Humans are somehow better

Many long nights have passed now since last I updated and, low, the things I have seen.

I wanted to post sooner, but I didn't at first because I was consumed with numbers. Numbers that wouldn't possibly interest anyone who doesn't watch Sportscenter. Later it was other things, inertially fixing me in place, but first it was those goddamned numbers. I was taken over by them. The RPI, the AP Poll, the Coaches' Poll. The national spotlight is back on my Alma Mater thanks to a big victory delivered on the back of a homegrown sophomore forward with diabetes who may, in fact, admire Adolph Hitler.

Hitler you say? You're interested all of a sudden. Yes, him.

That nugget came to me by way of my 14 year old cousin. He told me about it on Christmas Eve, standing before our traditional Christmas Eve bonfire. He himself had heard it from a friend. This friend spends summers under the tutelage of the human design flaw in question, learning how to better control the dribble in transition, taking lessons in function from this paradoxical collection of proteins. Proteins with heartbreaking mastery of a spherical leather bladder but almost no natural ability to regulate blood sugar.

***

It has come to my attention that ideas are viruses, and that their success in seeding the human mind--their ability to survive--has nothing to do with truthfulness or profundity. Not even magnitude matters. Highmindedness, counter-intuitively, almost always signals memetic death. The most seminal and just ideas are now parchment. Recite for me, if you will, the Emancipation Proclamation.

The key to the life of a mind-virus is salaciousness. Love and death, good and evil. Sex, lots. The best pop songs make the best mind-viruses. Ideas need a solid-ass hook.

Tepid ideas are boring and are forgotten. To cope with this reality, idea viruses, like genetic viruses and indeed all organic lifeforms, mutate freely, quickly and often radically. So even if it wasn't Hitler when my cousin's friend heard it, or even when that friend told him, it somehow became Hitler by the time it got to me. The last thing that matters, as it passes to you, juicy and hot off the brain presses, is if it's true or not. It's an idea. In this case, it comes with additional baggage, a Hitler suitcase, loaded with communally constructed weight and meaning.

Because isn't Hitler so much more memorable than Slobodan Milosevic? And Milosevic so much more memorable than Luke Baumgarten, who hasn't, to this date, sought to eradicate groups of anyone? Isn't Hitler so iconic that it essentially had to be him?

And this Adolph Hitler--reviler, slaughterer--isn't he just about as collectively memorable as Jesus Christ, who hated no one and actually un-killed a few people? Archetypal representations make very good mind-viruses.

But this Jesus, is he memorable because he lived well, or because he died well? Or because he claimed to be God, the maker of all things, and got lots of people to believe him?

Or was it because the people who believed him were themselves good at mutating ideas? From four gospels we are given four Christologic conceptions. Four different God/Men for four different communities.

Or maybe later, because it behooved them a rational depiction, the cultivators of this mind-virus decided certain strains of the Jesus mind-virus should not survive? Strains were selected for memetic fitness. And so, this Christmas, your Christian denomination's local holy man chose selections from four Gospels instead of twenty-six.

That's strange thing about mind viruses, they interact with their environment in a way that is wholly different than their genetic counterparts. If our environment, Earth, with its particular climates and its atomic makeup--it's abundance of particular molecules; it's dearth of others--were stripped of life, rid of all genetic material, the Earth would continue to exist. It would be changed, a barren place of dirt, water and trapped gasses, but it would exist.

But if the environment of ideas, the Mind, were rid of thoughts, what would be left? A barren place certainly, but could it be said that it even still existed?

Maybe.

Maybe too the Earth couldn't be said to exist if it didn't support life, there would certainly be nothing around to comment on its barrenness. The answer to that question might hang on whether you think things have intrinsic value, that they come into being with purpose and an end goal in place. Telos. That was the idea Aristotle had. It's an idea many of us still have, probably because Jesus also had that idea.

Still, it seems that thoughts interact with and are interacted upon by their environments in a way that is different from how we interact with and are interacted upon by our planet, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am.

So before I convince myself otherwise I'll say that ideas, rather than viruses, are more properly sybiots. Where our Earth gives us blizzards and tsunamis and tells us to handle it or get out, human brains have a more cautious and parental relationship with their ideas. They nurture and coddle them. They shape them to be more compatible with our mental landscape and make them hardier to stand a better chance of taking root in one of the 6 billion other idea environments around us*.

Because without ideas, what are we but dirt, water and trapped gasses? Similarly, if we didn't have the idea that we should be more somehow than just dirt or water, none of this would be so worrisome. We might be more cavalier with our ideas.

So, to that one idea right there--the idea that humans are somehow better--all other ideas owe the lavish existence they've been given.

If not for that idea, I wouldn't be so carefully grooming these anemic bundles of ideas, these knowledge suites. I certainly wouldn't be giving the relationship between Archetypes and Stereotypes in the Novels of Michael Chabon nearly as much thought. I wouldn't be worrying about it like it were an infant in an iron lung I have to power by hand with a stationary bike or a man-sized hamster wheel. I wouldn't be typing it out. I probably wouldn't be thinking about it at all. I certainly wouldn't care if other people--specifically admissions counselors--thought these idea conglomerates were bullshit. If not for that idea, people probably wouldn't even create titles like admissions counselor for themselves. Michael Chabon probably wouldn't have ever even written anything. Maybe no one ever would have. If not for that idea, he and I might be together right now, foraging for something.

Assuming the sun was up and there were no predators about.

If it's 2:05 AM PST, what time is it in the Great Rift Valley?

*This distinction is null if it turns out that the earth herself is conscious, which is an idea some people have.