Freedom Versus Tyranny

I have written more than once on the Garden of Eden. I keep getting drawn back to that story. It seems to be central to our continued struggle between freedom and tyranny.

Consider memes as defined by Wikipedia:

A meme (pronounced /miːm/), as defined by memetic theory, constitutes a theoretical unit of cultural information, the building block of culture or cultural evolution which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.^[1] Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976.^[2] He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity’s reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. “Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts.”^[3]

A short story written in 1876 by Mark Twain, A Literary Nightmare, describes his encounter with a jingle so “catchy” that it plays over and over in his mind until he finally sings it out loud and infects others (also known as an earworm).

I have only recently begun looking at the topic of freedom from the perspective of memes. What follows are some of my thoughts.