We are a connected world, in 2024 more than ever.

We are an absurd word, in 2024 more than ever.

Where are you reading this from? Probably very far from here and yet I'm there, in your mind now. The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and our eternal engagement with it through the smartphone has been a pivotal (r)evolutionary shift in human history, one more significant than our discovery of fire, agriculture, steel, or the combustion engine. We have yet to scratch the surface of its potential and power, and the deeper implications of its existence and what that reveals about us - the Internet is the genesis of a global communal awakening and awareness of hidden connection.

The Internet and modern constantly connected culture has allowed us to act as a sort of rudimentary hive-mind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody there is - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who may not even share the same language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of minutes.

You, me, and everybody else has a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for?

Memes, of course.

To crowdsource the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the centre of all belief and action.

The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is therefore not to be tutted at, wished away or met with calls for civility, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, copy itself, spread, and propagate to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd.

Advocates for either a progressive or conservative approach to policy can not compromise not because the facts are in disagreement (although that is true), but because what comes before the facts is not agreed upon; that is, the way the world is structured and ordered, or The Way The World Is, which itself always acts as the background for an ideology rather than the reverse. The idiom 'seeing is believing' is true backwards as well, perhaps even more convincingly - believing is seeing and this is evident now more than ever.

I’m going to make some statements that are broad and general, but ones I feel are fairly common and often subconscious. These are not meant to be statements of “fact", only associations to get us to think about how we reach the conclusion of "fact".

The relationship between progressivism and conservatism is like the relationship between masculine and feminine which is like the relationship between individual and community.

Consider this disharmony between two opposing (or complementary) principles as essentially the basis of all philosophical (and thus political) thought. Also consider opposing principles as really a single thing as opposites always exist only in relation to each other. This admittedly sounds a lot like some meaningless new-age woo, but I think most of us can and do recognize the basic and fundamental necessity of this tension between opposites.

We see what our minds project and what our contexts allow - we frame the world in the language we have at our disposal and what words mean is not something static and in the word itself, but something dynamic, unique to us specifically in the way we relate to that word.

Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like an imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of social change. This is why great orators have possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single unified force of nature.

Language is itself inherently biased, limited, and divisive - Black Lives Matter or Make American Great Again mean absolutely nothing until interpreted and language is always loaded with prejudice, even and perhaps especially when great care is taken to make sure it is not. There is always a fundamental aspect of loss from translating a feeling to a thought to any thing else, even when the path is as seemingly direct as from thought to speech.

Have you ever known exactly what to say but been unable to get the words out properly in the moment?

Have you ever written and rewritten something multiple times because the exact feeling you’re trying to capture just isn’t there?

As much as language is the primary way we communicate, ironically it just as often obfuscates and confuses because the kind of language we have available to us directly determines how we understand and conceptualize the world (and ourselves). It is not a matter of merely being Peterson-ianly "precise" in our speech, because precision is meaningless if the principles that precede it are incompatible.

How many proponents of any ideology have actually read and engaged with its foundational or supporting texts?

Probably very few.

How many have absorbed bits and pieces through their specific context - language, culture, family, friends, media, and digital memes?

Probably almost everybody.

You simply can't exist in 2020 and not intuitively just know what a meme is. Even those that exist totally cut-off from the online sphere would get the picture with some examples. Most typically we think of images like this, or this, but these are just some examples of the modern, digital meme and don't begin to even scratch the surface of just exactly what a meme is and why the answer to that might be really fucking important.

For example, a picture doesn't need any text to be a meme. Similarly, a picture can be only text and still be a meme. A phrase can be a meme, or even a single word. A sound. Symbols. The structure of the building you're in and the design of the device you're reading this from are memetic artifacts. Musical subgenres, fashion and style trends, social patterns and institutions including family, marriage, property, law, crime and punishment - even complex ideologies - religious, political, and philosophical (all actually inseparable and arguably the same thing) - are essentially very nuanced and enduring memetic conversations that span hundreds and thousands of years.

Human behaviour is memetic - a product of pattern, repetition, and context rather than a series of conscious “choices" we make at every moment - this is not to suggest we are totally bound and determined by fate, only that we are bound and determined to act in accordance with our own character - we are not something responsible for our decisions, we are our decisions, and for that we bear responsibility.

Can you imagine Donald Trump acting like anything else besides a caricature of pure petulance?

That’s his role to play - his constitution. If it weren't he would be someone else, and here lies the crucial error that pervades all levels of society.

I think the belief that he, or you, or I "make decisions" is quite backwards - it’s partly a product of the language we use to speak about ourselves and the world - a confusion of the symbol with The Actual Thing - and partly just our basic instincts. It's plainly obvious that I am aware and can consider many possibilities and outcomes and think rather abstractly about present, past, and future, so it only seems to follow that I must exert some basic influence over the course of my life, but I think if we really examine that thought there’s no good reason to assume that’s true and necessarily follows. We might feel that it does, but perhaps that is a sign to be skeptical of our most basic assumptions.

I find little distinction between Me and My Choices - I am those choices, not a separate entity in the pilot's seat of my skull that "chooses" - that stands separate, considers, and then finally pulls the lever that corresponds with the choice' I’ve made.

Those last three words are superfluous - to me they all reference a single thing - a localized happening from my specific perspective.

This idea is naturally unpalatable as it seems to absolve one of all responsibility, for both wrongdoing and ownership of good acts and artistic creations, but I think this is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to protect our sense of I as something distinct and in control, as to accept the opposite comes with a great and terrifying sense of powerlessness. This terror is multiplied further when coupled with the additional quality of randomness, and the ordinary and pervasive accepted fact of our free will is an attempt to reconcile this powerlessness with our instinctive desire to be in control. Even when faced constantly with the reality of circumstance where one life is destroyed based not on any decision or choice it was able to make, but the simple act of existing at the wrong point in time and space and colliding with the wrong other does nothing to dissuade us of this familiar and comfortable illusion.

Responsibility is not something we take, it is what we are by sheer fact of being.

Memes and the repetition of pattern connects us to something far greater than any single one of us - our collective human ideas about value, function, purpose, and their relation with each other - memes are a portal to the sum total of all human knowledge, experience, and feeling - memes are threads sewn into the fabric of the tapestry of reality, connecting us to the past, present, future, each other, and something totally separate - something unspeakable that yet demands to be spoken of - something that can be glimpsed only for a moment and reflected only as a fragment.

You may have felt it when engaged in something everyday and ordinary, yet struck as if for the very first time by the majesty and totality of all there is - all experience happening right now, billions of distinct and separate simultaneous happenings - connections - disconnected only by the limitations of our own dull conceptions of what is real, what is true, and what is possible.

What is possible?

It is possible then to understand Humanity not as an abstracted collection of billions of separate individuals, but as a single, unique happening of organism/environment that can act with that awareness of unity and underlying connection.

We currently insist on persisting in an ordering of society that enriches only a small handful that have fallen to the top through nothing other than circumstance and who insist this must be the natural ordering of the world simply because it is the current ordering of it.

Can we really trust those who wield inordinate amounts of power to fairly consider how it might be meted out differently? Is the fate of society directly tied to the fate of the billionaire class, or to the current institutions of governance and policing?

We are meant to believe and accept that this is just The Way the World Is?

As far as I see it, society bears little proof of functioning properly anywhere as long as we define ‘properly’ as for the common good of all people. If we instead understand "properly" as to the obscene and perverted benefit of a small few at the expense of everybody else, then it is functioning tremendously properly, and will only continue to do so until We put a stop to it.

From where is authority and power actually derived?

The primary source is our shared belief that these institutional structures are legitimate and just - and they are so long as we believe it.

The secondary source is the ability and willingness of these structures to respond violently if we do not accept the first.

Violence is of course the most powerful and persuasive avenue of acquiring and maintaining power, both literal violent action and indirect violence inflicted and facilitated by a system of organization that regards the principle of one's right to hoard obscene amounts of wealth as higher and more just than an attempt to provide the basic material necessities of life for all people.

That is the basic moral principle that serves as the keystone of the structure of our society as it is currently ordered.

To preserve life violence may sometimes be necessary, but violence can be avoided memetically - you cannot put a bullet in a concept and it’s just as futile (and a bit if a moral grey area) to do the same to those who espouse, exemplify, or believe it. Violence can be lessened with the correct memetic foundations to underpin our collective conceptions of 'self', 'other', and 'world' and the reciprocal nature of those three things - violence is given power by distinction and separation, but that power can be neutered partly by understanding that not only are we ourself, we are also every other self, too.

Individualism is too often championed by those who don't understand the distinction between it and selfishness, and this error acts as the basic foundation for an entire wing of belief that insists "value" is directly related to money and money alone and everything can be spoken about in terms of its equivalent and assumed value in US dollars, one of many currencies that can in an instant become almost worthless due to nothing other than our shared confidence (or lack thereof) in it.

So, if memes are the true catalyst of human action and social change, can we then "meme ourselves" into a better reality? Can we, together, engineer, build, or construct a meme to spread and transform our shared, collective (un)conscious and the ideas that follow about not only what is true, but what is possible?

I think a good place to start is to understand the illusory and mutable nature of money and wealth, their direct relationship with power, authority, and control and the distribution of these things. Money is a real thing that performs a necessary function, but our shared understanding of it holds real power over its form, and in this way we can collectively shape and alter that power it commands over our lives through a collective psychic exercise.

We can't function without money, but we absolutely can function with a new way of distributing it in hopes of lessening (not eliminating) the amount of suffering directly related to poverty and the misery that flows from that.

Google, "how many billionaires exist?" - Answer: 2095.

2095 problems.

Let's look at just one.

Does Jeff Bezos Elon Musk really have billions of an actual, tangible currency, or is his currency really in the form of power and influence as represented by money?

Is the standard work-week from Monday to Friday or Monday to Thursday?

Whatever the answer, is it because this is simply The Way the World Is, or might The Way the World Is be directly shaped by our collective ideas about it?

Wars are no longer waged on an actual battlefield - our modern war is a psychic and spiritual one, set in the space of the collective human (un)conscious, and the targets of annihilation are not only people but possibilities - the target is Truth, and the creation of Truth As it Serves the Manufacturer - we are in an era of memetic warfare and unless we can understand that and figure out how to turn it against itself, the collective human spirit will be swallowed whole, outlived by the last piece of manufactured shit we can sell for a dollar.

2095 problems and 1 crucial error stands between us and a better society, and building that society is as simple as believing in and spreading the right memes.

We can meme ourselves better, but only together.

If you can believe that's true, it is.

Don't let your memes be dreams.