth century. It has not received all the attention it deserves because Richard Dawkins and those he has primarily influenced study the animal world. Memes in the animal world are trivially simple, and comparatively uninteresting, when compared with those of humans.

Since memes evolve, they are nor mere tools. They can, in a sense, fight back. Through evolution, genes come to make use of a memetic-based behavior, but at the same time the meme population will be evolving as various memes develop new strategies to better use the genetically-based creatures to propagate the memes themselves. The relation is a two-way street. Memes, as Richard Dawkins insists, are alive in a true sense of the word. In the animal world, the life of a meme is extremely simple and for this reason Richard Dawkins’ colleagues have not taken the life of memes very seriously. The relation between bird and bird song may be technically interactive but it is a very one-sided interaction. The birds’ genes seems very much in control. When one turns one’s sight to the human world, however, the picture is dramatically different.

In the human world, there is a broad range in the complexity of memes. A musical tune is a simple meme that is somewhat similar to bird song. It takes residence in a human brain and manifests itself in whistling and humming or under certain circumstances in written musical notation. A tune may propagate itself from my neighbor’s brain to my own through his whistling. I will then have the tune

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lodged in my head and my humming may spread it to a friend. I have an imperfect musical ear and may hum the tune incorrectly. This will probably make people less likely to acquire the tune from me but there is some chance that my mistake will make the tune more attractive and the new version will eventually come to dominate.

The development of tunes in this fashion may be common in a traditional society, but the modern world is more complex. Individuals with a special musical talent evolve most tunes. They toss together fragments of old tunes varying them about in their head or on a keyboard until they think they have a tune infectious enough to sell. Musical variation commonly involves partial imitation of other related tunes. For this reason, memetic evolution occurs quickest in a rich environment where there is much related memetic code to be borrowed. Selection is first based on the appeal of the tune to some musically-inclined composer and then finally it is subjected to selection in the market. Memes that manifest themselves as tunes in the human world are thus more interesting and complex than bird song, but are still relatively simple.

The evolution of even such simple memes as tunes is not just determined by what people find immediately most appealing. Technology strongly influences what musical memes will survive. If tunes are commonly spread by the sales of sheet music to people who own musical instruments such as pianos, then the complexity of the tunes is restricted. More importantly, since each person must invest some time in learning to play each tune, the tunes must have a subtle appeal that will last even after much repetition. When tunes can be spread by radio, tunes that have an immediate impact gain advantage. A tune that grows old after several weeks of air time, can still be successful. These quick tunes could push complex tunes that take weeks to grow accustom to off the air. Technology also affects the popularity of tunes through the instruments it makes available. A tune that may be attractive on an electric guitar may not be as effective on a piano.

Most importantly, it is the tunes themselves that shape our tastes. Whether or not we like a tune primarily depends on the tunes to which we have been exposed in the past. A musical tradition, whether it be rock or classical, succeeds if it can create a taste in the listener for more of the same type of music. Successful musical styles are those which evolve ways of manipulating the brain. Music uses us for its own survival as much as we use it. Music does this not because it has a will of its own which plans strategies for controlling our minds. Its “behavior” has simply been shaped by the forces of evolution. Those musical styles which stumbled upon effective ways of using the human brain survived. Those that did not, are extinct or soon will be.

Examples of other simple memes are numerous. A chess opening is a simple

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meme. It is varied by forgetfulness, whimsy or deliberate experimentation. It is selected according to how well it wins games and also its beauty and apparent cleverness. Occupational skills are memes. They may be picked up from a book or instructor but more commonly are simply imitated on the job. In a competitive environment, they are selected primarily for how well they get the job done. But their beauty or cleverness may play a role in the selection process.

The book you are reading is a carrier for a more complex set of memes which I feel particularly important. I am not sure where they all came from or how it came about that they parasitized my genetically-created brain. I am not sure how much they have mutated in my mind and how much I am simply passing them on. They seem to have been selected for this book because they activated a desire I have to influence others and they stimulated something that caused me to consider them important. A fantastic array of ideas are constantly in a struggle to propagate themselves in human minds and whether the ideas in this book will find a way through the next selection process into the minds of readers is unknown to me.

The memes I wish to emphasize are the large-scale meme complexes that form the overall shape of our lives. These are the memes that are important as far as understanding human unselfishness is concerned. Punk culture, French culture and Seventh-Day Adventism are examples of such. I will refer to the memetic complex behind something like French culture as a meme although this is using the word loosely. French culture is a complex produced by many related memes. This usage is similar to that of biologists who will speak off-handedly of a gene for height when actually dozens of individual genes may go into determining a person’s stature. Complex memes cause very flexible complex patterns of behavior. They produce an intricate pattern of rules and drives.

A complex meme, such as Seventh-Day Adventism, can be considered a living entity. It is not alive in any mystical sense, but it evolves, it propagates itself and reacts to changes in its environment. It began as a mishmash of simpler memes that had been thrown together. Complex memes generally arise in such fashion, but seldom do they manage to infect more than a few human brains before ending in an obscure extinction. Those that survive only do so by evolving. They develop methods of spreading to other human brains, increasing the welfare and survivability of the humans already infected, protecting these humans from infections of rival memes and perhaps even attracting useful complementary memes to share the human brain as good neighbors. Seventh-Day Adventism is an interesting case because it came so close to extinction. An early technique which it developed for attracting converts was to create a crisis atmosphere by predicting an eminent end to the world. When the end did not come as predicted, a crisis within the denomination ensued

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which could have easily led to the denomination’s extinction. Extinction was avoided through the evolution of a modified message accompanied by new techniques of gaining believers.

Memes that manifest themselves in cultures, religions and ideologies undergo variation and selection at two levels. On one level, they clash with rival memes in the search for converts. For example, an individual may be confronted with a choice between Catholicism and communism. Both exist in the world because they have been more successful propagating themselves than such memes as Viking cults or utopian socialisms. On another level, there is evolution due to competition between variants within a meme-type. Both Catholicism and communism originally began as one variation among many within a larger belief system. They were selected because they had more effective methods of making use of humans than other variations. Today, there are many shades of Catholicism and communism that compete within the movements. In a country split between Catholicism and communism, one would expect that those variations of Catholicism that were most efficient at converting communists and holding on to already converted Catholic minds would flourish. Any variation of Catholicism that could not hold converts who faced a communist appeal would quickly disappear in a communist country although it might flourish in other places.

An unsuccessful variant need not be completely eliminated without progeny. A trait has evolved among complex memes giving them the ability to imitate the successful. Simple memes undergo variation by imitating other memes randomly. Memetic programming in a complex meme allows the meme to imitate neighboring successful memes in a more directed fashion. The development of this ability was surely one of the most important events in prehistory. Memetic evolution is fiercely competitive and resembles biological evolution in many of its aspects but differences are also significant. Memetic adaptation and propagation seems more flexible and complex than what one observes in the genetic world.

The human being can be seen as a symbiosis. Genes have produced our hardware. Memes have determined out software. Obviously humanity as we know it could not exist without a genetic base, but this does not mean that we are genetic creatures. A person without memes would be a person who exhibited no learned behavior and acted completely on instinct. Such a creature would be practically helpless in modern society. Animals do exist that are incapable of learning but their genes have developed a hard-wired behavioral system that humanity no longer possesses. We identify with our body because it seems tangible and relatively unchanging, but in many ways we identify even more with our memes. We can imagine living on after the death of our bodies much easier than we can imagine

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living on without our thoughts. Once, long ago, there were human ancestors who were purely genetic creatures.

A gene arose which allowed the creatures it created to use simple memes. This variation must have survived because it helped the gene to spread itself. At such a stage, memes were largely tools of genes with no significant independence. What was true in the past, however, is no longer true. The meme has been the dominant force in human life since at least the dawn of civilization. The situation somewhat resembles that portrayed in old science fiction movies in which aliens from outer space seize control of human minds. Our minds have been colonized and taken over by memes and to identify the modern human as a genetic creature is to completely misunderstand our nature. It is almost as if a colony of termites were to imagine itself a tree because it happened to be living in a tree trunk.

Genes have been outdone by their own creation because memetic evolution, i.e. cultural evolution, occurs far faster than genetic evolution in human society. The speed of evolution is crucial to survival and control in an evolving environment. Genetic creatures are in a constantly changing competition. Consider the example of a tapeworm that infests the human digestive track. Humans continually evolve better defenses against such infestation, but the tapeworms also evolve better means of attack. Biologists refer to such a competition as an arms race. There is no certain way of predicting which side will win an arms race and victory is seldom complete, but it is obvious that all things being equal the species that evolves fastest will have a definite advantage.

In the arms race between human memes and genes, the memes that infest our brains have an extraordinary advantage. Ten thousand years is a short span in genetic time. A superficial examination will show that the human gene population has only undergone limited change over the last ten thousand years. Meanwhile, the human meme population has undergone an almost unimaginable revolution. It has evolved ways of manipulating genetically produced impulses using methods against which genes had never needed to develop defenses. Memes have won the race for control of the human species, blowing past genes as if the genes were standing still. The genes that created creatures with a memetic capacity gained at least a short-term advantage over other genes, but they unleashed a force beyond their power to control. Genetic engineering, a memetically created technique, potentially makes memetic dominance of the human species final.

One indication of memetic dominance is obtained from observing our emotions. What really makes people happy? Personal success certainly gives pleasure but this says little since personal success is beneficial both to our memes and genes. We do gain pleasure from observing the success of those genetically related but we gain even

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more pleasure from the success of our memetic relatives. Much of our love for our genetic relatives stems from the fact that they also are memetically related.

We love our genetic children deeply but do we love our adopted children less? Children are adopted so as to carry on our memes for there are some memes that can only be spread by close long-term contact such as a parent-child relationship. Much of the love for our own genetic children is sparked not so much by the physical similarity but by the memetically-acquired mannerisms they have picked up from us. A genetic relative is often disliked if his or her memes clash with ours. Children with objectionable memes are sometimes disowned. The drive to physically reproduce is no longer simply genetic.

I do not wish to suggest that genes no longer have influence. If one had raised an adopted child from infancy and was then suddenly confronted with a “natural” genetic child from which one had been separated at birth, one would feel emotionally torn. I believe after the initial shock most people would eventually realize that they were emotionally closer to the child they had raised.

Memetic relatives we have never met play a large role in our loves. We are happy when a political party we favor wins an election although the election may have no direct impact on us. We are gratified that our church has won new converts. We band together in clubs and societies which may have no more serious purpose than collecting stamps or playing cards. Members of these groups gain a feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood and the extent to which the activity of these groups flourish can affect our attitude toward the world.

Human history is memetic history. All important historical change is tied to memes whether the change be military, economic or cultural. Even basic demographic features of a society are shaped by its memes. One could reasonably argue that changes in how memes are spread has been responsible for the demographic transition, that is the lowering of birth rates in the developed world. In family-oriented societies, children believe as their parents believe. Memes spread through the family and these memes gain advantage by producing individuals that will choose to invest their time and energy in having children. A meme that creates a person who will concentrate on raising children flourishes in a traditional society because those children will continue carrying the meme. Birth rates in these societies will tend to be high. In a modern individualistic society, one learns behavior through schools, books, TV or the internet, that is from people with whom one has little or no genetic linkage. Those memes which use social contact outside the family to spread themselves gain the advantage. Those memes which create people who will put their energy into memetically infecting the genetic offspring of others, e.g. proselytizing, persuading or just being an attractive role model now spread

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easily. Children are constantly being “stolen” by outside ideas and behaviors so that investment in raising children yields a smaller return. People will tend to have fewer children unless part of the cost of raising children is also born by those outside the genetic family.

A concrete, although rather exceptional, example of such a clash between family and individualistic memes is the ongoing struggle of the Amish to reproduce their population. Amish seldom spread their lifestyle through conversion but pass it on to their children. Therefore, Amish tend to have very large families with many children. A large number of these children, however, are seduced by the outside world as they grow up and eventually leave the fold. They move to the cities and lead lives of a non-traditional pattern very much under the influence of modern memes.

So far the Amish meme-complex has been successful in its struggle. Although many young people desert, the large family size is sufficient to make up for this and enough children remain in the community that it grows in size. To achieve this result Amish must depend on a large degree of social isolation. Most other traditional groups have not been so successful.

Memetically derived pleasure comes directly from carrying memes or from spreading the memes one carries. Memes that have developed ways of stimulating our genetically created sense of pleasure have an advantage in attracting carriers. Similarly, memes that make their propagation pleasurable to the original carrier will also have an advantage. Our ability to feel pleasure was originally created by genes for their own benefit, but this does not mean that memes’ heavy reliance on exciting pleasure makes them tools serving a genetic purpose. The meme that manifests itself in cocaine use has found a way to use pleasure to spread itself but its spread in no way benefits carriers’ genes. In general, genes and memes are in a mutually beneficial relationship. In parasitic cases in which one of these dominates the other to its disadvantage, such as cocaine use, it is the meme that commonly prevails.

Humans are composite creatures produced by memes and genes with memes playing the active role. The primary difference between memetic analysis and analysis of human society as it is presently done is that most current social science takes the individual or the group as the actor. The study of economics relies heavily on the idea of a society being a group of individuals each out to maximize his or her own welfare. In contrast, social scientists influenced by Marxism treat classes as social actors. In memetic analysis, the meme is the “actor” in so far as it programs the human individual. Individuals are modeled as memetic corporations. Memes cooperate and compete with other memes within each individual corporation. Moreover, memes serve in many individual corporations just as they infect many

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different individuals. Psychology is the study of how memes cooperate and compete within corporations. If the social sciences, including psychology, are to be unified, they must be unified around the study of memes.

Although memetic analysis is a logically correct approach to social science, it will not always be the best approach. The memetic structure of the human mind is incredibly complicated—at least as complicated as the genetic structure of the body. Furthermore, the analysis of memes is a yet underdeveloped study. Just as a chemist need nor trace back her analysis to sub-atomic physics, a sociologist need not trace back his analysis to its memetic components. Memetic analysis, however, does give important insights in particular cases. The human individual is largely unselfish in that he or she is not programmed to maximize his or her own welfare. Memes have created individuals who will work to maximize the welfare of the memes that possess them and this causes the individual to sacrifice his or her own welfare whenever this would benefit those memes.

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Chapter 2

Memetic Altruism

Biologists have long recognized the fact of genetic altruism and generally understand how it arises. Biologists have shown that the locus of selfishness does not lie in the individual creature. Since it is genes that evolve, it is the genes which are selfish. Selfish genes will gain advantage if they can create individuals which will act selfishly towards those who are not genetically related while acting somewhat altruistically toward genetic relatives. How altruistically depends upon how much genetic material the individuals share. Altruism should be most intense between parent and offspring and between siblings. These individuals will on average share half of their genetic material. Cousins share only an eighth of their genetic material so it would not be an advantage to a gene to produce individuals who acted very altruistic toward their cousins.

In fact, genes do not seem capable of developing methods of fine tuning their altruism. Take for example the case of the cuckoo which lays her eggs in the nest of other birds. When the young cuckoo hatches out, the bird whose nest the cuckoo inhabits will care for it. The cuckoo’s genes have thus evolved a strategy for taking advantage of a weakness in the genetic programming of other birds. The brains of birds are too simple to show careful discrimination in altruistic behavior. A bird is just programmed to care for any young bird that inhabits its nest. The human brain is much more complex than that of a bird but one should not imagine that human genetic altruism is finely calibrated in some foolproof manner.

Geneticists have speculated on the possibility of “green-beard” genetic altruism. If carriers of a particular gene could recognize each other it would be to the gene’s advantage to cause its carriers to act altruistically toward each other although they did not recognize each other as being family members. The whimsical example, which gives this concept its name, would be a gene that manifests itself in the form of a green beard. If such a gene not only showed itself in such an unmistakable form but also gave the creatures it produced a strong impulse to altruistically assist others who have a green beard, this gene would have a significant advantage in spreading itself. Carriers of this gene would tend to prosper from the mutual help they give each other. The population of carriers would multiply and the gene would become increasingly

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common. Scientists have never identified a green-beard gene. They may exist as yet undiscovered, but it seems this degree of sophistication is beyond the ability of anything in the present gene pool.

Memetic altruism is comparable to genetic altruism. Moreover, memes of sufficient complexity are capable of green-beard behavior. Like genes, memes gain advantage by creating individuals who will act altruistically toward other carriers of the same meme. Not all memes are capable of this behavior. Certainly, there is no evidence that people who use the same chess opening behave with particular altruism toward each other. A complex meme such as a religion, however, uses memetic altruism quite openly. Religious memes are in competition for believers. Their success depends on the success of their believers, their ability to attract new believers and their ability to hold on to old believers. Religions which create believers who will act altruistically toward other believers will be at an advantage. Their believers will prosper from mutual help and this will draw in new believers and discourage old believers from leaving the flock.

This memetic altruism will not be of advantage to believer’s genes. Believers will be sacrificing their own family’s welfare to further the welfare of genetically unrelated individuals. Genes which created individuals not susceptible to memetically-induced altruism would have an advantage but as previously noted genetic evolution is slow. Any genetic defense which would arise could be circumvented by the much faster evolution among memes. Genes have never shown themselves capable of fine-tuning human behavior. As the case of adoption shows, genetically designed human behavior is open to manipulation just as the genetic altruism of birds can be manipulated by the genes of the cuckoo.

Instead of blocking memetic altruism, genetic evolution has in fact formed the tools that make memetic altruism possible. Memes use the genetic altruism program that has been hard-wired into our brain redirecting it toward memetically related beneficiaries. These basic programs evolved millions of years before complex memes existed. They, therefore, do not come with a built-in defense against memetic piracy. Evidence that memetic altruism makes use of the original genetic program is present in human language. Christian believers are “brothers and sisters in Christ.” Muslims too are “brothers” and “sisters.” The Earth abounds with “motherlands” and “fatherlands.” In many cultures, close friends of parents, and thus memetic relatives, are referred to by the children as “uncles” and “aunts.” “Godfathers” and “godmothers” have special memetic relationships with their “godchildren.” Organized crime gangs who must maintain tight personal relations live under the rule of “godfathers.” Unions have been established as “brotherhoods.” Such examples are endless. Each one of us belongs to many memetic families.

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Our ties to a memetic family and our genetic family may vary in degree but they do not vary in kind.

The closeness we feel toward others often depends on their similarity to ourselves. This was remarked upon both by David Hume and his admirer Adam Smith, the man many imagine to have been a prophet of human selfishness. Smith observed that people had a natural sympathy toward others who were in some way similar to themselves and that this sympathy had a very strong influence on human behavior. Smith hypothesized that this sympathy sprang from self-love. We love ourselves, so naturally we tend to love those who resemble ourselves. We do not, however, seem to feel any special sympathy for strangers who share our facial features or mannerisms unless these factors otherwise signals that the stranger belongs to some complex memetic family to which we also belong. The similarities that bring us into sympathy with strangers are those similarities based on complex memetic families: nationality, religion, culture, ideology, etc. People are sometimes warned that they should stick to their own kind because these are the ones who will stick by them when the chips are down. The “kind” to which this warning refers is always the memetic family.

In business, one of the most prevalent manifestations of memetic altruism has been the trade diaspora. As any businessperson knows, trust is an important component in all but the simplest business deals. Historically, the riskiest business deals have often involved international trade. Before modern advances in communication, monitoring the activity of a business associate in another country was very difficult. As a result, much international trade took place within memetic families. Jews were spread all about Europe and they were thus in an advantageous position to handle much of Europe’s international trade. A Frenchman and a German belonging to different memetic families did not possess the same memetic altruism as did two fellow Jews. Jews are by no means unique. Italians, Armenians, Chinese, Nestorians, Indians and others have been in the same position. The same phenomenon can still be seen today but international trade is no longer the most difficult form of business. What one generally finds is that the more trust required in a business deal, the more homogeneous will be the culture of the businesspeople involved.

A negative effect of memetic altruism is discrimination directed against those of a different memetic family. This discrimination does not necessarily show hostility. One may simply associate more profitably with one’s own group because of the greater degree of altruism which makes for trustworthiness. Memetic altruism would not explain a discrimination based purely on race since race is not a meme. Race, however, may be a signal that someone is not likely to be in one’s own memetic

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family. It thus could trigger a presumptuous discrimination that would last until the stranger could show one’s presumption false.

The degree of altruism necessary for different interactions varies widely. Meme-based discrimination is most prevalent in situations in which altruism is most important. For example, a non-altruistic individual will have a greater incentive to take advantage of a stranger than to take advantage of an acquaintance with which she often has dealings. Taking advantage of the stranger may have no negative consequences to her, but if she takes advantage of the acquaintance, he will no longer deal with her in the future. Thus altruism will generally be more necessary in mutual transactions between strangers. Indeed, one finds that dealings between memetic groups are most difficult in relatively anonymous situations. A Muslim may discriminate against Christians but he will likely have a few Christian acquaintances with whom he deals regularly and profitably. Members of minority groups which face severe discrimination often rely heavily on long-term patron-client relationships with members of the majority group. The mobility of oppressed minorities is often restricted by the minority individual’s need to build up such relations.

Discrimination may seem a surprisingly ugly aspect of memetic altruism. A belief that mankind is selfish and has achieved success without reliance on altruism is, in a sense, a very comforting belief. If real altruism has never existed, then it is obviously unnecessary for our present success as a species. If, however, our achievements rest upon altruistic foundations, then a deficiency in altruism can create an ugly situation. Situations in which altruism merely subsists at a relatively low level may threaten human society.

Fortunately, memetic altruism does not necessarily break a species up into competing groups. Although there are advantages to dealing with others in our memetic family, there are also important disadvantages. All else being equal, we gain more from cooperating with those whose skills and knowledge differ from our own. People in our own memetic families will tend to have skills and knowledge resembling our own. Therefore, those memes which create carriers better able to deal with others outside the memetic family will have a survival advantage.

Another factor that ameliorates the situation is the overlapping of memetic families. A world is imaginable in which virtually everyone shared a memetic family with almost everyone else. A person may behave altruistically toward some because they are fellow Hindus, others because they are fellow Americans, still others because they share a political ideology. People who belong to a multicultural religion or a similar movement know that one feels a peculiar pleasure from a memetic fellowship with an individual who is otherwise in a completely different set of memetic families. The feeling may be somewhat similar to that experienced by

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the discovery of a long lost sister or brother. In so far as pluralism refers to a society consisting of numerous non-overlapping groups such as castes, it is a troublesome phenomenon. The pluralism that most people praise is one in which there are many memetic families on many different levels overlapping each other. This type pluralism has a number of advantages not least of which is the diffusion of altruistic links throughout the society.

Finally, an extensive altruism is possible between memetically unrelated individuals due to the possibility that these individuals could become related at some later time. This phenomenon deserves its own chapter.

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Chapter 3

Extensive Altruism

One of the fundamental differences between memes and genes is in their methods of propagation. Genes propagate through the production of children. Once an individual is created by a set of genes, it is secured. It will not be invaded by another set of genes. It will die with the same genes with which it was born.

The individuals created by memes are never safe. An individual may begin life Turkish but before he is through he could very well end up Canadian. Communists turn fascist; Methodists become Baptist. More important than these complete conversions are conversions of degree. A Chinese may be Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist. Some days or years she is more one than the others. The ratios and inter-relationships between the memes constantly shift.

Because memetic carriers are constantly being recreated the population can not simply be divided into carriers and non-carriers of some particular meme. An individual may not presently carry the meme but still be a potential carrier. This fact determines many social relationships. A professor is often possessed by memes, particular sets of knowledge and ideas, that he is driven to propagate. He inspects each of his students trying to determine which are worthy of the effort it will take to infect them. A Mormon on a mission is formed so as to see everyone he meets as a potential carrier of his meme. Identifying promising potential carriers of memes that manifest themselves in support for political programs is a major American industry. Potential carriers of memes can be infected by the memes in various ways. Altruism is often a useful component of the infection process.

Christian missions are a good demonstration of the use of altruism toward memetically unrelated individuals. Throughout the history of Christianity, missionary work has been attempted with varying degrees of success. Some of the attempts made use of a variety of altruistic behaviors, and these attempts were generally more successful. Those groups that used altruism to draw in others thrived. The loss they experienced due to the sacrifice of their present carriers’ welfare was made up by the increase in converts brought in. The population of these groups grew and their techniques were imitated. Hospitals, relief work and other attempts to increase social welfare became common.

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The use of memetic altruism toward potential converts is not limited to religions. European socialist movements used altruism to attract members. Socialist parties spawned many social service organizations whose services extended beyond party members. Cultures differ in the degree of altruism they show to newcomers and this directly influences the number of carriers of their culture meme. Even in the case of simple neighborhood or school clubs, it seems natural to go out of one’s way to be kind to potential recruits. We do not do this for any benefit that might accrue to our genes; the kindness is driven by a desire to promote the meme that drives the organization. Those memes that instill this type of behavior have at least one advantage in the struggle to procreate.

Altruism toward potential carriers is a useful strategy in at least three respects. First it attracts the potential carriers. Personal contact is not always necessary for the propagation of memes but it is generally useful. It is not unusual for religious groups to give free dinners or show free movies near college campuses just to bring individuals into contact with the present carriers of the meme. Delivering food baskets is a better way to get into contact with others. This is really no different than free trial offers that companies make when trying to sell their goods and services. Memes gain advantage through finding clever ways to show themselves off. Note that there is nothing altruistic in this from the memes’ perspective, but it does cause one individual to act and probably feel altruistic toward another genetically unrelated individual for the sake of spreading the meme that directs its carrier’s actions.

A second advantage of altruism toward potential recruits is that it benefits future meme carriers. In most cases, this advantage is less important. It is only significant when the potential carrier is a probable carrier. The only obvious example that comes to my mind is in a master-pupil relationship. Consider the following situation: The master carries memes she feels driven to impart. The pupil has been chosen and no longer needs attracting, but is not yet a carrier. The master’s memes still gain advantage from forming her so that she will act altruistically toward this student. The student is not now a carrier but he probably will be some day so his welfare is important to the memes’ future.

Finally, memes sometimes use altruism to trigger the genetically hard-wired family feeling in the potential carrier. Baby geese after they hatch imprint upon the closest moving object accepting it as their mother. Humans are more sophisticated but we seem to also develop a special relationship with parents, genetic or otherwise, who take care of us. We want to belong to a caring family. This feeling is genetically instilled and was originally evolved so as to benefit the gene, but it is ill-focused enough that memes can make use of it. We are strongly influenced by “father-figures” and “mother-figures.” Cases are common in which lonely

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individuals have been drawn into cults which most other people would find bizarre largely because of the strong family-feeling for which they longed. This altruistic family-like atmosphere was partly something they observed from the outside and wished to be within. But commonly a taste of this altruism is offered the potential recruit to further incite his longing.

An open society is one in which memes can gain and lose control of carriers with relative ease. In a closed society, one is usually under the control of the same complex memes all one’s life. An open society has many widely recognized advantages. It is fluid and can change quicker to meet new challenges. It opens up more possibilities to the individual. It allows for more efficient methods of variation and selection in the ongoing process of social evolution. An open society is less likely to get stuck in a dead end social development and will solve problems gradually avoiding most major crises. An advantage to the open society that is less often noted is that is encourages extensive altruism. In a closed society, new potential carriers are few and unlikely. Altruism toward non-meme carriers is virtually pointless. The memes that inhabit a closed society naturally develop different means of propagating themselves. Generally, they rely on creating individuals who will indoctrinate their genetic offspring. In an open society, new potential meme carriers abound. Habits of extensive altruism become natural.

Those that prefer a closed society often do so because they prefer individuals which are produced by the type memes that flourish in a closed society. An individual who is constantly being recreated by new memes seems to them to lack depth. They prefer those who have been possessed by the same meme all their life. There may be memes that need many decades to form their carriers into attractive vehicles. These memes will not flourish in a society in which their carrier is likely to be pirated before it is fully formed. The opening up of society frequently leads to the destruction of those traditional arts which can only be mastered by a life-time of devotion. The closed society has its beauties, but by its very nature it will never lead to the unselfish community which an open society can bring about. The memetic altruism among closed groups is strong but narrow and thus dangerous.1

                                                                                                               1   Some  may   argue   that   an   open   society   will   cause  memetic   altruism  within   groups   to   be  weaker.    The  members  of  memetic  families  will  be  potential  carriers  of  other  memes.     Just  as  altruism  will  be  directed  toward  those  who  might  become  carriers  in  the  future,  altruism  will  be  directed  away  from  those  who  might  no   longer  be   carriers.     I  will   be  altruistic   toward  a   fellow  member  of  my   religion  only  to  the  degree  that  I  am  sure  he  will  remain  a  member.     Such  an  effect  is  possible  but  there  are  offsetting   factors.     The   threat   that   a   meme   carrier   might   defect   may   cause   a   greater   degree   of  memetic  altruism  to  develop  so   that   the  defection   is  made  more  costly.     The  meme  might  also  be  more  apt  to  sacrifice  the  altruistic  giver’s  welfare  because  this  giver  too  may  ultimately  defect.  

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Chapter 4

Alternate Memetic Strategies

Altruism is very important to the spread of memes but it is certainly not the only strategy used and many of the other strategies can affect the form and degree of altruism which memes evolve. As previously noted, a strategy commonly used by memes in closed societies is to procreate roughly along genetic lines. Parents teach children the appropriate behaviors. These teachings can be reinforced in various ways. Memes can drive the parent carriers to acts of physical violence against children that do not carry the meme that is being propagated. Genetic children can be disowned if they do not also become memetic children. Some memes can drive parents to such a frenzy that they may actually kill carriers of their genes which do not also carry their memes. On the other hand, rewards await genetic children who are strongly infected by parental memes. The favorite child is generally the one who is most closely related to the parent in the memetic sense.

Memes that depend primarily on transmission from parent to child will reinforce altruism between family members but will do little to diffuse altruism throughout society. Therefore, those societies in which these memes predominate will show narrower forms of altruism. Societies in which communication is relatively easy will be more altruistic. The ease of communication will make it easier for children to imitate and learn from adults other than parents. A healthy competition among memes for carriers may incite an arms race among rival memes in which each meme evolves increasingly stronger methods of enticing carriers. These improved methods could well involve increases in altruism. A positive effect of public schools is that they expose children to memes that rival those of their parents. TV has the same positive effect. In at least one respect, therefore, television and public schools stimulate altruism. Of course, many feel that TV and public schooling have serious problems that more than offset this good quality.

A quickly changing society will also tend to be more altruistic. Memes acquired from parents when young will often be inefficient in dealing with the new situations the changing society brings about. Successful individuals, therefore, will be those who are often recreated by new memes. This too brings about a beneficial memetic competition. Unfortunately, a quickly changing society will also cause

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much misunderstanding and thus require more altruism to function. Memes seldom spread alone in complete isolation from other memes. Like

genes, the effects of memes are intricately interwoven. Something as complex as Brazilian culture, for example, can be broken down into a wide variety of interacting memes. High level memes are constantly using other memes. How well a meme makes use of other memes is crucial to its propagation. If a religious meme restricts the occupational skills that its carriers can also carry, then the religious meme is handicapped in its spread. A cultural meme passed down from parents to child that depends heavily on intimidation and violence might make it difficult for the carrier to acquire as she grows older important memes that manifest themselves in social skills. An individual, when young, may be infected with a meme complex that manifests itself in a rationalist “enlightened” view of life. This meme complex could be picked up from parents, friends, school or simply reading Voltaire. Carriers of this meme complex will pick up certain other memes on only slight exposure: Antireligious bigotry or support for democracy may come easy. Other memes will hardly fit: occult practices or ancestor worship. Sometimes one meme will piggy-back on another: The speaking of Arabic sometimes followed conversion to Islam. Becoming a fraternity brother usually leads to an increase in beer consumption.

One could go on, but the linkage between various memes has been described much better by sociologists and anthropologists than I can do in this book. These social scientists have simply used a somewhat different language in their description. It would not be hard to pick up an anthropology text book and rewrite most of the chapters in the language of memes. The close connection between memes is important for my purpose in that it strongly influences altruism.

One of the reasons memetic altruism is so prevalent is that it need not evolve independently within each meme complex. For simplicity’s sake, one can consider German culture to be a meme which manifests itself in a large number of qualities, among them altruistic behavior toward other Germans. Actually, however, German culture is a constantly varying cluster of memes. One of those memes can be supposed to be an altruistic meme that manifests itself in the rule, “act altruistically toward those who are in your memetic family.” This meme need not have been created within the German-culture meme complex through some random variation. The German-culture meme complex is constantly changing and has evolved some mechanism for testing and adopting new memes into the complex. Memetic altruism was probably picked up from some other meme complex because of its usefulness. Since it can travel between meme complexes it only needed to arise once within the human meme pool. If one could find accurate measures to

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characterize memetic altruism, one might trace back and reconstruct its general origins in the same way an anthropologist uses genetic information to trace and reconstruct the genetic origins of the human species. I would speculate that a fundamental intensification in memetic altruism occurred in ancient Mesopotamia accompanying the creation of human civilization. This increase in altruism may have been tied to the rise of large-scale organized religion of which Mesopotamia yields the earliest evidence.

Since numerous memes coexist in every individual’s brain—competing, quarrelling and cooperating—a meme complex that exhibits memetic altruism may have another advantage not yet mentioned. It may be a good neighbor and more easily accepted by other memes. This will not necessarily be the case. A potential new memetic complex which altruistically directs assistance toward carriers of this new complex and thus away from the original memes’ fellow carriers may not be welcome. In human society divided loyalties are often unwelcomed. In America, for example, people may be suspicious of the immigrant who seems to maintain overly strong emotional ties to his country of birth. On the other hand, if we suppose that the new meme complex simply contains a meme that generally instructs the individual to be altruistic toward those who bear memetic similarity to himself, then the original memes may actually gain advantage from luring this meme complex into their brain. As a possible example of this, among some groups in America, an individual who is not possessed of a religion is seen as less American than one who is. The carrier of a religion is seen as generally more altruistic and this altruism may strengthen non-religious bonds as well. This effect suggests that the latter more diffuse altruistic meme will have a comparative advantage in pluralistic societies. In societies in which individuals carry one dominant meme complex at a time, memetic altruism would tend to be more specific.

In theory it is possible that an anti-altruism could evolve. A meme could use the strategy of causing its host to act in a hostile manner to those who carry different memes. The meme would cause individuals to sacrifice their own welfare to do greater damage to the welfare of the carriers of rival memes. The relative welfare of rival meme carriers would diminish and thus their population would decrease. Many may convert to avoid persecution. This strategy may evolve in special instances but in a pluralistic society it faces a critical problem. The main beneficiary of a memetic anti-altruistic struggle would be some third-party memetic complex. Such a persecution strategy could only be used successfully by a meme that already dominated a given society.

The most obvious threat to memetic altruism would come from mimics. Suppose Christianity thrives at the expense of the genes of its carriers because it

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makes use of memetic altruism. In theory, a mimic-Christianity gene could arise that was in most characteristics indistinguishable from real Christianity but which did not have an altruistic component. Carriers of this gene would receive altruistic help from others but act so as to promote the welfare of their own genes. The danger from mimics is probably the main reason green-beard genes have never been successful. A gene which caused an individual to grow a green beard and act altruistically toward others who had the green beard trait would succeed just as long as other genes did not create individuals with green beards. But mimicry is a very common phenomenon in biology. To succeed, the original green-beard gene would have to evolve ever more subtle methods of mutual recognition and signaling as its rivals evolved an ever growing similarity.

In the simple case of green-bearded Christian mimicry by a gene, the Christian meme would probably be able to successfully distinguish itself due to the slowness of genetic evolution. A greater danger is that a rival meme complex may find ways to imitate the Christian complex and take advantage of misdirected altruism to benefit its carriers. Atheists, for example, could pretend conversion in times of need and join the Christian fellowship in body though not in spirit. Isolated cases of this are no problem. Christians actually try to attract atheists since they see them as potential converts to true Christianity. The mimic phenomenon could be a real danger if it occurred on a large scale but this is unlikely. The mimic meme’s greatest problem would be reproduction. How does a meme that keeps its real nature hidden spread itself to other carriers? It is possible, of course, that it will find channels through which it can propagate which are unobserved by carriers of the meme it mimics. The need to remain unidentified, however, seriously handicaps the meme in its attempts to propagate itself. Furthermore, the success of the imitator meme will depend on the fewness of its progeny. Both Christians and Christian mimics agree in hoping for fewer mimics and more true Christians off of which each mimic can mooch.

Memetic reproduction is exceedingly complex. A theory of memetic reproduction would necessarily range over all the social sciences. I doubt anyone will offer a complete theory any time soon. In these few chapters I have done little but play with a few of memetic reproduction’s simpler aspects.

Without a theory, one can say little definite about meme-based altruism except that it is likely to exist and vary in intensity. One can not theoretically establish the degree to which it exists. A cursory examination of the world may convince some that it has a very limited existence. To the extent that mankind is altruistic, we have a tendency to take for granted examples of altruism and focus primarily on apparent selfish behavior that offends us.

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Even if such bias is avoided, our casual observance of our world is not objective. Without realizing it, we take the facts we observe and twist them to fit preconceived theories. Most behavior can be explained in either selfish or unselfish terms. The opinion toward which one is most likely to lean will depend on the logic one sees underlying the world. This logic should be carefully considered.

Memes that evolve are often not consciously understood. Psychologists have shown that we often mistake our own motives. We live in an ever more complex world in which means of cooperation are constantly being evolved without being designed. A people who do not understand how they themselves cooperate will naturally have a distorted view of which activities are altruistic and which selfish. In the next section, I wish to show that in spite of first impressions, selfishness does not dominate human society. This is not to deny that memes create individuals that will on occasion put their own welfare above that of others or show an unequal favoritism in judging what is best for society. The average human, however, will generally sacrifice his or her own welfare when this truly conflicts with that of complex memes which have created the individual.

On the surface, human society appears to be a large collection of individuals. We, therefore, imagine the individual to be the basic locus of decision making. That being the case, selfishness seems a natural phenomenon. To say all individual decisions are selfish seems almost to be tautologically true. The concept of selfishness begins to dissolve if one takes seriously the concept of mind as a community of memes residing in the rambling mansion of a genetically engineered brain. The whole concept of self becomes problematic. Decisions are not made by individuals but by a raucous mobile memetic populations that both fragment and transcend the individual. Individuals do not maximize their individual welfare because as a committee of memes they have no clear scale on which to measure individual welfare and even if they did it would be of little interest to any of the memes which control the individuals’ actions. What readers thinks of this book will be decided by how their memes “vote.”

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Section II The Unselfish Society

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Chapter 5

Cooperation among Angels

Cooperation among individuals, either selfish or unselfish, is extremely difficult in a complex modern society. The most difficult problem to be overcome is our limited knowledge. To overcome this problem we create ever new ways of interacting. We playfully break the massive problems of the world up into small pieces and turn them into games. These games can obscure the underlying motives driving an individual. Within a game of cards or an athletic competition we may have no higher goal than to win within the rules. This desire is simply part of the game. Once we step out of the game, we find ourselves being guided by deeper motives. Understanding the games humans play is the heart of the social sciences, a field largely created by Adam Smith.

Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations over two hundred years ago. He is still the best known of all economists and his book is still read. He was not only a great economist but also a profound social thinker. He saw how social institutions transcended and manipulated the human mind. He was also one of the first to explicitly understand how the efforts of individuals in society could be coordinated without the central direction of a king or parliament telling people what to do. The need for coordination in a society grown too complex to be understood by any central authority is what led to the widespread use of economic markets.

An economic market is one of the simpler forms of cooperation studied by social scientists. It is used as a signaling device. As a simple example, consider the market for cement. Somehow a society must decide how much cement should be produced, how it should be produced and how it should be used. This is what a market does. By matching supply with demand some price for cement will be established. Once a price is established producers can figure out how much cement they should produce to maximize profits. Consumers can figure out which of their wants are important enough to justify paying the price established for cement. If a new use is found for cement, the increased demand will drive up the price and customers will have to reevaluate their earlier decisions and quit using cement where they judge it least important. Simultaneously, producers facing higher prices for their cement will search for new means of production that may now have become

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profitable. If a new breakthrough in technology makes producing cement easier. This would lower prices. New uses would now be found. Cement might be substituted for brick or wood in the construction of buildings. Old expensive means of production would be abandoned.

Cement is not a high tech product but the producers and users of cement are so varied that a man, committee or bureaucracy that set out to determine how much cement should be produced, how it should be produced and how it should be used would be faced with terrible difficulties. The task is not impossible. Socialist countries try to limit their use of markets and even the governments of capitalist countries use central economic control in many fields. Markets have their own problems and occasionally these problems can be more severe than those of central control. But consider the difficulties.

If other markets were functioning to establish the price of labor, machinery and natural resources, deciding how to produce the cement would be the simplest aspect of the problem. There would be a lot of information to handle but a clever organization could probably gain a reasonable idea of which producers were most efficient and how this efficiency was affected by the amount produced. Large corporations often find it necessary to work out similar problems. Determining what use to put the cement to would be much more difficult. There are people who could be considered experts in cement production but no one can truly claim to be an expert in cement consumption. The uses are too varied. If one wished to cut back and substitute other materials or just do without, where would one start: bridges, office buildings, road work, dams? And how much would one cut back in each place? What if cement production became cheaper? Deciding where to increase cement use would be an even more difficult problem. In the case of cutbacks, at least there is a list of products to look over. If one was considering possible new uses of cement, one would have to look over a far larger field.

Finally, one would need to determine how much to produce. One would start producing where one could produce cheapest. If one was considering some particular quantity of production one would have to estimate the expense of the last most expensive ton of cement produced and compare that cost with the value to society of the ton of cement one had planned to put to the least valuable use. If the cost was higher than the value gained, then one would consider lowering the amount produced. If the value was much higher, then one would consider increasing production.

Most of us would do a very poor job managing such an industry but governments have attempted this sort of thing with varying success. In this example, however, other markets were being relied upon. It was assumed that one knew the price of

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labor, machinery, natural resources, products consumers could substitute for cement, etc. If these prices were not known, figuring out the expense of producing cement at different facilities using different techniques would all be guesswork. The person who determined how much reliance to place on machines compared to laborers would not know enough about the value of machinery to estimate the cost to society of these machines and the maker of the machinery would not know enough about the value of labor and raw material to tell him.

What this shows is that in a modern complex society some industries can probably be centrally managed, but as one attempts to manage an increasing number of industries, problems increase exponentially. Communist nations have not been very successful at solving the problems even though they have fallen back on the use of markets in many cases. Planned economies try to make production decisions with complicated input-output tables, but these can only be used if one makes very simple assumptions about technology. Planned economies often begin by making production decisions similar to those made in the market economy before the plan went into effect. These are reasonably efficient for a while, but technology and tastes change. The decisions made by the planners diverge further and further from the optimum.

Adam Smith had a clear vision of the basic workings of the markets on which Europe had come to depend. Where other saw and feared anarchy, he saw the constant chase for profit by millions of individuals as a marvelous dance. Without knowing what he or she was doing each individual in his or her small way was keeping the economic machinery of society running with an impressive degree of efficiency. Few of these people seemed terribly concerned with how society was functioning and yet it seemed to be functioning much better than it would have functioned under the direction of any conceivable central authority. Each individual who wished to make profit tried to buy cheaply and sell dearly. This generally directed the society’s resources toward the most valued uses. Government interventions that forced individuals not to buy goods at the lowest price or sell to those willing to pay the highest price seemed generally destructive. Observing this, Adam Smith stated what to him seemed obvious, “buy pursuing his [the individual’s] own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” This is generally taken as praise for selfishness and that is the way it may have originally been meant.

This logic, however, can be turned around. Suppose that an individual is truly unselfish. In such a case, how should he act? Obviously, if by pursuing his own self-interest, he benefits society more than when he directly intends to benefit it, then

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he should pursue his own self-interest. This will more effectually achieve his unselfish goal. The unselfish individual will not directly display his unselfishness in such a situation. The casual observer would probably write him off as selfish.

How would a community of unselfish individual act? Assume that a race of angels took up residence on some Earth-like planet. Put memetic assumptions aside and simply assume these beings are purely unselfish wanting only the greatest good for all. They labor though under the handicap of merely human powers. Their strength is limited and more importantly so is their power of reasoning, their power of memory and the information they possess. How would these angels organize their society? We want to be able to recognize an unselfish society when we experience one, so it is worthwhile putting a good deal of thought into this. There are many problems unselfishness just does not solve. Making intelligent decisions in an unselfish society will be very challenging and these challenges will shape the society.

The organization of this society will depend very much on what the angels unselfishly believe is good. They each want what is good for the group, but there can be a wide variety of opinions as to of what this good consists. They may begin by working alone or in small groups. If the soil is fertile and other resources easily available they will subsist, but if they are like mankind the angelic race will seek more for its members: more security, more variety, more time to spend as each of its individuals wish. They can only gain this through cooperation. There are many useful goods and services which can not be produced by one or merely a few individuals. Great gains are also made through specialization as Adam Smith emphasized. Individuals have different skills. More will be produced if each individual works at that in which he excels and then exchanged his produce with the others. As the angels grow accustomed to their world and learn more sophisticated skills they will come together in larger and larger groups. But as long as the groups are reasonably small, perhaps tribal in size, they can probably figure out reasonable ways to value goods without markets.

It the tools involved are limited, they may value the goods in accordance with how long it takes to produce them. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith uses the example of beaver and deer and suggests that if it takes twice as long to catch a beaver than a deer then a beaver will exchange for two deer. Given these ratios, the angels will still need to figure out how much to produce but this could generally be talked out. If wants, needs and tastes differ, then even at this early stage individuals would probably be left to consume whatever they chose when this had little effect on others.

One could imagine the tribe estimating how much effort it wished to put into production. Then it could estimate the cost in effort of producing each good and

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decide how the amount of total production could be best divided among families. Each family would then be given a budget and a set of prices so that it could work out for itself the actual amount of each type of good that it had best consume. The families would then report back to the tribe and the tribe would figure out the specific mix of goods it would produce. Production tasks would be assigned. When the goods were produced they could be kept in a common store room and then used by those families who had asked for them.

Such a scheme will work if production is very simple. Once the situation is complicated by economies and diseconomies of scale then the amount of a good consumed influences the effort that must be put into producing each unit of the good. Under these conditions, the consumption and production decisions can not be divided so neatly. If there are diseconomies of scale, for instances, such that beaver become harder to catch as one is forced to search farther and farther away, then a larger than expected desire for the good will drive up the cost to society. The original cost estimate would be invalid and the problem would have to be reconsidered. How much of each item to produce would become a problem that could only be worked out by the individuals as a group.

Deciding on the production of public goods and services which everyone consumes together would be a major difficulty. Human society still has not developed very good solutions to this problem. Cleaning up the litter and garbage around the community site would be a problem that had to be faced early. Given any amount of this service and a corresponding amount of labor needed to do the job, some angels will want less of the service and some will prefer more. Even though the angels are honest and want what is best for the community they will each have a hard time communicating to the rest of the community exactly how much they would value an increase or decrease in the service.

Investment would also raise tough questions. In principle, one could figure out how much time a tool would take to create and how much it would increase production over what period of time; but such calculation is difficult. A corporation which purchases large amounts of office equipment tries to make just this decision, but an individual who buys a car seldom has any clear idea how much time and money the car will save. An investment decision that is made frequently can become routine, but a new investment decision is a shot in the dark.

More problems will be raised by a difference in abilities. As a rule of thumb, the angels may begin with each consuming an equal value of goods. Some variation may be allowed to take into account such things as age and health. The problem is that most consumption, at least in a poorer society, is actually investment in human capital. Increased nutrition has been a significant factor in the increase in human

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productivity. Even such “luxury” goods as toys and games have been important in training the intellect. If abilities and work loads differ, optimum consumption will also differ. At the very least, those who do tasks requiring more energy should get greater food rations.

The community is going to face other tough choices. It may have to choose between an irregular high-yield crop and a dependable crop of lower yield. What price is the community willing to pay for security? The community’s location will affect the cost of the goods which are produced and this will affect the lives of everyone. How will one decide the location? How many hours should each work and how much time should be spent in leisure? How much labor should be put into the intangibles such as religion, literature and art? Whose labor should be put into these intangibles?

This last question points to an ironic fact. Modern individualistic decision making is considered by many crassly materialistic and they hope a more communal decision-making process would lead to a greater emphasis on the more spiritual humanistic side of life. But it is just this side of life in which communal decision making is the hardest and least efficient. Making some assumptions, a committee could attempt to estimate the cost of wheat production and how much wheat is needed. Wheat can be measured as can its inputs. Art production is different. That which is important in art is not measurable. Generally, even as individuals, we are unclear as to our own needs and wants as far as art production is concerned.

Regardless of the difficulties small simple static societies do make the above decisions and the angels would muddle through. As long as decisions are made by the whole group, however there will be a ceiling to the groups’ success. The efficiency of group decisions is limited by group size, and the complexity and regularity of the problems faced.

The bigger the size of any discussion group, the less time the average individual has to offer an opinion. After a certain size is reached, one is limited to listening to a few representatives and counting votes. Breaking into a hierarchy of small groups can help combat this problem. More opinions can be voiced but since each person is in only a few groups, he or she can not hear any more opinions than in a large group. Decision making must be specialized which means decisions will be made with fewer inputs.

The second factor, complexity, has two important dimensions which both lead to difficulty. First is the variety of tasks that must be accomplished. The more various the tasks, the more information necessary to make an intelligent decision as to the allotment of resources. When the individuals can no longer afford the time and effort necessary to make intelligent decisions, they will be forced to delegate

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decisions to specialists. Meanwhile, specialists in coordination will try to give to the various groups of specialists the outside information that is necessary for their decisions. A special group may decide how corn will be produced while coordinators try to give them some idea as to how much corn will be required and how much labor, land and tools they can depend upon. Ideally the decisions of the specialists and coordinators should not be made independently but if there are too many groups of specialists, coordination must be simplified. Complications will increase when there is no single obvious way to break down decision making into groups. One could split agricultural decision making by crops or one could break it down into groups dealing individually with farm labor, farm land and farm tools. Ideally, the group deciding which land should be used to grow wheat should not only understand wheat production but also understand the other uses to which the land, labor and tools could be put.

This leads into the second dimension of complexity, the interaction between decisions. Choosing wheat land is an obvious case since it may easily conflict with the choice of corn land made by the corn committee. Even when decisions are made by the same group they may conflict. Political scientists have uncovered a wide variety of voting paradoxes. These paradoxes demonstrate that a series of decisions made by an assembly of individuals with varying opinions may fit together illogically even though each individual’s opinion is itself logical.

To illustrate with a trivial example, suppose a group of Italian tourists are deciding where to go on vacation. Possible choices are Spain, Russia or Mexico. They also must decide how to get there: either by train or by boat. If the ballots were cast simultaneously the trip to Mexico might win, but if those who voted for Mexico did not have a simple majority, it is possible that the supporters of the Russian and Spanish trips would have dominated the vote on transportation and travel by train was chosen. Of course, this is impossible. If the vote on destination had been made first, Mexico would have won and then certainly the group would have decided to go by boat. If the vote on transportation had come first, however, the group would have decided to go by train and then Mexico would have been out of the question.

The problem here is that the decisions are interdependent and the problem can only be avoided if the two problems are reduced to one. In a complex world, however, many decisions are interdependent and they often can not be reduced to one intelligible problem. The angels will probably not just woodenly vote their opinions on each issue. They will try to talk out the possibilities and avoid the worst of these problems but this will make decisions more costly and complicated.

Regularity is the third limitation on decision-making efficiency. In a society in

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which nothing changes and the same decisions must be made again and again, then regardless of size and complexity eventually some way will be found to make adequate decisions. Facing new problems is the great difficulty. Breaking new ground is a process of trial and error with errors far outnumbering successes. The angels will not agree on which changes in technique will have the best chance of success. Something equivalent to a research laboratory would have to be created not just to test out new tools and resources but to test new patterns of cooperation. No matter what means is used to select from possible experiments, there will be awkward biases and promising areas of advance will be overlooked. To partially overcome this problem, a number of independent groups for testing new methods may be established and this directly leads to decentralization.

Perhaps some of the angel tribes will decide to turn some individuals loose to experiment with new methods. These individuals are as unselfish as others but they have different ideas as to how things can best be produced. For their experiments they are going to need resources. The tribe will somehow have to decide how much different resources are worth if they are going to judge the success or failure of these individual projects. They will put a value, or price, on the tools, resources and labor the individual experimenter uses. A value for the experimenter’s produce will also be set. The experimenter will do the production his own way and after a sufficient period of time the experiment will be evaluated. Profit and loss will be calculated but there is no need to give the experimenter the profits earned or take from him the losses. He needs no motivation except his love for the community.

Some of these experiments will succeed and some fail. The tribes will take into account this information when planning their production. Since new techniques will disrupt old production patterns and suggest new production strategies, planning will become more difficult. There will be an even greater rationale for experimentation. Since resources are limited, the society must choose who will be allowed to experiment. This will be a tough choice but one might reasonably suppose that those who have successfully experimented in the past will be given preference and those who have a record of failure will be seen as bad investments. How each experimenter judges the likelihood of success will also be taken into account. It may just be easiest to allow experimenters to keep any profits they have made to invest in further experiments. Experimenters who have made profit are more likely to succeed in the future or at least correctly recognize the potential success of others and back them with resources. In any case, this would make the decision process simpler. Experimenters will probably each be requested to make an objective guess as to the profit they expect and the risk entailed.

If an experiment were turned down by the angel tribe but the individual angel

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and some of his friends thought the project sufficiently promising to give up some of their own consumption to free the resources necessary to give the experiment a try, the tribe might not object. On the one hand, the tribal experts have decided that the experiment is worth less than the consumption the individuals would forgo. On the other hand, the individuals probably have a more accurate knowledge as to what the consumption is worth to them and they may have reasons for evaluating the experiment’s potential differently than others. Who can be sure their judgment is wrong? Allowing them to proceed is itself an experiment in alternative means of project evaluation.

The increasing number of experiments will gradually increase the efficiency of the tribe’s efforts. Some experiments, however, can not be done so simply. Experimenters are venturing into the unknown and they need some flexibility. They are apt to find that they sometimes need more or less of a resource than they expected. They will come back to the tribe with follow-up requests. The tribe has already allotted resources and it will not be worth their while to rework the whole plan to meet the needs of single experiments. They are likely to tell the individual angel that he can get more of a resource if he can convince some other angel who has an allotment that some of that resource could be better used in the experiment.

The experimenter would then make the rounds. He would compare with other individuals the value of the necessary resource in its present use and its potential use in the experiment. If it would be more valuable in the experiment it would be turned over. Since the present user is not selfish, no exchange would be necessary, but when the committee calculates out the profit gained in different activities, they will subtract the value of the exchanged resource from the cost of the original user’s activity and add it to the cost of the experiment. If many experimenters are going about society looking for resources a market would form. Individuals would post the estimated value of their non-essential resources and experimenters would often check these posting to see if there were resources others held which they could put to better use. Once the non-experimenters get involved extensively in these markets they too become experimenters. They are testing out means of production using different sets of resources than what the plan originally allotted.

Thus in this angelic society a market economy may come about. It does not arise in order to harness the selfish desires of individuals: the angels are completely unselfish and care only for the group. The market economy arises to overcome angelic ignorance. It allows each individual to use his own mind to solve problems of which he is personally knowledgeable. The markets allow knowledge to be processed in a decentralized fashion.

At first, the tribal production plan may remain as a starting point—a periodic

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reshuffling of the deck—but as markets develop the plan becomes unnecessary. It is wasteful to switch permanent resources around casually at the beginning of each period. If an angel is allotted good corn land, he will get to know the land and farm it better than others. He had best keep working the land until someone comes along who can use it better than he can.

If the producer needs new tools each year, these might at first come through some tribal distribution center. An amount would be produced and distributed according to plan. Once markets became widespread, however, this would be unnecessary. The makers would determine a value for their tools based on the cost of production and those who judged that the tools would increase their production by at least an equal value would take possession of the tools. If more tools were demanded than supplied only those whose production would increase the most would get the tools. The producers would raise the value estimate until supply matched demand and produce more the next year. If tools were left over, the producers would lower the value estimate until they were all distributed and produce fewer tools the next year. Labor markets would develop along similar lines. Angels who needed labor and angels who had labor to give would estimate its worth and try to make the best matches possible.

Profit and loss would be recorded and money might be created to simplify accounting. This would be necessary for determining efficiency. Everyone would want to know whether their experiments in production were making effective use of society’s resources. As suggested previously, revenue gained minus costs could be automatically retained by each individual so that those whose judgment had given the best results in the past would have more resources with which to experiment in the future.

Only consumption would remain controlled, and even this control would eventually be abandoned. As noted above, some may decide that society would benefit if they gave up some consumption and invested it in production. This would be allowed. What if others decided that society would be better off if they consumed their profits instead of reinvesting them? They may decide that such consumption was an important form of investment in human capital and is what society most needs. These individuals are angels and their motives can be trusted even if their judgment may be faulty.

Once the wall between consumption and production breaks down, consumption controls will make no more sense. The angels may simply switch to a retained-profit system with a guarantee that everyone regardless of losses would be given an amount of resources that would be at least large enough to sustain life. These resources could come from a tax on profits. The decision to have everyone retain profits and

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losses, after all, was just a convenient way to put more resources into the hands of those with the best past record. Final ownership of the profits still belongs to the group. If the angel society had anything resembling extended families, it might delegate the responsibility for individual welfare to these groups. This would mean leaving the task to those better informed at the expense of more uneven coverage. In theory, it is even possible that allowing the most inefficient to die from lack of resources might benefit the society as a whole; but this would probably only be likely in societies which were desperately poor.

The system the angels are using has thus evolved into a system similar to that used by modern humans. The angels, of course, may make different consumption and production decisions than are made by humans. The question of what the angels ultimately value has been left open and they may be as confused as humans about what is ultimately good for society. The question may be so difficult that many avoid it and busy themselves with their own experiments in profit making. It is possible that angels may get so wrapped up in trying to make a profit that they occasionally forget that they are angels and need to be reminded.

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Chapter 6

Ignorance and Cooperation The angels in the last chapter practiced a decentralized from of cooperation.

They did so to limit the effects of their ignorance. They ended up playing the same type of games that one might expect selfish creatures to play. Naturally, there are differences between selfish and unselfish individuals but people often look for these differences in the wrong places.

The story of the angels suggests important insights into the human world. Much that appears on the surface to be selfish may not really be so. Humans are not angels: We humans are composite creatures whose behavior is directed by the ongoing struggle between the various memes that have created us. Thus human behavior is much more complicated than the simple unselfishness of the angels. Nevertheless, the human world and the world of the angels are remarkably similar.

It is difficult to overestimate human ignorance. The problems described in the angels’ economy are very evident in the human world. Among modern economists, Friedrich Hayek was perhaps most important in bringing the problems of ignorance to the fore. Hayek saw man as a tribal creature profoundly uncomfortable with individualism. Mankind only moves reluctantly toward an open individualistic system because he needs to deal with the growing gap between what each individual knows and the total knowledge necessary for society to function.

The ignorance that cripples humanity is both that of particular matters and general principles. Obviously, human society is limited by the scope of our scientific knowledge. Even more troubling is our ignorance in the field of morality. Most of us like to pretend that we know right from wrong—particularly when we wish to condemn the objectionable behavior of our neighbors—but the fact is that we find ourselves in confusing moral quandaries almost daily. In economics it is often said that there are no solutions—only trade-offs. And this is just as true of morality. Our lives are filled with more necessary compromises, white lies, conflicting responsibilities and lesser evils than most individuals are comfortable admitting. If our conscience often misleads us, our reason is an even less perfect guide. In such matters we are forced to rely on rough rules of thumb. Traditional cultures are rich

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in proverbs to guide people in their decisions and generally whichever way they decide they can find several proverbs to justify their actions.

Equally troublesome is another form of ignorance: that of particular things. What are the needs of particular individuals? What is the best use of a particular laborer? How could a particular field be best cultivated? What special problems might one run into using particular pieces of equipment? Hayek argued that the relative importance of general knowledge was overestimated and that this unfortunately led to an inefficient centralization of control into the hands of “experts.” The more diffuse ignorance of particular matters was easier to overlook.

Correcting problems created by general ignorance often requires impressive decisions that make a splash on the nightly news. Bills are pushed through the legislature or panels decide on new regulations that will affect the whole society. Correcting the multitude of smaller problems caused by ignorance of the particular is done silently: A farmer decides to plant beans instead of corn. An auto repairman opens his own shop. A college student cuts down on computer gaming. One only hears of these decisions when they are made by the few people with which one is acquainted. In fact the number of such problems in society is so vast as to be beyond comprehension. The types of ignorance and miscalculation being corrected seem so petty and mundane as to be unworthy of notice but it is important that such problems are noticed and that decisions are delegated, whenever possible, to those scattered individuals who can best deal with them. An expert in a central planning bureau may determine that the average classroom floor needs mopped every three days, but it is the school janitor who sees when and where the student spilled the milk.

Ignorance can not be accurately measured, but people have attempted to measure the resources we use to try to circumvent ignorance. Such estimates can rise to above 50% of GNP in developed economies. Most workers do not directly produce goods. Instead, they deal with information. Without ignorance of small particular matters of the above type, we would have little or no need for accountants or bookkeepers, lawyers or judges, managers or executives, salespeople or buyers, consultants or representatives, bankers or brokers. In such a world, the information these people gather and act on or pass on to others would simply be free to all.

Human society is shaped by ignorance. The particular form our ignorance takes molds the particular form of the society. Our friendships are limited by our ignorance of the others’ true values and feelings. Although one naturally may attribute one’s quarrels to the selfishness of others, ignorance generally plays a major role.

We do not even really know what we know. Most of our knowledge is implicit and undefinable. As children, we do not “learn” a language, but acquire it. In

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general, our understanding of how the world works is acquired unconsciously. One quickly realizes this if one tries to learn a complex skill simply from reading a book. A good salesman or repairman can outline some of the tricks of his trade, but merely guided by such an outline one will not become a good salesman or repairman. One acquires the necessary skills from trial and error and observance of others. Once one becomes competent, one will only vaguely understand of what that competence consists.

Knowledge in the field of consumption is also strictly limited. There is an old Hindu story that when eating a meal the Hindu gods fed each other while the demons fed themselves. Thus, the gods were made gods. If such a system worked for the gods, it only worked because of their extraordinary knowledge or else a monotonous similarity in their tastes. When humans attempt the same, no one gets to eat quite what they wish. Even when humans feed themselves they often leave the table unsure if they chose intelligently.

To deal with their ignorance, angels delegated decisions to individuals close to the various problems. Since the decisions could not be made intelligently without outside information a framework was set up to supply the information. This framework took the form of markets. Eventually, the angels’ process of unselfish decision making became a game in which each angel set out to maximize his or her own profit within the framework of certain rules. Human life also is played as a game: at least very much of human life is game-playing. Businesspeople are well-known as calculating gamesters. They often are more excited about racking up points in the form of profits than actually spending their gains. Office politics is a game as are all politics. Marriage is one of the most important games of all. The trick of course is setting up a society’s games so that the movements of players toward the goals which individually attract them will systematically lead to a better overall society: the closer the correspondence, the more effective the system. If the players are unselfish, then a closer correspondence will also make the games more interesting. Nothing would seem more disheartening than to be trapped in a system of games that seemed to have no meaning as far as human welfare was concerned.

The system of games in the human world is unimaginably complex even if one limits oneself to considering the formal games of economics and politics. As in the angels’ society the games have evolved slowly over time. Attempts are constantly being made at piecemeal rationalization to correct inefficiencies and achieve new forms of coordination. No one, however, really understands more than a small section of the game board. Social scientists are constantly frustrated by the fact that the closer they exam any given problem, the more complex it appears to become. The high level of abstraction which we necessarily adopt when thinking out social

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problems can create the illusion that these problems are simpler than those of our personal lives, but they are by nature much more complex.

Even in our relatively simple personal lives we are constantly facing alternatives which we can evaluate only in the vaguest manner: What should I wear? Who should I call? What program should I watch? What book should I read? In order to simplify choices, we are forced into making many decisions simply by habit. Upon reflection, we are uncertain how efficient many of our habits are, but we can not live without them. Those who attempt to clearly think out a tenth of their choice are probably among a very creative minority. Our decision-making processes are patchworks of creative borrowings that often mesh poorly. Our successes come through trial and error.

The games we have developed to coordinate our individual efforts have been a marvelous aid. They have allowed large parts of the world’s population to escape grinding poverty. These games appear terribly flawed and they are terribly flawed. We are a very ignorant species. Human civilization might be awesomely more productive if the games were perfectly designed, but the closer any given game is examined, the more difficult its improvement appears given human limitations. A reasonable understanding of the difficulties inherent in developing such games should leave one more impressed with what has been accomplished than distressed at what has yet to be achieved. Of course, mankind’s unreasonable resistance to being impressed may be an important factor in explaining how far we have come.

It is difficult for any individual wrapped up in a particular game to guess the extent to which that game hinders or hurts society in general. When a person decides a game hinders mankind or could be greatly improved, she may try to reform the game. In making this decision, she must estimate the chance of achieving reform, the chance that her proposed reform is actually beneficial, the effort the reform attempt will require and whether this effort could be put to better use. The decision is not easy. Running a profitable business can be thought of as a large complex of related games. A businessperson may find herself in a situation in which some particular game integral to her business seems harmful to society. Perhaps when paying taxes she makes use of some common legal loopholes which do not seem socially desirable. In such a case, she has three options. She can go ahead with business as usual, playing the questionable game in hopes that her business will still be of benefit to society in spite of her compromises. Or she may attempt to continue in her business without playing the questionable game, fall behind the other players and perhaps accept losses and eventual bankruptcy. Or finally, she can get out of the business so as to avoid playing the questionable game and hope she can find a game in which such choices are unnecessary.

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This is again a tough decision and in many cases unselfish individuals facing the same problem could easily decide in different ways. On the one hand, compromising principles is always dangerous. On the other hand, an overscrupulousness would abandon much of the economy to those with the poorest understanding of what benefited society. Furthermore, our individual judgments of what benefits society is often defective.

For centuries, Europeans considered loaning money at interest to be unnatural and immoral. Under these circumstances, it was fortunate for Europe’s developing capital markets that not all its inhabitants were equally “moral.” A few of the money lenders may have clearly recognized that the taboo against interest was illogical, but it is likely that most either struggled with their conscience or completely suppressed it. Their position was similar to that of Huck Finn when he had to overcome his impulse to do good by turning Jim over to the slave hunters. In both cases, memes have implanted conflicting rules in the individual’s brain and the rule that is consciously recognized as morally imperative is not necessarily the one that should be followed. In a formerly communist country such as Russia where a long standing moral tradition was suddenly abandoned in favor of free speech and free markets, people often find that their conscience chatters nonsense completely out of touch with the new reality.

Cynics take delight in explaining every human act as selfish, no matter how saintly it may appear. With a little cleverness, one can easily put a superficial gloss of selfishness over almost every act. It is equally easy to explain any act in terms of unselfishness although one sees this approach taken much less frequently. Consider the following three examples of behavior that most people would take as evidence of selfishness.

First, a problem confronted by businesses in many countries is that of a firm operating in an industry where tax avoidance is widespread. An important quality of an efficient game is that it has clear rules. Governments have basic written rules but they are often inefficient, sometimes absurdly so, and the rules actually enforced are quite different than those on the books. Taxes are levied but sometimes hardly, if at all, enforced. Under such circumstances, a good unselfish rule may be to pay the taxes as levied unless they are so unfair as to seriously disrupt the economy. Having basic written rules which are followed is usually an advantage even when the rules are awkward.

If only one firm decides the taxes are too disruptive to pay, however, then that firm gains advantage. It may run the other firms that pay taxes out of business. Furthermore, since it is the least efficient firms that are likely to judge the tax most disruptive, their dominance of the industry will certainly not be to society’s advantage.

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Idealistic firms could decide to pay the tax and be driven out of business or simply avoid the problem by getting out of the industry voluntarily. And both of these solutions may set a positive long-run example. But they do nothing to meet present social needs. An unselfish person could decide that the firm’s best choice is to dodge taxes. Once this industry avoids taxes it will have an inefficient advantage over other competing industries and they too will be faced with a similar choice. As tax dodging becomes more common, enforcement becomes more difficult. There is a danger of a vicious cycle occurring.

Another economic example of supposed selfish behavior is monopoly profit. Economists often use the example of a monopoly market as a socially inefficient game. When there is competition in a market, prices of goods and services are driven down to about what they cost to produce. In monopoly markets, producers can raise the price of goods and services well above what they cost to produce. Economists do not worry so much about a monopolist’s high profits. These profits may eventually be used by the company’s stockholders as well as they would have been used by the company’s consumers. Economists most dislike the fact that raising the good’s price above costs means that less of the good will be bought and sold. If a good costing one dollar is sold for two dollars, then there are buyers out there who could have got $1.75 worth of value out of the good, significantly more than it cost, but who are not going to purchase it at $2.00. One might expect an unselfish person in a monopoly position to sell the monopoly good at cost.

Like tax avoidance, this case also is problematic. One famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter, broke ranks with other economists and argued that monopoly and monopoly profits actually benefited an economy. While agreeing that monopolies were inefficient in a static economy, he argued that the low profits in a competitive market did not allow enough funds for the research and development necessary for technological advance. He also suggested that a monopolistic company might actually expand production greater in the long run since the cushion of extra profits allowed it to take chances that competitive firms could not risk.

A further complication is that most goods and services can be increased and improved in many different ways. An unselfish monopolist might not know in which way his service would be best increased or improved. In a static world, any increase or improvement would be better than nothing, but in a dynamic society seeking maximum monopoly profits might be the best technique to keep up with ever changing consumer tastes and demands. Market surveys are often undependable. Rising and falling profits under varying conditions are important feedback when adjusting the nature of one’s product. They are the only good signaling mechanism on which most businesspeople can rely to determine how well they are meeting

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consumers’ needs. As the angels discovered, leaving profit in the hands of those experimenters who

made it may be beneficial to society. If an inventor creates a new device, it makes sense for society to put more resources into her hands to see if she can continue to create. The easiest way for it to do that is to issue her a patent (or monopoly) on the device and let her gather in the profits herself. The same principle holds true for a company that enters into a new field of production and finds itself in a monopoly position.

Finally another economic phenomenon that often seems selfish is the fierce games of bargaining that commonly go on in the business world. The savagely cut-throat negotiator is a stock character in novels and movies. He seems to care nothing for the welfare of others. He is an expert in playing the game of “push.”

“Push” is primarily an aggressive approach to rooting out information. How much do you really value this good anyway? Are you sure? The game of push that businesspeople play is very similar to the game played in the courtroom. To find the truth, lawyers take opposing sides. Each team aggressively argues one side of the matter, although they may not be personally convinced that their side is completely right. Unlike the angel economy I describe, humans dealing with each other will not objectively and openly evaluate a good and discuss its best use. They will take sides and fight the matter out.

The game has its advantages and disadvantages. When two people of very differing degrees of aggressiveness bargain, an unbalanced outcome can result. Human coordination and cooperation are very difficult. Just as the more civil, if not to say passive, person often feel uncomfortable when faced with an aggressive operator, the aggressive negotiator also tends to feel dislike for those less aggressive than himself. It is not unusual for two hyper-aggressive negotiators in a seemingly ferocious battle to come out full of friendship and admiration for each other.

Push is also an important tool in price discrimination. A person who sets his own prices can charge different people different amounts for the same service. This may not always seem fair but it can increase efficiency. When one can separate out those who value the service less, one can charge them less than others so that they will still be able to purchase. If price discrimination were impossible, these people would be denied service. A doctor who charges rich patients more than poor is a popular example of this. Push is used to determine how much one actually values a product—something the buyer himself knows only vaguely.

Games of tax avoidance, monopoly or push could all develop in an unselfish society. They are games based on self-interest which can be played for unselfish reasons. All could be traced to information problems. The world’s economy is a

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sophisticated, albeit imperfect information processing system that attempts to confront the overwhelming problem of human ignorance. Many components of this system may well appear selfish and oppressive if selfishness and oppression is what one is seeking. On the other hand, if one begins with the premise that mankind is a species of imperfect intelligence, primarily driven by memes and subject to drives induced by meme-based altruism, one will find nothing in the world’s economy to refute this.

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Chapter 7

Government and Violence Violence in society can be thought of as falling along a spectrum. Individual

violence lies at one end. At the other, is the violence of an organized government. Many forms of violence lie in between. Violence by small gangs requires cooperation but is similar in nature to individual violence. Organized crime, on the other hand, can sometimes grow into a government in all but name. Certainly it is not hard to think of particular governments that have resembled organized crime gangs.

Selfishness is commonly associated with violence and unselfishness with peace. Such an association is very misleading. Selfishness can lead to violence when selfish desires clash. Unselfishness can lead to violence when individual’s perceptions of what is to a society’s advantage clash. Generally, individual violence tends to be more selfish while government violence will tend to be more unselfish. Selfish violence is to be most feared in a society in which people think the only way to get ahead is at the expense of others. Under such circumstances, altruistic desires can be repressed as unrealistic. Unselfish violence is most often found where individual’s visions of the good society are least compatible. It will be particularly prevalent when the unselfishness of others is doubted.

Government would exist in all but the simplest unselfish society and may practice violence. Governments are set up because there are many matters that involve more than a handful of people who could sit down together and work out an ad hoc plan or contract. For unselfish creatures, at least, ignorance is behind the need for government. Tribes of angels could spin off many decisions to individuals but other decisions would still be made better centrally. This type government arises not from a desire for power but from a need for rules and resolution of conflicting views.

Air pollution is a common example of a tough problem to solve in decentralized fashion. A factory may be needed to produce an important good but the production can only take place if waste products are released into the air. Large numbers of people are affected by this and they are bothered by it in different ways and to

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different degrees. A balance between the different uses for the air could be argued out on the spot by those affected, but in the long run specific centrally developed rules would likely be more cost efficient if the situation is one that is likely to be repeated.

Commonly the government enforces a set of rules within which individuals make their decisions. An individual constantly encounters a multitude of others and it is important to know where one’s rights stop and the other’s start. Drawing boundaries is as necessary for the unselfish as for the selfish. Individual opinions clash on how things should be used and there should be clear rules for resolving these clashes. The rules must also be stable over extended periods of time. Otherwise, intelligent planning will be impossible for anyone. Individual property rights arose in the angelic society as soon as individual experimentation began. They did not grow out of a grasping desire to accumulate, but out of a need to intelligently evaluate different methods of cooperation.

In a simple tribal society, angels would probably follow rules to the letter. If they found some rule overly troublesome, they would hold a tribal conference to decide whether the rule should be eliminated. As the society became more complex more problems would arise. More rules would be needed and the increasing variety of activities and desires within the society would assure that many of the rules would have unintended side effects in unexpected instances. Changing the increasing number of laws would be harder. In such cases, angels might ignore rules. Although this could upset the plans of others, the breaking of outdated inefficient laws may be useful. Resistance to problematic laws could signal to the government the inefficiency of these laws and lead to the development of new improved ones. Individuals who were too law-abiding might lead to a society which stagnates in a morass of inefficient restrictions. Passive disobedience to bad laws has been an effective means of highlighting and correcting injustice. On a more mundane level, people sometimes break good laws because, in some particular instance, following the law entails unreasonable costs. Few people would hesitate to jaywalk across an empty street to catch an acquaintance with whom they needed to speak or drive a bit over the speed limit to reach an important meeting on time. We generally do not admire those who are excessive sticklers for regulations. Still, it is easy to overestimate the irrationality of a rule that restricts oneself in a task one is sure is valuable and necessary. Society must develop some means of discouraging its citizens from breaking rules too freely.

A reasonable solution would be to impose punishments. Angels would be permitted to break rules if they judged it important enough to pay a certain penalty. The angels would break the rules they felt should be broken and if anyone objected the angel would be notified and the penalty imposed. Transferring resources away

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from the angel would be a natural penalty but some may lack the resources to pay. An alternative measure such as imprisonment would sometimes make sense, especially if the individual’s judgment in a wide range of matters is considered dangerously questionable. Thus, crime and punishment can arise even in an unselfish society.

Those who see human society as a collection of selfish individuals each chasing their own interests tend to identify the government with violence. They may argue that all government is based on violence. But, in an unselfish society, such violence would be seen only as a side effect of government. Government would be based on legitimacy. The greatest crisis an angelic society would face is a crisis of legitimacy. Different opinions could arise as to how and by whom certain governmental decisions were to be made. Some group could so deeply disagree with the vision and goals held by the rest of society’s members that they decide total welfare will be enhanced by their secession. Or they may decide that the group is making poor decisions because the system of decision making is biased or in other ways faulty. In either case, the rest of society may strongly disagree with this analysis. One would like to believe that angels could find some non-destructive mechanism to solve such problems, but it will depend on the distance between the angels’ ultimate goals for society and the degree of their ignorance. One side or the other might judge a threat of violence to be beneficial. Thus, civil war and revolution can arise in an unselfish society.

In human society, most people view most governments differently than organized crime gang. Those that do see their government as an organized crime gang usually recognize the possibility of legitimate government. This feeling for legitimacy suggests that humans are at least partially unselfish. Selfish creatures would calculate advantage instead of arguing legitimacy. As in the case of economics, there is nothing in the political behavior of human beings which could not be explained by mankind’s ignorance. In a world in which confused people seek benefit through horoscopes, palmistry and reading sheep entrails, it should not be surprising that some may support political regimes for mankind’s advantage that many of us find repulsive.

Government shows mankind at its worst, but also at its most altruistic. This will only seem paradoxical if one mistakenly imagines altruism a cure-all for human ills. The problems with which government deals are less tractable than economic problems. Even more cooperation is needed. Thus, although our altruism is most visible in this sphere, it often finds itself overwhelmed by the inherent difficulty of the situation.

Without a large degree of altruism, society would drift into anarchy. If a small

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minority exhibits a penchant for selfish law breaking, a system of courts and police can hold them in check. The larger the number of lawbreakers grows, however, the more expensive enforcing the law becomes. At some point, the law breaks down. In America, prohibition of alcohol proved ineffective even with the support of a majority of the citizens. At present, the effectiveness of drug laws is also a problem. When only a narrow range of laws are challenged, then a society can focus its enforcement on this area and maintain the law if it wills to do so. If a significant minority were to treat every law the way many now treat drug laws, law enforcement agencies would be hopelessly overwhelmed.

The strength of the law lies in the willingness of a great majority of people to accept laws even without enforcement. Anti-littering laws succeed because they convince people that littering is bad for society and take advantage of the respect people have for law. Few people are actually fined for littering and people who refrain from tossing soft drink cans out the car window do not do so because they are afraid of being caught; they refrain because they are civilized which means they are under the control of complex memes. Even in countries where the government is widely viewed as illegitimate, people may ignore certain legislation but will still adhere to a deeper moral code. The tremendous power of the government in a totalitarian state is only maintained by the acquiescence of the majority and to maintain this acquiescence great amounts are invested in propaganda. Dictators commonly regard their subjects as ignorant of the workings of the real world and those citizens who support the dictatorship also suspect that their fellow citizens are incapable of properly running a country.

The greatest difficulty to be faced in governing a nation is the clash of unselfish visions. Unselfish individuals will have a more difficult time agreeing among themselves than selfish individuals because the scope of their concerns is much broader and fuzzier. Determining what is best for one’s own welfare is hardly easy, but it is much easier than trying to determine what is best for society. Suppose a nation was divided by rival ideologies. One of these ideologies believes that mankind’s highest good consists of the maximization of the community’s income and wealth. The other ideology holds that the highest good takes the form of maintaining and strengthening a broad assortment of cultural traditions which often conflict with economic growth. Even assuming the best of intentions, where will these individuals find their common ground? They can try to talk out their differences but they will need more wisdom than human philosophers have shown over the last several millennia if they are going to really settle this dispute. If the society is sufficiently sophisticated, it could resolve the argument through a democratic election with both groups accepting whatever outcome results. This still

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leaves them, however, with many ugly problems concerning the rights that should be granted the minority.

If the society had been divided into ten competing ideologies, then the situation would be even more troublesome. The outcome of the election would depend upon temporary coalitions of incompatible ideological groups. Losing groups may accept their loss if they had agreed to play the election game but their position outside the government will not seem as fair and natural as it would if they had lost a one-on-one election. A losing group may be the largest faction of the ten. It may be left out of the winning coalition due to arbitrary chance or the dealings of other parties which in the losing party’s eyes seem unreasonable.

The use of elections will only be possible if the people involved are not paternalists who believe that even when in a minority they should have a special say in what the community does. Such an attitude may stem not from selfishness but from the belief that one is more qualified than others to understand society due to factors such as one’s economic success, one’s education, one’s deep ideological understanding or some special relationship one has cultivated with God. The success of a strategy using an election game will also depend upon how much one trusts the sincere unselfishness of the other parties. Most of the wars and oppression humanity has seen in the last century have grown out of a skepticism concerning the opposing parties’ good faith. One could decide that killing an unselfish group of people was called for if they were dangerously deluded, but this won’t happen frequently. Commonly the enemy in a violent conflict will be imagined as selfish and insincere.

The governments that have been responsible for most of the killings in the twentieth century have been labeled either authoritarian or totalitarian. Totalitarian governments have been the bloodiest but sometimes they are the most quickly forgiven. Unlike an authoritarian regime, a totalitarian government claims to be driven by a noble unselfish ideology. Those who find aspects of the ideology attractive find it possible to ignore the murders and robberies of a Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Supporters of such men may explain that one can not make an omelet without breaking eggs. The acceptance such leaders find among otherwise reasonable people can be seen as evidence of the deep inner craving we feel for a return to a simple straightforward unselfish solidarity. Less intense authoritarian regimes may also be unselfish but this can be more difficult to see in that the unselfishness takes a less grandiose form.

The oppression of either the authoritarian or totalitarian regime is based on the principle that the few should be sacrificed for the many. If the unselfishness of the few is suspect, this decision becomes easier. Liquidating or merely persecuting ten

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percent of a country’s population in the hopes of raising the welfare of the remaining citizens by twenty per cent, for example, may be a terrible strategy, but not necessarily a selfish one. It does not even necessarily entail group selfishness in which one memetically-linked dominant group, unselfish within its own boundaries, acts without altruism toward an opposing group which is resistant to accepting the dominant meme. In the Soviet Union, for example, there were many cases in which Marxists were willing to accept their own imprisonment and death for the good of the cause. They accepted the fact that they had erred against the state and, being convinced that their elimination benefited the country, they were willing to stoically accept it. They thought the punishment just even though they themselves had made a very honest mistake while altruistically supporting the cause.

This type thinking seems peculiar to those who live under a reasonably effective democratic government. They have forgotten how difficult a free democracy is to cultivate and the intense bewildering pain and frustration involved in an attempt to newly create a system of government that functions at some minimal level. As the angels discovered, a major problem one meets in trying to set up a government is the terribly high cost of getting the necessary information to the right people. Markets offer a partial solution to the problem of determining the production and distribution of goods consumed by individuals, but the type services provided by governments are not consumed by separate individuals but by everyone as a group. The clever decentralized information processing network created by markets is of limited value when faced with political questions such as what we choose to make of our environment or how we deal with problems of unequal natural endowments. Such decisions must be made in a much more centralized manner and as problem-solving becomes more centralized, information problems rapidly increase. Many countries turn to autocratic regimes in an attempt to overcome these problems.

Some non-democratic regimes have had a fair amount of economic success. This has led some to argue that less developed countries must rely on authoritarian government if they wish to develop. One would hope this is not true, but there is enough to the idea that it can not be casually dismissed. Democracy is particularly sensitive to information problems and in societies which process information poorly authoritarianism can appear an attractive alternative to reasonable unselfish people.

The beauty of democracy is that it allows all opinions and interests to be represented in the halls of government. Its great weakness if the lack of information and understanding of the voters whom it takes as its foundation. This is a serious weakness even in developed countries with relatively good information systems. I have spent a good chunk of my life thinking about social problems and yet I must admit that there are broad stretches of political territory in which I have virtually no

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well-considered opinions and must fall back on second-hand clichés. I suspect the average person is no better off. In less developed countries reliable news is scanty. Those reports that get through to the citizens are often biased. Even the best government officials feel truthfulness will hurt their cause and given the state of the system, they are likely correct.

Without good information, democracy can lead to “the tragedy of the commons,” a situation in which the common good is left neglected while each seeks his or her own immediate good. The game of democracy is set up in such a way that each elected representative is responsible for looking out for the good of his or her voters. The worse the information system is, the more direct his service must become. With a poor information system, the service will largely be limited to providing pork. The representative’s attempts at bettering the common good will be either completely beyond notice or at least poorly understood. Voters may honestly altruistically want what is best for all but they will be in no position to judge concerning this matter. Those representatives who most identify the good of the nation with the good of those who vote for them will obviously have a great advantage in elections. The government can easily degenerate into a scramble for spoils even with no selfish behavior. Narrow localism prevails. The saddest form of democracy is that in which real political issues are poorly understood and, therefore, ignored. Elections become little more than exercises in strengthening divisions along regional, ethnic, religious and class lines.

It is as if a million people owned an overseas cherry orchard: Suppose they divide into groups of one hundred and elect ten thousand representatives to provide each group with cherries. If no knowledge of the state of the orchard or total production is available to the group members who elect the representatives, they can only judge their representative by how many cherries he or she brings back to the group. Those representatives who keep their jobs will not be those who spend their time tending the orchard. Although people want the orchard maintained, this work is not observable. The representatives who tend to be reelected will be those who put the most effort into harvesting cherries from the trees. Those who spend most of their energy maintaining the orchard will not be differentiated from those who are just incompetent pickers. They will soon find themselves unemployed. The orchard will not be tended as it should and it will fall into decay. This will happen regardless of whether the actors are selfish or altruistic.

An authoritarian government will also experience information problems. It may have a more difficult time gathering certain types of information than a democratic government, but it can avoid the tragedy of the commons. In an autocratic regime, a strong man rules who does not need to be greatly concerned with

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pleasing the voters. His ideas as to what is best for society may be quite different than those of most citizens but if he firmly controls that which is produced, he can look beyond the short run and carefully increase production without worrying about whether his actions are misunderstood. He will keep the orchard well tended. There will be biases in the autocrat’s scheme of distribution and mistakes in his judgment, but he may increase long-term investment in the country enough to make up for this.

There are examples of inefficient democracies that have been replaced by autocracies resulting in an increase in the welfare of their members in the medium run. In the long run, however, authoritarian governments suffer from problems of excessive centralization much as centrally-planned economies do. An autocrat or even a central committee can not process all the information necessary and his policies grow out of touch with reality. In a democracy, one can expect institutions to slowly evolve more effective means of processing information. In an authoritarian environment, such institutions can grow only in a very stunted manner. A free flow of information could allow the formation of interest groups which would destabilize the society and the advantages of authoritarianism would be lost.

Moving toward a democracy is a sign of growing maturity just as is moving toward a market economy. Once one admits, however, that authoritarianism has advantages in certain situations, the possibility arises that at least some mixture of authoritarianism may be useful in a less mature political society. This certainly seems to be the belief of most people in the world. If one accepts that a reasonable altruistic individual can support authoritarian government, then many institutions that at first seem based on selfishness appear in a different light.

To the extent that a society’s welfare depends on a stable autocracy, democracy and freedom of action must be limited. If freedom of action is limited, then there are strong arguments for limiting freedom of speech. Expressing opinions that seem to call for actions that are forbidden can cause discontent that may threaten the peace of the society and call the legitimacy of the regime into doubt. Free speech and discussion, like democracy and free markets, can be thought of as a sophisticated game. Most countries that now play the game took centuries to learn it. On the one hand, a country can gain information by giving individuals the right to express opinions the majority judge dangerous. On the other hand, there is a cost to this gain in stability that must be paid. In many homes tightly bound by genetic and memetic altruism, free speech is still not practiced between parents and children. It should not be surprising that countries consisting of altruistic individuals might also have trouble handling free speech.

The above arguments are not made to encourage authoritarianism. Such

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government should be avoided when possible. If it can not be avoided, it should be outgrown.2 The existence of authoritarian regimes, however, are no evidence that people are selfish. Altruists may find themselves supporting an autocrat just as other altruists could find themselves trying to overthrow him. Revolution and reaction may come down to no more than honest differences of ill-formed opinion.

The conflict between the need for change and stability is crucial to understanding how a society of altruists may find themselves in a violent internal struggle. Honest conservatives may believe change dangerously destabilizing while revolutionaries feel that the society is stuck in a morass which can only be crossed if those most disadvantaged by the present state refuse to accept the present rules. Revolutionary altruists might well hesitate to introduce violence into a peaceful society. But if they find themselves in a society which still needs at least the threat of violence to operate, they may decide that some increase in violence is appropriate. Most people would have viewed the deaths resulting from the Russian Revolution and entailing civil war as a high but acceptable price if it had led to the communist utopia that the revolutionaries were convinced they would bring about. Few Americans doubt that the American Revolution was a positive event in spite of the death and destruction wrought and in spite of the fact that the society created fell much short of utopia. Similarly, many modern revolutions have led to frightful destruction and oppression and, in retrospect, a reasonable altruist might wish that the original conservative regimes had been more vigorous in repressing the revolutionaries if this repression could have succeeded.

Given that countries consisting of altruists can break into civil wars, it is not surprising that they can also fall into wars with each other. As previously noted, this is most likely to happen when the respective countries doubt each others good will. Countries going to war invariably offer an explanation as to why they do so and within the country the explanation is widely believed. The explanation is virtually always based on upholding justice in some form and the expectation that victory will benefit the country is always treated as secondary. Even Hitler had to first convince the German people that they were being grossly abused by an international conspiracy of Jews and plutocrats before he could lead them into war.

People generally maintain the reasons offered by the enemy for going to war are nothing but cynical excuses and rationalization. We are very willing to discount explanations offered by those who oppose us. Truly, mankind is much given to rationalization and half of what men say can be safely ignored. But which half?                                                                                                                2   The   best   stance   against   authoritarianism   may   be   one   that   resembles   a   Marxist’s   opposition   to  capitalism.     The  Marxist   admits   in   theory   that   capitalism  has  positive  aspects  and   that   it   has  been  useful  under  some  conditions,  but  this   in  no  way  diminishes  his  eagerness  to  overthrow  the  system  and  to  move  on  to  something  he  judges  better.  

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Rationalization is a knife that cuts both ways. We tend to suspect claims of unselfish motivation as being rationalizations but perhaps it is the claims we make for selfish motivation that should be most suspect.

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Chapter 8

Direct Evidence of Unselfishness Since humans are creatures created by memes and genes, their motivation is

neither completely selfish nor completely altruistic. Human behavior is guided by impulses and rules that are created by memes and genes to promote their own propagation. The human, therefore, is not driven either to promote his own welfare or that of mankind in general: he is driven to promote the propagation of his memes and, to a much lesser extent, his genes. Some impulses and rules can be labeled unselfish in that they promote the meme’s spread through a sacrifice of the welfare of the carrier. Usually a human’s action promotes both the welfare of the individual and the society. An individual does not generally help society by hurting himself. In such cases, it is probably useless to quibble over whether the action is really selfish or unselfish. Its effect is both. When the good of the individual and the good of society clash, however, human actions will be either selfish or unselfish in their effect. Usually, they will be unselfish.

That humans perform unselfish acts has been often demonstrated in the laboratory. To separate the selfish act from the unselfish, a situation must be created in which the good of the group and the good of the individual clash unmistakably. The clearest situation of this is a game called “the prisoners’ dilemma.”

In the prisoner’s dilemma, it is imagined that two accomplices to a crime have been arrested. They are being interrogated in two different rooms. The police are trying to obtain confessions. Both prisoners are confronted with the same choice. They can either confess or they can keep quiet. If they both remain mum, the police can still prove a lesser charge and put them both in prison, let us suppose, for three years. If one of them confesses, he will only be charged on the lesser count and be given only a two-year term to reward him for cooperating. His partner, however, will be put away for twenty years. Finally, if they both confess, they will both be tried on the more serious charge, but they will each only be given fifteen years because they cooperated.

In such a case, an individual not instilled with altruistic concern for his accomplice will confess. He will reason as follows. What if his partner confesses?

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Then by confessing, he himself will get only fifteen years in prison instead of twenty. Therefore, if his partner confesses, he had also best confess. And what if his partner does not confess? Then by confessing, he will get only two years in prison instead of three. In this case also, confessing is best. Whatever he suspects his partner will do, his own choice is clear. Both selfish individuals will confess and they will be given fifteen years in prison. If some means of cooperation could have been discovered then they both could have been out in three years. But cooperation was not possible.

This problem could have been overcome if the prisoners had been created by memes which made them behave unselfishly. Each would have taken his partner’s welfare into consideration. An unselfish person would have reasoned: What if my partner confesses? Then by keeping silent I will cause us to spend a total of twenty-two years in prison instead of thirty. What if my partner keeps silent. Then by keeping silent, I will cause us to spend a total of six years in prison rather than twenty-two. Obviously, I should keep silent. If both prisoners were unselfish, they would both remain silent and only serve three years a piece. Their unselfishness brings about a cooperative solution.

Many laboratory experiments have been done using a prisoners’ dilemma situation because this type situation is very important in the human world. We commonly find ourselves in situations dealing with others where we both can gain by cooperating but either of us can also gain from taking advantage of the other. We each must decide whether to act so as to maximize the total benefit to both parties or whether to simply look after our own benefit and walk away with as much as we can.

The laboratory experiments are set up using simple rewards, often money. They are set up by psychologists and social scientists under a wide variety of specific conditions. Results vary but the general findings are that people generally cooperate even when dealing with a stranger whom they may never see again. A cooperation rate of sixty or seventy per cent is common. Even this probably underestimates our tendency to cooperate in real life. When we feel ourselves to be taking part in a game, we naturally play to win. The laboratory situation is artificial and subjects may see the tests as games that one should play for individual victory.

Although cooperation is usual, there are naturally exceptional cases. If one believes the other party will cheat or refuse to cooperate, one will generally not cooperate oneself even though cooperating will mean a better total result for the players together. This is probably a mechanism instilled in humans to make sure any selfish behavior that arises will be punished and controlled. People, however, tend to assume the other partner will cooperate unless there is strong evidence to the contrary.

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One need not go to a laboratory to see unselfishness. Positive evidence that memes tend to make their human carriers unselfish is widespread throughout society. Such unselfishness is ignored only by those who are first convinced of the selfishness of humanity on other grounds. For example, it has often been popularly argued that a person by definition can only do what he wants to do which automatically makes his actions selfish. Memetic analysis reveals the fallacy involved in this argument. We identify so closely with the memes which create us that sacrificing our own welfare for these memes may feel as if it were a form of selfishness. But, there is a clear logical distinction between our self and our memes and human behavior can only be understood if this distinction is made.

Anytime there is a major change in a society’s situation, obvious unselfishness rears its head. The most common case is the disaster, but great good fortune also has a way of making people suddenly generous. People do not just suddenly grow unselfish. What has happened is that the rationale for the profit-maximizing games memes generally direct us to play has broken down. The individual welfare-maximizing behavior we follow with little thought is tuned so that it does benefit society under ordinary situations. In extraordinary situations, the good of the individual and the good of society are no longer the same. We, therefore, are created in such a manner that we will sacrifice our own individual good.

The type needs one faces in a disaster are fundamentally different than those faced in ordinary times. In a disaster, direct information on the most pressing of society’s needs is readily available. We may personally see people whose lives are in great danger. Basic necessities are lacking. Institutions that generally provide for individuals’ needs are not functioning. The best way to benefit society is to immediately attend to the desperate immediately observable matters at hand.

In ordinary times, the needs of society are complex and no one is likely to quite agree how the resources at hand can be best used. We can always turn on the television news and see intense suffering but whether our personal resources had best be directed at such problems or invested more subtly in raising kids, selling shoes or innumerable other activities is unclear. There is something in us that almost welcomes a crisis for it clarifies our doubts. People remember wars nostalgically because they were periods when we had few questions as to goals and could work together in solidarity.

In our everyday life, unselfishness is shown in little acts that keep the machinery of society greased. In large impersonal matters, we trust established social mechanisms and profit-maximizing games, but in small matters such machinery is too cumbersome. We are left to our own judgment of what is best. We tend to give a passerby the information he needs without thinking of how it will advantage us. We

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hold open doors for strangers carrying heavy loads and give up seats to the elderly. We do these things as the chance arises almost without thought. In matters too small for thought or playing games, a natural wish to help others comes to the fore.

One of the most important differences between the unselfish and the selfish is that the selfish will be much more likely to “free ride.” Free riding occurs when one shares the benefits of a service while shirking one’s duty to share the cost. A person who constantly goes out to dinner with a bunch of friends but always allows others to pick up the tab is a free rider. Free riding unquestionably is practiced by many humans. The trend in free riding can not be accurately measured but there are some signs that it is decreasing. Most people are willing to pay their way if they believe they are being treated fairly. If they chose to free ride, they feel compelled to offer an excuse. They may plead poverty or argue that they have paid more than their share in the past. In America, most ordinary goods are no longer placed behind store counters. People could often free ride by taking the items without paying. But in spite of the temptation not to pay most people can be trusted not to shoplift.

A phenomenon suggesting a decrease in free riding is the financing of churches. Two hundred years ago, Americans paid taxes to churches. When funding was made voluntary, most churches adopted tactics to discourage free riding. Money was raised by renting pews to the members so that they were forced to directly pay for service. When subscriptions to raise money were passed around the amount each member donated was widely publicized so that members who free rode could be publicly shamed. Today, such tactics are no longer necessary and seem rather crude.

Although free riding can be found throughout society, much of it can be explained by ignorance and difference of opinion. What is most striking is how seldom one takes advantage of an opportunity to free ride. Next time you are in a discount store watch for opportunities to steal without risk. Then in the parking lot frisk yourself to see if you have stolen anything. Probably, you have decided to pay for the goods you have taken. Some people may avoid stealing, not from reluctance to free ride, but because of the intense shame they would feel in the unlikely event that they were caught. This, however, is also evidence of unselfishness as a significant force in society. In a society of individuals created to be selfish, one would only feel shame at the incompetence one manifested in being caught. One would not be ashamed of thievery because it would be common knowledge that all people in such a society will steal whenever they judge it profitable.

If free riding were practiced whenever possible, society would not last long. Many of our institutions are based on the human resistance to free riding. Although elections can seem circuses of self-seeking, they are actually strong evidence for unselfishness. Voting half-intelligently in any election takes a significant chunk of

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an individual’s time and effort. Not only must one go to the polls but one must give the issues and personalities some consideration. Few people have ever been in an election in which their vote actually mattered. An election won by a hundred votes is considered very close and one won by a single vote is a rare curiosity. The effect on a person’s life of the rare election her vote decides is liable to be small and uncertain. A selfish person would not waste her time. She would free ride and let others do the voting.

People will only vote if they are concerned about the welfare of society. The effect of the rare election decided by one’s vote will only have a limited impact on oneself but a much greater impact on the community. In a district of ten million people, the effect of such an election on society will be approximately ten million times the effect on the individual. The decision to vote could only be rational if we take the effect on society into consideration.

The same type argument can be made concerning protests and charities. A refusal to participate is not going to significantly hurt us. Our day on the picket line or our one hundred dollar check costs us directly. We may like to see injustice corrected or live in a hunger-free society but whether we participate or not makes little difference to the success or failure of a large movement. The selfish would certainly choose to stay home and keep their money in the bank. Only those who consider the multiplied impact of their participation on all members of society might consider the effort worthwhile.

Much of our happiness comes through our identification with others. The reason most people read the news is not because it will have any impact on them personally. They have their own vague idea of what a good society should be and they are made happy or sad by society’s advances and retreats. At its most playful, our unselfishness is what creates spectator sports. In a selfish world the devotion of fans to their team would be incomprehensible. What profits us if the Cubs win? We live large chunks of our life at a distance identifying with people who do not even know we exist. A life not lived this way would seem narrow and barren. A healthy life is one in which one’s struggles and achievements are consciously linked to the larger world.

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Chapter 9

Limits of Unselfishness Genes and memes are selfish, but true selfish motivation does not exist on the

level of the human individual since we unselfishly serve our genes and memes. Selfish behavior does exist between those individuals who are neither related nor potentially related either genetically or memetically. Selfish behavior may be important but it is unclear how important. On the one hand, the impulses and rules governing human action are not directly observable. On the other hand, the long-term effect of the action is seldom clearly known.

The memes’ dominance over the human species suggests that unselfish behavior has limits. It is in a meme’s interest to form a creature that will direct its altruism strategically. Geneticists argue that genetic altruism diminishes as the genetic relationship between creatures becomes more distant. A parent and offspring share half their genes, so the welfare of the offspring should be half as important to the parent as its own welfare. By the same logic, the welfare of an offspring’s offspring (a grandchild) will be valued at a quarter of one’s own welfare. Even in genetics, this is nothing more than a very rough rule. It has little relevance to the human memetic world.

Memes make use of the genetic altruism hard-wired into the brain, but there may be strict limits as to how they can manipulate it. Suppose an individual is dominated by several complex memes one of them being Christianity. It is in the interest of the Christian meme to form the character of the individual so that he will treat the welfare of every Christian as being as important as his own. If he meets another individual who only shares the Christian meme with him, his other memes gain no advantage from treating this individual altruistically. Whether or how they will resist his Christian-inspired altruistic impulses, however, is problematic. There seems to be no obvious internal referee which would decide, for instance, that Christianity controlled one-third of his actions and therefore the weight given to welfare of other Christians should be one-third that of his own.

Furthermore, memetic altruism is directed not only at fellow carriers but potential carriers as well. The degree of altruism one shows toward a non-carrier

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may determine whether the person eventually becomes a carrier. This effect could conceivably generate a universal altruism that pervades all mankind. The desire to spread one’s memes is the equivalent of the sex drive in the genetic world. The memetic drive to influence others is intense and if altruism is a useful means of doing this, it could color every aspect of behavior.

Since selfishness will be most powerful in relations between non-memetically related individuals who do not see each other as potential fellow carriers, selfishness is likely to be most entrenched in international relationships between widely different cultures. Nationalism is one of the most dangerous form of selfishness. Primitive people often seem reluctant to admit the humanity of other cultures and refer to themselves as “the people” or some similar phrase. They can see no way that their memes could spread to other cultural groups without the use of force.

Usually one is more apt to identify selfishness with the violence perpetrated by individuals. Individual violence can be selfish but is not necessarily so. An example of unselfish individual violence is that of a anarchist terrorist on a suicide mission. Selfish violence would seem to be better typified by memes that manifest themselves in robbery and mugging. When successful, these benefit their carrier at the expense of society. Such memes generally arise under particular circumstances.

One commonly finds that robbers and muggers do not believe human cooperation possible at least within society as it exists. They are sometimes glorified by people who share this belief. Not only a Robin Hood who supposedly gave to the poor but even a Bonnie and Clyde or a Jesse James can become folk heroes. People who ennoble such characters are possessed of an underlying opinion that those being robbed did not gain their wealth through valuable service to society and they do not see the wealth as being well used at present. Sometimes such people are poor and can see all about them desperate immediate needs. Naturally, they may question the cooperative nature of a system in which it is decided that some rich young man should get a new sports car while they themselves are hungry. If one believes that the people one robs have themselves unfairly obtained their money, then it is not clear that one’s robbery hurts society.

Some people justify stealing from the poor using similar logic. If one believes that the world is a dog-eat-dog place where one person’s gain is another’s loss, one can legitimately argue that robbery and other forms of selfishness can benefit society. In such a primitive cynical world, the abuse of the weak and stupid by the strong and clever would at least “improve” the gene pool.

These types of selfishness reflect a belief that real cooperation is impossible. They often flare up most intensely in a quickly changing society, among the uprooted or among those who, rightly or wrongly, believe themselves oppressed. Such people

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would like to be unselfish if only they could live in a rational world which apparently made sense. The society around them does not seem a cooperative one, however, and they are convinced that under present conditions one person’s gain must be another’s loss. This conviction often makes them extremely unhappy.

Such a belief is widespread in the world. It is one of the most destructive beliefs that can inhabit the modern mind. It drives both gamblers and class warriors. It has found its way into such great works of thought as Aristotle’s Politics and Montaigne’s Essays. At times it may be almost accurate. Social situations may arise in which, however much one is driven to enter into cooperative social relations, the individual of average intelligence can not see how this is to be done. The individual may find herself in situations in which all the means of cooperation she has mastered have become inapplicable. It is a commonplace that criminals generally feel themselves cut off from society.

Another way in which people can be twisted into non-altruistic behavior is illustrated by drug abuse. A drug can cause such a strong craving that one is willing to sacrifice the welfare of those around one to use it. A drug use meme is very powerful but it is also very primitive and simple. It is in some ways an exceptional case but it is an extreme example of a type destructive behavior that is widespread.

Large complex cultural memes make space for many forms of behavior that can benefit an individual and his society. For example, games of skill or even chance can be useful tools in forming an effective human character. They can draw us into social activity or give rise to useful habits of mind. They are also important ways to escape pressure. There need be nothing selfish about choosing to spend an evening playing a game although it may be of no immediate benefit to anyone. Even a week spent lost in a video game is not necessarily bad under certain circumstances.

Problems arise when the lure of the game gets out of hand. Complex memes makes us vulnerable to the allure of certain games because, on the whole, this enhances our welfare and their survival and propagation. But the vulnerability is not finely tuned. Games themselves are constantly evolving and successful games continually develop new ways to lure players. A successful game may take advantage of our vulnerability in ways that hurt society. We can become unhealthily addicted to games just as we can become addicted to drugs. Tennis, coin collecting, working crossword puzzles, even bathing and eating are all potentially worthwhile activities that can lead to destructive behavior when they get out of control. Note that addictions such as these lead to non-altruistic behavior but are not examples of individual selfishness. They hurt the individual just as they hurt those around her.

Memetic creatures may be largely unselfish but even traces of selfishness can cause great problems for a basically unselfish society. The greatest harm to be

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feared from selfishness is not the direct harm, but the suspicion that is created. One never knows when one may be dealing with selfishness. If one is living in a society that has been built on unselfishness then an increase in selfishness is a dangerous threat that must be checked. A purely unselfish person dealing with a person known to behave unselfishly will act very differently than when he is dealing with a person who may behave selfishly. Misunderstandings between two people certain of their mutual good-will can usually be resolved. The same misunderstandings will fester and spread when neither party feels sure of the other.

Many political and social institutions can best be understood as means of controlling aberrant selfishness. The decision to use the adversarial process both in the courtroom and in business makes selfishness less profitable. Neither side takes the other at its word. This may arise as a useful process of double checking among the unselfish, but it is even more obviously useful when one side is suspected of possible selfishness.

The greatest difficulty inherent in decentralized decision-making is coordination. Society’s knowledge is scattered among millions of individuals. Putting this knowledge to use is difficult enough when each individual can be expected to attempt honest communication. When communications may be manipulated, costs of using information held by others rises. As the need to use decentralized decision process becomes greater defenses against manipulation must be created.

Just as a small number of criminals may cause the need for an expensive police force or a small threat of war may require a large defense budget, a small but potentially growing selfishness can make trust impossible and forces a society to make huge investments in verifying and enforcing honesty. Memes that profit from individual selfishness will find profits greatest just where trust is most necessary. A little selfishness does great damage because it will attack the weakest link so that all links must be made strong. Some people upon observing the world’s problems can only attribute them to massive selfishness. These people underestimate the tragic scope of human ignorance and the large effect a little selfishness can have.

The possibility of selfishness should neither be ignored nor overemphasized. A belief that selfishness is widespread can make selfishness itself more likely and the condemnation of wide swathes of useful altruistic behavior as selfish will camouflage real selfishness leaving it invulnerable to attack. Selfishness becomes rarer as civilization becomes more complex in spite of the fact that this very complexity makes altruistic behavior more difficult to directly observe and police. Since selfishness pollutes human behavior, the advance of human civilization will depend both on increasing human knowledge generally and the growth of increasingly sophisticated memes which require altruism to propagate. The increased knowledge

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will make selfishness easier to detect and memes that can only be propagated through altruistic contact will leave the selfish at a disadvantage.

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Chapter 10

The Pain of Misunderstanding Many see the world as a selfish place because they see themselves as selfish

people and they assume that others are no better. In Christianity, salvation depends on a conviction of sin. One must come to a realization that one is hopelessly trapped in one’s own selfishness and pride. Other religions picture humanity as in a battle with selfishness having little hope of winning without divine aid. Sensitive souls examining their motives can be severely troubled by what they find. The less sensitive also detect extensive selfishness but accept it as natural assuming it could be no otherwise.

Such insights into one’s own soul are very inaccurate. Mankind is a rationalizer. The evidence we gather from introspection is seldom reliable and the evidence as to our own selfishness is no exception. Human beings seem to have a strong need to believe that they are rationally in control of their personal choices. In fact, much of what we do is not driven by a consciously understood rationality. We, therefore, freely make up stories to cover for this—stories we strongly believe. Some psychologists go so far as to argue that the “self” is largely an illusion we create to cover up our plurality. People with split personalities may be unusual only in so far as their unifying façade is exceptionally weak. The pluralism manifested by a split personality is very different from memetic pluralism but it does clearly show the fascinating extent to which the human mind is subject to disunity.

The lives of human individuals are enmeshed in a system of cooperation beyond human understanding. A major difference between the angelic society and our human society is that the angels consciously designed their institutions. Human institutions slowly evolved because they solved problems, but no one necessarily understood why or how these institutions worked. Imagine a simple society in which production has been institutionalized according to a traditional plan. Something happens and the society opens up to individual experimentation. Perhaps a small group tries trading with others and production is increased. Memes have created people so as to pick up such useful traits that will help the community. Over the centuries, others imitate the trading behavior or members of the trading group try new

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activities and bring the new technique with them. Finally, individual plans coordinated by trading become the leading characteristic of the society.

The activity has grown out of the unselfish meme-based drives of individuals but these drives are not understood. Most individuals have shifted to playing the trading game because it is the game their neighbors or parents taught them. They have not reasoned it out as the best unselfish solution to the community’s problems. They are certainly going to feel confused. They want what is good for society and they are hustled into a game where they seem to do little but pursue their own advantage. How are they to understand this? As they spend their years chasing profit and ignoring their impulses to directly and communally work for society’s good, the question will often come to them: “why am I doing this?” The only answer possible with the available data will be: “I am selfish.”

Such imagined selfishness brings remorse and a feeling of uncleanliness. It will seem a fall from grace. Legends of the almost mythical old days will tell mankind of the beautiful creature he once was living in solidarity with his kind before the poison of individualism destroyed his soul. The structure of the new games, the patterns of the new dance, will be far above his comprehension and at times society will seem a war of all against all. Noble souls will seek salvation by escape from this world. Great souls will rise up in rebellion and attempt to make the world anew. Honest souls will write books condemning the madness and pain. In successful societies, most will hunker down and play the ill-understood games, creating a society ever more cooperative and complex. For many, altruistic impulses will be pushed back to very edge of consciousness where they may play the role of a nagging confused conscience.

Mankind’s understanding grows, but it never catches up. Looking back over the development of human thought, our painfully slow progress is evident. In ancient China, people were sorted into four categories: first were the scholar-bureaucrats, second came the farmers, third the craftsmen and finally merchants. The ranking was supposed to reflect the morality of these occupations. Scholar-bureaucrats directly dealt with the common good so they were superior. Farmers did a necessary task with only limited trading so they too were acceptable. Craftsmen were needed but they lived in shops and bought and sold frequently so they were morally suspect. Merchants were immoral. They chased gain regardless of the common good. They traded goods regardless of the common plan. Chinese society needed and tolerated the merchant but when problems arose it was generally assumed to be the merchant who caused them.

This type thinking is typical of traditional society. Modern society shows important advances but we still confront the same type problems. The salesperson

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and wheeler-dealer are widely suspected of petty souls. A person’s morality becomes more suspect the deeper he sinks into abstract market activity. Those who accept the merchant may not yet accept the banker. The merchant at least handles goods transporting them from place to place. The banker shuffles money and bonds. In more complex societies the banker has now won his place, but the stockbroker’s position is nowhere very secure. As astute a businessman as Andrew Carnegie saw brokers as mere parasites. Sometimes the broker herself can not see what good she is doing society. Too many brokers never understand the value of the services they perform and are almost forced to the belief that they and the human race generally are creatures of pure selfishness. This belief can run them off the track and get them into trouble. Society is sometimes blamed for the crimes of the impoverished. The white-collar crimes of the broker can be laid at society’s door with at least as much justice. It is society’s lack of understanding that shapes such criminals’ values.

The situation mankind faces is not so different from that faced by human children. It is not unusual for children as they grow up to be tormented by strong sexual urges they can not understand. Their thoughts and desires leave them feeling ashamed. When they grow up, they may come to understand that there was no reason to be ashamed. Their thoughts and desires were natural.

Immigrants from traditional villages find themselves in a similar position. As traditional youths they live under a strict set of rules that severely limits the profit-seeking games that can be played. They sometimes break these rules and feel the shame involved. When they go to the city, they learn that there is nothing inherently shameful about many of the games. They are a natural part of social advance and sophistication.

This is the general situation of mankind. Our species has passed through periods in which individuals were ashamed to lend money at interest, to do business outside of a marketplace or even to have a better crop yield than their neighbors. Although we find these scruples rather puzzling today, such taboos have left their scars. If we continue to develop, much that shames us as selfish today will also puzzle us in the future. I suspect much of the violence in society can be attributed to a residual selfishness. In the future, however, it is very possible that mankind will come to understand that even this is tied to some game that serves an unselfish purpose.

In trying to estimate your own selfishness, you can not go by your feelings. You must examine your actions. What do these actions show? Most of us try to make money, but only by abiding within certain limits. We generally play the game unless we feel we are being short-changed. We primarily take care of our own family and find this to be a tough enough job to keep us busy. But we do not claim

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our own family to be in theory more important than that of others. We look out for our family’s welfare because they are our family and thus our responsibility. We feel more love for them than others because we are close to them and just for this reason this feeling is most useful. It would be hard to design a system of emotions better tuned to benefit society than our human emotions. Even when we sink to vindictiveness, we act so as to “teach the other a lesson” which is a perversely unselfish motive.

One can even argue that our unselfish urges often go too far and end in behavior that hurts society and produces nothing but waste. An incredibly large amount of concern is expended on characters in soap operas. Emotional involvement with fictional people may serve an educational purpose, but it seems that our memetic altruism is being manipulated. Useless concern for the trials and tribulations of celebrities is also widespread. The limitations of our concern for others is due to the ease with which such feelings misfire as anyone who has unsuccessfully tried to improve the life of a neighbor is aware. An intelligent unselfish reformer could reasonably decide that improvement of the world should include further limitations on our unselfish feelings to order to balance the increase in communications which keeps us so well informed of miseries we can not effectively alleviate.

Charity toward strangers has an important place but it needs to be held in check by a certain skepticism. One does the most good following one’s own genius. Henry David Thoreau’s criticism of charity rests upon solid ground. Of doing deliberate good to others, he said it was, “as if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the mean while too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good.” He continued, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life…”

An argument of this type, of course, can be used as a selfish excuse to avoid giving needful help to others—although it is not clear why such excuses would be needed in a selfish world. Many people believe that more of our time should be spent directly helping others, but hardly anyone believes that most of our time should be spent this way. People who specialize in directly helping those in difficult circumstances should be admired but so should those who specialize in making music or producing oil. The particular admiration many direct at the former group of people may be healthy since mechanisms have not yet been developed to reward them

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otherwise. But excessive romanticizing of saints and relief workers may follow from the haunting, but unjustified, sense of guilt our own apparent selfishness causes.

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Section III The Way Ahead

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Chapter 11

Being Human The human individual is a composite creature. We are an ever changing pack

of memes inhabiting a brain and body built by genes. Our genetic origins are still important in understanding our character. If nothing else, the sex drive shows us this. Genes though are no longer in charge of man. They have lost out to a far stronger, far more nimble rival. The genetic evolution that has occurred since the development of complex memes has been relatively minor. 3 Genes’ primary influence is by the equipment they evolved before the memes took up residence.

Memes are more than a strong influence on the individual. They create the individual. In a psychological sense, they virtually are the individual. Reading sociobiology often gives people the uncomfortable feeling that they are nothing more than robots that have been engineered by their genes. This book has made the argument that individuals resemble robots reengineered by memes. Our conscious awareness suggests that humans may have a soul and free will but it is hard to imagine what form these would take unaccompanied by memes. If one could pull back a physical curtain and find a spiritual world, one would not see cool gamesters skillfully controlling their characters using simple game consoles. More likely, one would find desperate sailors trying to keep their ships aright in a storm-wracked twelve-dimensional memetic sea.

Being composite memetic creatures, we are both more and less than individuals. Our minds are a community of memes. To succeed in creating a successful individual these memes must cooperate to an extent but they are not unified. Memes are linked more tightly in some respects with the corresponding memes in other minds than with the memes in the mind they share. A Japanese culture meme will be more

                                                                                                               3   Conceptually,  it  is  difficult  to  compare  the  speed  of  evolution  in  two  completely  different  processes.    Few  would  dispute  that  the  difference  in  appearance  of  a  modern  man  and  one  alive  20,000  years  ago  is  smaller  than  difference  between  modern  culture  and  culture  20,000  years  ago.     It  should  be  noted  that   the   genetic   evolution   that   has   occurred   seems   to   be   centered   in   the   brain  where   the  memes  reside   and   this   may   well   have   been   caused   by   the   quickly   changing   memetic   environment.    Something   akin   to   a   friendly   arms  war   between   symbiotic   partners  may   have   occurred.     Linguists  believe   our   use   of   language   has   been   greatly   facilitated   by   genetic   evolution.     Genetic   evolution,  therefore,  does  react  to  memetic  evolution  and  can  not  be  completely  discounted.  

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interested in promoting the welfare of Japanese culture memes infecting others than in promoting the welfare of other memes who share with it a particular Japanese individual’s brain.

The fragmentation of our mind among many memes means that we will not act as a rational individual would. Our memes each have their own interests for which they struggle. The decision process is not well understood. In order for humans to function and propagate their memes, irrationality must be minimized but this is a complex task. We have already seen how difficult it can be for even unselfish angels to get together in committee and make rational decisions. Unlike angels, and unlike humans, memes are selfish and manipulative. In a person whose mind is dominated by two memes—a Buddhist meme and a drug-use meme—one can hardly expect a rational compromise to be worked out. Such people exist and they are given to great internal battles and wide swings in behavior. The mind of another person may include two different memes, one manifesting itself in Indian nationalism and the other in support for free trade. This individual is going to feel conflict when India opens its borders to trade in a sensitive sector or gets involved in a trade war. She may have a much easier time rationalizing her changing actions and views than will the Buddhist drug addict. In most cases, however, the twists and turns in her position, though rationalized, will not be rational. They will be determined by the constantly changing layout of the battlefield in her mind.

Memes have evolved numerous methods of minimizing the chaos. They commonly establish boundaries breaking life into spheres of influence. A religious meme may govern decisions in some areas while other decisions fall to an occupational meme. Beginning a business meeting with prayer would be an attempt to affect the business decisions made by moving them into the religious meme’s sphere of influence. Advertisers intuitively understand how important memetic context is to consumers. Instead of arguing logically for consumption of their product, they put most of their efforts into suggesting the proper context for consumption. Cars, shoes and breakfast foods associate themselves with different lifestyles and their consumption rises and falls with that of the meme that creates the lifestyle. A car-maker must decide whether its goods should appeal to the buyer as a family man, a sharp consumer, an adventure seeker or a patriotic American.

Memes can also avoid conflict by positioning themselves in a hierarchy. Lower-level memes that manifest themselves in cooking, house-cleaning, watching TV, etc. conflict easily but they are generally governed by an overarching cultural meme that keeps everything roughly in its place. This layering of memes in an almost bureaucratic hierarchy is one reason they are so difficult to analyze.

The broad overarching memes are where one finds mankind’s basic altruism.

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The self-seeking games we have learned to play are generally among the lower-level memes. The broad cultural memes have evolved slots for the lower-level memes that manifest themselves in seeking individual profit. Those variations of the cultural memes that happened to generate such slots prospered. Until recent times, generating a conscious understanding of why these profit-seeking games were useful was prohibitively expensive given the brain’s capacity. Thus has come about the seemingly paradoxical situation of a creature that is unknowingly unselfish.

The memetic fragmentation of the self is efficient given the human condition. The drive to rationalize our actions is a relic of a simpler time. Just as we romantically yearn for a simple community in which goals and means are centrally decided in social solidarity, we also yearn for a simple unified consciousness. Accepting the babble of squabbling memes like the acceptance of profit-maximizing games is a mark of human maturity. Coming to terms with either phenomenon is an agonizing experience for any society. Critics of modernity have done a great service in exploring the pain that wracks a transforming society although they themselves have often been in too much pain to recognize the heroic aspects of such suffering.

If memetic fragmentation can be troubling, the memetic transcendence of self is the basis of human happiness and human civilization. Memetic brotherhood makes mankind an extended family. Although we are not as internally unified as we would like, we are externally unified with others. An important aspect of the mind of a Russian individual, for example, touches that of other Russian individuals in an intimate manner which may feel almost mystical. When two such individuals meet, an important meme within each will recognize in the other a brotherhood stronger than that which unifies the individual himself. The closer the memetic similarity, the easier will be the recognition. I would like to believe that there are no individuals so memetically different that such a recognition would be impossible. A person who was unable to recognize his memetic brotherhood with anyone would be impossibly lonely and could not function in the human world.

The relationship between memes residing in different minds is strengthened by their fluidity. The individual is ever changing. Behavioral patterns that were once dominant are pushed aside leaving the merest trace. The old friend one meets after years of separation really is a different person. One may teach a friend bridge and get her hooked on the game and then lose all interest oneself. The bridge-playing meme has propagated itself and lives on, but its original residence in one’s own mind has been abandoned. The mansions of the brain are rented, not sold. And being renters, memes are less interested in keeping up the property than an owner would be. Their self-interest lies in their own interpersonal relations.

In one sense, one can imagine a human being as a high-rise apartment complex.

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Tenants move in and out constantly. They have some commonality of interests and can put up a united front on occasion but they maintain no consistent solidarity. They quarrel and litter the halls. Their best friends live elsewhere.

A more accurate, though more complex, metaphor is that of the human as corporation. The complex memes that shape the modern human’s overall life act as a board of directors. Their membership and control are constantly fluctuating. The remnant of the genetic self which the memes struggle to manipulate could be thought of as the corporate president although here the metaphor is weak. This president, although granted a life-time tenure, is slow and stupid compared with the directors and plays a largely passive role as a front-man. The many simpler memes, such as job skills, social skills, faults and habits are the employees of the human corporation. Some are harder to hire and fire than others, but most of these memes are too simple to have the sophisticated control over human behavior possessed by complex memes. They are incapable of memetic altruism and are selected by complex memes for their perceived usefulness.4

I do not have the expertise needed to write in detail about the internal structure of the mind. It seems clear, however, that the internal corporate structure has been changing through history. In traditional society, there is a much less clear division between simple and complex memes. This can be observed by comparing the Old and New Testament. In the earlier Old Testament, the Levitical law minutely regulates many aspects of traditional Jewish life. In New Testament times, Jesus repeatedly puts emphasis on the spirit of the law rather than on its letter. In other words, he was trying to slim down the complex Judeo-Christian meme stripping it of the attached simple memes which were no longer necessary for the complex meme’s success. By stripping simple memes off of a complex meme, one adds flexibility to the meme. One can experiment with customs and rules and they can be accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they serve the overarching complex meme.

Human progress has often depended on how far complex memes can be stripped down. In the Middle Ages, a good Catholic was required to believe that the Sun rotated around the Earth. Scientific progress depended on the fact that this simple belief could be stripped from the religious meme. Under a culture in which a belief concerning the Earth’s position was integral to the dominant religious meme, astronomy could not develop. The modern Christian meme is faced with the problem of whether the simple meme manifesting itself in a belief in miracles is integral to the religion. Liberal denominations have stripped themselves of this

                                                                                                               4   These   simple   memes   have   sometimes   evolved   skills   that   allow   them   to   misrepresent   their  usefulness  to  the  complex  memes.     As  mentioned  in  an  earlier  chapter,  some  drug-­‐use  habits  seem  capable  of  seizing  virtual  control  of  the  entire  corporation.  

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belief while conservative denominations hold on to it. The decline in membership being experienced by liberal denominations suggests that the belief in miracles may be an integral part of the Christian meme which can not be successfully stripped off.

Some traditional cultures could not readily accept the use of Western technology because the complex memes governing these traditional cultures had simple technical memes strongly attached. If a particular form of housing was central to the complex meme, then the meme was not only unable to make use of more “efficient” Western housing, but the Western housing was a threat to its very existence and thus not really efficient at all. Progress depends upon what the complex memes accept as useful. A unified selfish utility maximizing individual such as postulated by most economists would be more open to adopting new skills, but a unified creature with the level of skills of a modern human would have taken much longer to evolve. We have reached our present state by way of a symbiotic memetic shortcut and we live with the consequences this entails.

Memes develop over the centuries. Christianity has been evolving for almost two thousand years and it did not start from scratch. Memes already far in advance of anything possessed by animals traveled out of Africa with the first prehistoric emigrants. Memes can be short-lived as shown by many a passing fad but the memes that most shape our personalities have had the opportunity to develop very sophisticated selfish survival strategies.

The transience of human individuals gives us no time to develop more than a rudimentary selfishness. We are here and then gone, and before we are gone we have changed many times. Self-love is a thing we have little time to create and in which our memes have little interest in investing.

In this work, I have been primarily concerned with how this lack of self-love affects our behavior. In this section, I wish to go somewhat further and consider how lack of selfishness affects human progress. To simply identify positive progress with evolution, however, would commit a fallacy. One cannot derive what “ought” to be from what “is” selected in an evolutionary process. To speak of progress, value judgments are required which are particularly difficult to make given the lack of human selfishness that I claim. One cannot fall back on simple utilitarian arguments since it is the memes and not the individual that does the valuing. One cannot speak of the utility of some event to a human given that the human is a combination of memes which may each be affected very differently by the event. Natural rights arguments also seem inappropriate in this context. Such arguments are finally grounded on common sense and throughout this book I have been attacking the idea of human selfishness that most readers have probably accepted as a common sense idea. The basis of morality has always been a troublesome issue and the concept of

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the meme adds another layer of trouble for philosophers to ponder. I cannot solve this problem. I have tried, however, to avoid making any very controversial moral judgments in this book. I assume that most of us can pretty well agree on what is moral, that we are probably close to the truth in so far as we agree and any disagreement we have is most likely due to a disagreement over the objective facts of the matter. Nevertheless, the reader should keep in mind that I am making moral judgments in this section with which some may disagree even if they accept my objective analysis.

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Chapter 12

Peace Memetic evolution is gradually altering our world. Tracing the memetic trends

that led us to our present society is an immense task. Anything more than the beginnings of a crude sketch are beyond my power. Attempting to follow the trends off into the future is even more difficult. Tackling such a task requires a certain arrogance but the future is where we are fated to live, it is the period of most interest to humanity and it is worth some risk to examine. Through the fog, the road seems to vaguely appear.

Society is advancing. It is becoming ever more complex. Skeptics claim that the world grows richer, but no better. Economic advance, however, stems from the division of labor and thus shows a clear increase in cooperation. It is this increase in cooperation that makes the ongoing development of human society so exciting. This process can be dangerous but in the long-run it leads to peace. The dream of ending war is thought utopian today just as the dream of ending slavery was once thought utopian. The end of war, however, may not lie so far over the horizon.

War, like other social phenomenon, is meme-based. Memes evolved war as a tool of survival and propagation. The nature of war has changed greatly in modern times. Wars were once fought by men in tight formations wearing brightly colored uniforms or by mobs of charging horsemen. Concealment could not be used effectively because a fighter would not voluntarily cooperate at the risk of his life. Fighters had to be kept under observation so that shirkers who tried to save themselves at the expense of their unit could be punished. As late as World War I, machine guns were sometimes placed behind trenches ready to fire on laggards when an advance was ordered.

Fighters faced a type of prisoners’ dilemma. The unit was much more likely to be successful if everyone sacrificed his own welfare to that of the group. Each individual, however, was much more likely to come out alive if he shirked his duty leaving the dangerous fighting to his colleagues. Under pressure the soldiers often did not cooperate.

In modern war, there is generally a solidarity that allows for more sophisticated

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tactics. Concealment can be used because soldiers will cooperate and fight as a group even when not being observed. It is often said that one should never attack a revolution. During revolution, ideology is strong leading to cooperation within the ranks of fighters that can allow an otherwise outclassed force to win battles.

The horrors of a traditional war were often based on lack of cooperation. Civilians died amidst widespread unorganized looting and lawlessness. Soldiers died from disease brought on from lack of organized sanitation. The horrors of modern war, on the other hand, arise directly out of cooperation. Destruction is much more often planned and systematic. In traditional warfare, men killed because their officers maneuvered them into kill-or-be-killed situations. Modern soldiers kill according to instructions as decided by the group. They will put themselves in danger in order to kill.

Perversely, the horror of modern war is based on an increase in unselfishness. Before the modern increase in communications, memetic altruism between individuals taken out of their local communities was too weak to fight a war with modern efficiency. Attempts were made to alleviate this problem by sorting men into units according to their place of origin, but this was only partly successful. The horizons of a villager’s memetic altruism were very limited and the survival of these villagers’ memes were seldom at stake in battle. Modern fighters feel much stronger impulses to sacrifice themselves for relatively anonymous countrymen with whom they have been thrown together. They will risk their lives for other people in their unit. Moreover, even when fighting in foreign lands, they have a strong feeling that they are fighting for their country. The “country” they are fighting for is a memetic concept and it is an important enough part of the mind to drive them to self-sacrifice.

The nature of modern war itself, therefore, shows movement along the road to peace. Altruism has increased in scale. Assuming the increase in scale continues, peace will eventually be achieved. What is needed first is a more complex memetic environment ranging across national borders. Second, we must better understand human altruism so as to avoid misunderstanding.

War can occur when the borders between dominant meme complexes divide the world into regions. Memes that divide individuals but not on a regional basis can lead to social conflict and even revolution but they are generally somewhat less dangerous than regional memes. To the extent that meme borders are drawn through individuals rather than between individuals, inter-personal conflict will be replaced with psychological conflict which will occur within each person.

As communication, along with transportation, become cheaper and increasingly efficient, memes become less regional. The content of the matter communicated is less important than its existence. Soap operas, detective shows and music videos

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may be worthless in themselves but still useful as instruments of peace. The effects of the communication revolution have been treated by many authors much better than I can do so here. I will simply note that international communications has three important effects. First, it spreads memes across borders. Second, it allows memes to recognize their relatives at a distance. Third, it gives inter-cultural memes an advantage over culture-bound memes since this new form of propagation is one particularly suited for memes which can adapt to various cultures. Communications spreads international values and it allows people to recognize that others already share the same values as themselves.

The growth in memetic complexity itself leads to peace. Individuals whose minds are creations of several complex memes will not divide their memetic altruism along single well-defined boundaries. A Muslim Ethiopian immigrant to Italy finds himself memetically tied to a variety of groups. His response to a call for solidarity on the part of any one group will be qualified. Furthermore, the variety of the memes that have created him will tend to be of a more peaceful strain. To the extent that he is a successfully functioning individual the memes within him must have evolved means of peaceful coexistence. Memes having skills that allow them to struggle peacefully for advantage within an individual will be more likely to develop peaceful means of propagating between individuals. The internal division, uncertainty of identity and angst that for many people typify the modern world are a result of a growing memetic complexity within individuals. Treating these as symptoms of some fearful disease is wrong. Instead, these are side effects naturally arising within a maturing, and increasingly peace-based, civilization.

Memetic complexity also makes for a more competitive environment. Memes find violence only a successful tactic when they already have significant monopoly power. In a pluralistic society, there are many memetic competitors. As unsuccessful competitors are weeded out, successful memes undergo variation and split into competitive strains. A meme that goads the individuals it creates into violent attempts to spread itself will have more success if it already dominates a society. If it infects only a minority within the society, it can generally be controlled. There are exceptions—an obvious one being terrorism. Violent confrontation can trigger something in the memetic structure of the mind causing an individual to set aside the games of self-interest he plays and work directly for the good of his memetic group as commonly occurs in war. Violent tactics on the part of extremists are meant to trigger this response among others in society driving moderates into warring camps. The tactic only works if this effect is achieved.

Another effect of memetic complexity that gives rise to peace is the fluidity of the society it creates. Complex societies are always readjusting to changes internal

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and external. Fluidity in society favors memes skilled at infecting the adult mind. This leads to the development of extensive altruism since such memes treat non-infected individuals as potential targets of propagation. Problems which may arise between China and the West are somewhat ameliorated by the knowledge that China is a quickly changing country whose meme pool will be quite different in ten years time. The attitude of Westerners toward China is broadly shaped by the individual Westerner’s estimate of how likely it is that the memes that dominating the Westerner will become a significant part of the Chinese meme pool. Businesspeople are accustomed to thinking of foreign countries as potential markets for their goods. The importance of foreign countries as areas of memetic expansion is a parallel case. When there is a large imbalance in power, violence may be used to seize markets or spread memes, but when power is more evenly balanced, it is usually businessmen and missionaries who most fear war as a danger to their enterprises.

Once memes reach a certain level of complexity, they generally can not be spread by the blunt instrument of violence. Force works best with relatively simple memes. One can force observation of certain rituals and even drill some basic attitudes into others’ heads, but there is a limit to the complexity of learning that can be instigated through violence. Violence can be used to prep the memetic battlefield. When Islamic armies burst out of the Arabian Desert to conquer the surrounding kingdoms, they created an environment conducive to the Islamic meme complex which then grew and flourished through more sophisticated means. But although the Islamic memes were complex, the overall memetic environment created was still, by modern standards, quite impoverished. Complex modern memes flourish in meme-rich environments which contain large amounts of material which can be borrowed. Violence damages these environments.

The second factor necessary for peace is growing understanding. Peace becomes more likely as awareness of memetic drives increases. Understanding, of course, is useful in itself. As discussed with regard to the angels’ society, violence may be due to high information costs. Increased understanding in any field decreases the chance that violence may be necessary. Most important, however, is an increase in our understanding of memetic and extensive altruism.

Recognizing unselfishness in others is crucial to minimizing violence. We all depend on others’ good will and cooperation but we are often not sure they are actually cooperating. A work group may have poor results but the manager does not know which members if any are slacking. An investigation may bring little but recriminations. Marriages are especially close partnerships but even these relationships can be poisoned by unjust suspicions of cheating. Under such circumstances, either the suspect or the suspicious may begin actually to cheat spurred

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on by the feeling that they have been wronged. Countries have drifted into war in the same manner. One need not be naïve. But if one starts from the assumption that the other country—in its own mistaken way—is trying to improve the world, a non-violent solution to conflicts is much more likely. Some memes still do spread themselves through violence, and pure pacifism may not yet be a practical alternative. But if one is confident that time is on the side of peace, containment will often seem the most appropriate strategy. Even violent memes can evolve non-violent propagation methods when this is to their advantage. And in our changing memetic environment, peaceful methods of propagation are becoming increasingly effective compared to violent methods.

As a general rule, the more selfish a person believes those around him are, the more selfish he himself will behave. He suspects others of constantly taking advantage of him and he gets into a habit of striking back. People who take advantage of others often do it from a belief that they are living in a dishonest cannibalistic world. This belief is not a rationalization used to justify their own selfishness. It is an honestly held opinion that causes their selfish behavior. Because their underlying unselfish nature is given no outlet, such people are not generally happy. They believe that no outlet for their natural desire to cooperate is possible given the unfortunate state of the world.

An individual’s judgment of others may simply have developed from correct or incorrect observation. In general, however, it is powerfully influenced by his view of himself. If he sees himself as selfish, he will assume selfishness on the part of others as well. If he is like most people, he sees himself as much more selfish than he actually is.

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Chapter 13 Dangers

Memetic evolution is pushing the world in what most would view as a positive

direction but there are dangers along the way. An unbalanced increase in unselfishness can be devastating. The great crimes of the twentieth century were not perpetrated by the narrowly selfish. Fascists and communists were driven by a hatred of “selfish” individualism. Both groups often behaved unselfishly within their own limited sphere. This is what made them dangerous. Those that carried these memes put their own welfare second and worked hard to promote their vision of the good society. Their vision of the good society was tragically twisted largely because they could not accept the individual profit-seeking games modern society needed to function. They wished to reestablish a primitive solidarity in which all members of the society worked together in a directly unselfish manner. To do this, those who were unable or unwilling to fit the new group had to be eliminated. Enemies and threats had to be created to move society toward a primitive solidarity and away from individualist games.

To effectively wage a war, persecute a minority or impose a tyranny, unselfishness is necessary. The growing sophistication of memes leads to an increase in unselfishness that can be dangerous when partial. Pluralism tends to blur memetic boundaries, but as unselfishness becomes greater, those boundaries which remain become more dangerous. The most dangerous areas of the world will be those as yet comparatively traditional.

There are two reasons for this. First, as traditional family-based memes diminish, the traditional memes that are left will be those with the best defensive strategies and various other unusual strengths. In itself, this might be good. Just as isolated biological environments can add to the variety of the Earth’s gene pool, the world’s meme pool might be enriched by traditional social pockets that preserve old memetic material which may be important at some unforeseen future time. The great threat to civilization comes from bastard variants of strong traditional memes that through proximity to modern memes pick up effective modern procreation strategies, allowing them to unify large homogeneous blocks of people in violent

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endeavors. Such meme complexes could be called reactionary and the rise of Nazi ideology is a primary example.

A more modern example of a reactionary meme complex is Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism has become powerful primarily because the more liberal forms of Islam, being open to new ideas, lost large numbers of their adherents to these new ideas. The Islamic movement was left to memes which defended their carriers from outside infection by a strong hostility to the outside world. These memes picked up crucial memetic procreation tactics from modern memes allowing them to solidify a section of humanity with sharply defined borders. Neither liberal nor purely traditional Islamic culture threatens growing memetic sophistication in the modern world. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is dangerous.

Another danger that may arise in the less developed areas is the unbalanced and unchecked growth of modern memes. A genetic creature released into a new environment may find itself with no natural predators and be able to overrun that environment. Rabbits introduced into Australia by Western settlers are one example of this phenomenon. Europeans brought rabbits to Australia in 1859 and with no natural predators they quickly multiplied spreading throughout the continent. They were only brought under control by the deliberate introduction of a disease to which they had no immunity. This disease then overran the rabbit population much as the rabbits had overrun Australia. A similar much more terrifying event was the introduction of Old World diseases to the New World. Native Americans had never experienced small pox, measles, malaria, mumps, yellow fever, etc. When these diseases came over with the Europeans and Africans, they found an American population that had almost no resistance. According to some estimates over 90% of the native population was killed as these diseases ran amuck.

Memes that have evolved in the very memetically competitive developed world can also run amuck when turned loose in a traditional society. Third-world Marxism is a twentieth century example of this. As long as Marxism remained in the developed world, it played only a restricted role in social development. It came to attract a large following in Germany but only by gradually toning down its revolutionary rhetoric. Once Marxism reached Russia and other less developed areas of the world, the meme spread rapidly sweeping traditional ideologies into the background. Traditional memes were unable to effectively compete with it for the possession of young minds that had little resistance to the new sophisticated meme.

In any environment, memetic change naturally involves danger. It brings about new ways of thinking and challenges old means of cooperation. If one has the opportunity to live in several different cultures, one quickly discovers that cooperation

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skills differ from place to place. Cooperation can be particularly difficult for villagers who have moved into a city or immigrants to a new country. The cooperation skills evolved in these populations may not suit the new richer memetic environment. In these situations, cooperation is sometimes based on violence and organized crime and political machines can become important. We may fancy ourselves cosmopolitans far above such challenges but, disembarking on the future’s confusing unknown shores, we may find that we are all immigrant villagers.

One phenomenon fraught with danger which has recently arisen from memetic change is the break up of large political units into smaller ones. New methods of international cooperation, such as freer trade, have evolved which increases the viability of smaller nations. This change has the side effect of making political separatism less costly. Breaking a large country into smaller countries is a difficult problem even when faced with a large degree of good will. Violence will not always be avoidable.

The problem of small new nations is an example of problems that can result from the general advances in market cooperation that are leading to a marked increase in our ability to decentralize economic decision making. The new forms of cooperation that arise bring about deregulation. New concepts of property rights will need to be developed and accepted. This is certain to lead to short-term conflict. The recent financial revolution, for example, has led to the right of ownership over abstract goods such as derivatives that most people do not understand. Hostility to these new markets is already evident. The early growth of financial markets a century ago led to the widespread use of stocks and bonds, which at the time seemed equally mysterious. This earlier revolution in finance made it harder for the average person to understand business decisions that were now often made by financiers. Condemnation of production for profit, as opposed to production for use, became popular. Many people became disillusioned with the game of capitalism because they could no longer understand how it benefited society.

The history of this earlier period, roughly continuing from the 1880s to the 1940s, is a fascinating contrast to the period of history we are passing through today. This previous period has been referred to as “the rise of big business.” In our present age, it is the rise of economic markets which is most obvious. Many complicated economic relationships that used to take place within a firm or government are now contracted out through the marketplace. In the earlier period, it was the means of cooperation within organizations that were improving. Large administrative units of many types became possible. Large corporations and government bureaucracies arose. This led to massive political change. This improvement in technique was a long-run advance for mankind, but the short-run costs were high. The new

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techniques made bureaucratic control possible to an extent previously unimaginable. The growth of big business led to difficulties in adjustment so severe as to almost destroy free market cooperation. The hostility traditionally-minded individuals focused on big business was overwhelming and many doubted that fair voluntary cooperation was even possible in a world divided between individuals and monstrous corporations. The growth in big government exacerbated these problems and made possible a period of totalitarian regimes and heightened colonialism. Whether the advances in market cooperation, which we are presently experiencing, will bring about short-run problems of a similar magnitude remains to be seen. The movement toward smaller units which the increasing sophistication of markets allows is in some ways psychologically comforting, but the increasing complexity of market cooperation will leave many befuddled, alienated and angry.

This earlier crisis carries a further warning. Our theoretical understanding of the world around us is much less flexible than we would like to imagine. A study of the history of thought shows that important creative leaps are rare. Human understanding does not evolve smoothly. We are quite competent intellectually in the straightaway. Given a simple paradigm we can squeeze out a seemingly endless series of implications. But we are very slow around curves. The direction of our thought and analysis can lag major changes in our real world environment by over a century.

The classical liberalism of the nineteenth century did not keep pace with the changes occurring in its world. It found itself unable to explain why free speech, democracy and free markets could benefit the new world that was evolving. It relied on old arguments that had been developed before the spread of large-scale organizations and extended these arguments with little creative thought. By the twentieth century, classical liberalism had largely deteriorated into a cult for the disgruntled that put the good of the individual before that of society. Since mankind is unselfish such individualism only appealed to those on the edge of the political discussion. These left-over liberals who glorified free markets, free speech and free association could feel that something had gone wrong but were unable to go any further than simply refusing to follow the majority’s lead. They glorified the freedom of the individual in societies increasingly dominated by corporations. But if individual freedom in the marketplace was so wonderful, why were individual economic units being largely surpassed by massive business organizations? Classical liberals not only failed to answer such questions but, for the most part, they seemed to lack the creativity to even ask them.

Not until almost the middle of the twentieth century did a truly coherent case for a free society in the modern world begin to emerge. Within the sphere of economics,

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thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ronald Coase did the key work. Hayek emphasized the need for freedom to create an information network which could handle the large amount of information necessary for a modern society to function. Coase explained how the small planned economy within a business enterprise interacted with the market in which the business was embedded. A free economy was not a market economy, but an economy in which markets and business planning were free to compete. These men’s work was important in freeing the argument for free markets from an outdated individualistic ideology. Their work was crucial in reviving the drive toward increased human freedom, but it came tragically late.

Memes generally evolve quietly. They propagate at least as much by imitation as through understanding. But there is an important subset of memes that are intellectual. These are propagated via persuasion. Intellectual memes are the maps we use to explain our behavior. The intellectual sometimes imagines himself an explorer, but actually he is more like the mapmaker who follows after explorers and settlers, drawing the contours of what they have found and settled. The maps created are used by the meme complexes which serve as the board of directors within each individual. They can influence which instrumental memes will be adopted by the board and whether any of these directors are going to be pushed off the board. With only outdated maps, the board of directors is more likely to make mistakes. These directors may continue to use flawed instrumental memes, or not realize how destructive one meme complex is to the welfare of the other memes on the board.

As memes develop ever faster, we must find some way to keep the consciously developed intellectual memes from falling too far behind. In the past, many promising memetic advances petered out due to conservative academic resistance. A society dominated by the academic spirit is one in which intellectual memes are selected not for the pragmatic success of their carriers but for their ability to fit established patterns of thought. Such societies are always conservative in that power comes through conformity. An intellectual meme complex has come to dominate the society and has created a system that is able to stifle other competitors. For a monopolistic academic strategy to succeed, a meme complex must create or discover and then take control of a bottleneck, blocking carriers of other memes from gaining positions of power and influence. Behavioral memes will continue to silently evolve for a time, but lacking maps, such evolution can slow to a stop. To keep the development of new forms of cooperation continuing, bottlenecks must be circumvented as fast as they are monopolized.

A final quite different phenomenon that may become a serious problem is depopulation. This present decrease in population which is becoming evident in much of the developed world seems unique to modern times. Past depopulations

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were linked to impoverishment and a high death rate. Modern declines in population are due to a falling birth rate and coincide with increasing prosperity. Traditional memes, which tend to spread from parents to children, gain advantage from creating carriers that will maximize the number of children they raise. Modern memes depend more heavily on using their carriers to infect the minds of adults. Given that raising children is a very difficult and expensive process, many modern memes apparently do not find it a cost-effective means of propagation. As memes become more skilled at infecting adult minds, propagating through families will become increasingly difficult. Children raised in a family-based meme environment will be recreated by other memes as they mature. Under such circumstances, memes which propagate by encouraging their carriers to raise children will become less common and population will fall.

A smaller population is advantageous in some respects. There would be more land and natural resources per person. On the other hand, memes tend to evolve fastest in areas of denser population. All things being equal, more people means more memes in mutual contact and more new memetic variations to be tried and tested. Small isolated populations are almost always primitive. Only a small minority of human minds ever generate great works of art or important inventions, but it remains true, all other things being equal, that a halving of the population should half the size of this small minority.

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Chapter 14

The Road through Utopia? The evolution of memetic altruism is neither painless nor automatic.

Throughout human history memetic evolution has been a stop-and-go affair. On the one hand, there is a tendency toward acceleration. The development of new more sophisticated memes makes for a richer environment that increases the chance that even more complex memes will arise. Altruism thickens, increasing cooperation, which in turn intensifies human interdependence creating conditions under which altruism is more likely to thrive. On the other hand, a strong tendency toward stagnation is equally evident. Human history overall has not been the story of ever accelerating memetic development and increasing meme-based altruism. Periods spanning centuries have passed with no significant progress. Memes, like genes, do not “strive” to evolve. They strive for monopoly and only compete from necessity. It is not unusual for a meme complex to crush its competitors and achieve such a monopoly. For individuals, long periods of directionless frustration and conservatism then follow.

I have felt driven to write this short book because I wish to see a continued acceleration in memetic evolution and I fear human society has already bumped up against a ceiling. What is blocking progress is an outdated moral vision that does not understand the games of self-interest upon which our society relies. As creatures whose drives are largely unselfish, we are torn and alienated by these games. This not only limits how far the games can be usefully taken but distorts those games which are usefully played. In many fields new games are still being developed but at the deeper levels of the human spirit, progress seems to have halted. New forms of cooperation are often seen as unwelcomed challenges. Much of our idealism has been neutralized through misdirection. Instead of experimenting with new means of cooperating, creative individuals have wasted talent and years combating illusions. They have imagined useful, playful forms of self-interest to be serious evils. They have mistaken cows for dragons, heroically strewing pastures with carnage.

Human self interest is a tool of altruism. The sophistication and complexity of the human meme pool could have never developed to anywhere near its present

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degree without the use of games based on self-interest and profit-chasing. Self-seeking and unselfishness, therefore, grow hand in hand. By creating games based on self-interest, memes establish institutions in which large numbers of individuals can coordinate their efforts. Under these conditions, open societies develop in which memetic altruism spreads beyond small tribal groups and extensive altruism arises.

The creation of an open society with its multiplicity of competing memes and its transcending altruism has thus far been humanity’s greatest achievement. It has also been humanity’s most under-celebrated achievement. The transition from tribalism to pluralism has been painful and is as yet unfinished. We have evolved the institutions of a pluralistic society but we have not yet evolved a pluralistic understanding or imagination. We still dream of simple solidarity. This is natural, understandable, reasonable, and must be outgrown.

The modern world is not ugly. The beauty of its games cannot be found in the deadening unity of the primitive. The best fascism and communism could give us were mass choruses and sermonizing. The memetic world offers variety with unity: unselfishness without force and self-seeking without shame.

Through the memetic vision, the world is transformed from an array of isolated individuals to a pattern in which individuals are merely background. In the foreground of the memetic world are the memes, breaking apart the individuals we imagine and fitting the pieces back together into previously unobserved patterns. Each individual in the memetic world is an experiment that quickly runs its course as the memes tangle, unwind, stretch and split. All human minds are interlaced cells in the social mind, which works out problems using fuzzy logic and parallel processing. Intellectual vanity tainted with primitivism deplores the repetition and waste, and schemes to transform society in accordance with the logic of electronic cybernetics. But this is not the brain’s way and neither is it the way of society.

Humanity gropes and sprawls its way forward through billions of small individual experiments. Each individual experiment is a new combination of memes. Each fails in a somewhat different way but relays along the information necessary for continued progress. This vision of progress is much different than the primitive vision of wise councils reasoning out new directions and setting forth plans. This old vision was once accurate, long ago in simpler times, but now is outmoded.

The modern means of moving forward through a decentralized process of trial and error has not yet been accepted in many of its manifestations but in its simpler forms it already has had some effects on the human vision. It is what attracts us to democratic ideals of the common man. It is what causes us to feel elitism not only wrong, but ugly. Those formed by memes complicated enough to use extensive

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altruism seem to have been implanted with a gut feeling that an individual must be allowed to form his own ends and not become merely another’s means. We will not be bound to serve the conscious ends of any power, legitimate or illegitimate. We are each our own experiment and not just an instrument to be used in the experiments of others.

This is not a matter of selfishness, but a matter of responsibility. If progress depended on clever design, we would yield to the clever. Progress, however, depends on all. Sometimes it seems to primarily depend on the failures, the half-crazed, the desperate and the ignorant. It depends on those who will try what others will not. The main road is a sufficiently easy path such that few who find it voluntarily abandon it. Those who wander furthest off the main road are sometimes brave explorers, but more commonly they are simply lost. As well-functioning sane individuals, most of us stick to the main road most of the time but all of us make occasional detours, intentional or unintentional. In some aspect of life we are all explorers and entrepreneurs.

The person who spends his life merely chasing money is not despised because chasing money is wrong. The person who honestly chases money serves mankind. He gets his money by giving others what they want and he should be respected for this. The dishonor comes from his choice to be nothing more than a servant. Just as everyone else, he is a unique combination of memes and we want to see what this combination can achieve beyond simply facilitating others’ achievements. We are all players of the economic game and can be proud of the fact, but we should also be something more.

Games based on self-interest that individuals play have grown spectacularly over the last couple centuries. Sophisticated markets and complex bureaucracies, advanced communications and transportation allow us to cooperate in ways beyond our ancestor’s comprehension. The possibilities of individual experimentation have similarly expanded. Two hundred years ago most people worked at very similar agricultural jobs and largely limited their cooperation to neighborliness and simple buying and selling. The life experiences of these people would seem monotonous to us today. There were few large organizations, either social or economic, outside the government. Relations between distant friends and family members lay dormant. The common life was one of conformity and tradition.

As pluralism and the variety of experimentation increased, the maintenance of a free society became more difficult. In a simple society in which all experiment with answers to the same type problems, freedom is comparatively easy to bring about. Even two hundred years ago, most Americans understood the value of allowing their neighbor to sell his farm or protest a local ordinance. These were things each

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individual could imagine himself doing. Actions that would have been found offensive did not need to be outlawed. The threat of poverty was never far off and neighbors were too valuable as friends to risk offense with reckless social deviance. In a rich complex society, on the other hand, experimentation can be reckless and the types of experiments one undertakes are often not understood by others. How beneficial a particular game is to society, or whether it is at all beneficial, can be hard to judge. The problem is particularly difficult when one suspects the motives of those who play or has an automatic suspicion of any form of self-interest.

There are positive signs that we are beginning to understand and accept the complex modern world. One indication is the popular interest which has arisen over the last couple decades in chaos and complexity in natural systems. This shows that people are becoming more comfortable with systems too complicated to be clearly thought out or designed. We no longer feel it necessary to pretend we live in a world where action and reaction can be mechanically calculated. We are willing to feel ourselves part of a system beyond understandable control.

A more impressive sign, perhaps ironically, is the development of environmentalism. Environmentalism is a hopeful sign in spite of a strain in the environmental movement that is unashamedly reactionary. Some environmentalists’ love of nature seems but a craving to return to a simpler time. For them, the goal is not a clean environment or natural diversity but a return to the primitive. Such destructive feelings are a byproduct of a confusing, progressing society. When one pushes forward, a degree of friction is unavoidable.

What makes environmentalism such an exciting positive phenomenon, in spite of its negative aspects, is the love that most environmentalists feel for natural systems. There is nothing in this world that resembles human society quite as much as the world’s ecology. Both are extremely complex. Both are based on evolution. Both are the creation of populations, either genes or memes, that seek their own advantage and yet in doing so create a beautiful system which goes much beyond their simple aim. The gene is the parent of the meme and a strong family resemblance exists. Genetic diversity lacks the complexity of memetic diversity, but to many people genetic diversity seems more obvious and the path to a truly deep appreciation of memetic diversity may lie through a recognition of the wonders of the genetic environment. It is hard to imagine that lovers of ecology will not come to appreciate the beauties of the memetic world as our understanding of this world increases. However our human sense of beauty is very conservative. We are still not ready to aesthetically appreciate much that is new in the modern memetic world. Until our senses grow more accustomed to the new beauties, the old beauties of the genetic environment play a crucial role in keeping alive our poetic feeling.

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Understanding the memetic world does not answer life’s basic questions nor should it lead to a Pollyannaish attitude. Attributing human problems to ignorance instead of selfishness does not necessarily make them any less threatening. Memetics does show how the individual problem is subsumed in the problem of mankind. It outlines a path of development, both past and future, which most of us will find attractive and makes us better aware of some the pitfalls we are liable to come across along the way. It makes apparent the fundamental unity of mankind, and yet leaves each of us with his or her independence.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

The origin of the memes transmitted in this book are to me somewhat obscure.

As the creator of the meme concept, Richard Dawkins has certainly been a strong influence. His books, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype both include chapters dealing with memes. Susan Blackmore uses the concept of memettic altruism in her book The Meme Machine. The social scientist who has had the strongest influence on the ideas in this book is Friedrich Hayek who described the economy as an information processing system and popularized the idea of competition as a discovery procedure. His last book, The Fatal Conceit, bears strongly on the discussion of society presented in this book’s second section. Some people may argue that similar ideas can be found even earlier in the work of Ludwig von Mises, but Hayek’s presentation has most influenced me. Reading through this book, I see ideas I have probably picked up from such people as Bernard Mandeville, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herbert Spencer, Ronald Coase, Douglass North, Thomas Sowell, James Buchanan, Gray Becker, and Michael Polyani. In academic papers, Paul Allison has discussed memetic altruism as part of his concept of “beneficent norms.” Robert Frank and Robert Axelrod have written important books on the prisoners’ dilemma, free riding and related issues. The quotation from Adam Smith in chapter five comes from The Wealth of Nations, book IV, chapter 2 and the quotation in chapter ten comes from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the “Economy” chapter.