Temetics (whups, cut a paragraph - or more - for a rewrite and need to retrieve and re-insert)
In "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins he coins the word "meme" (noun - “a unit of cultural information spread by imitation” is Google’s return and “close enough”: it's an insightful book), it has been much discussed since, and is defined herein as…
meme - noun: "an idea or concept, the fundamental unit of cognition"
He might stipulate an idea is not a meme until it is imitated, yet the transmission is inessential in a stricter identity, and its inclusion distracts.
He stipulates memes are a novel class of "replicators" after genes and genetic self-replication.
(temp edit: Blackmore coins "teme")
teme - noun: "a technology meme, an idea that is true"
"Truth" (a meme that is also a teme) herein is defined "the positive boolean", that is: I do not include metaphysical definitions (though we discuss the temeticity of metaphysical beauties, the moralities of deception strategies like lying). Beyond our scope and frankly unhelpful to debate it - "true or false" herein means "1 or 0", or "the singular outcome of the collapse of the wave function in our 4-space". Truth is an idea, a meme - just a word - yet it becomes a teme when it is strictly limited to a mathematical boolean, yes or no, black or white.
So defined it includes concepts like science, reproducibility, objective existence, persistence of memory... in fact the boolean definition entirely contains all subsequent definitions and flavors, as they are formally and generally conceived, in my study. I chose the “positive” boolean value in part symbolically, poetically, for its affirmative: it’s what you say “yes” to. And while boolean math is boolean - one could claim “indifferent to outcome” - you are sometimes very not indifferent - the definition is mapped to your experiential positives, it is intentional.
Flip a coin, call it in the air, whether you get a “positive” or “negative” outcome is essentially amorally inconsequential, I chose the phrase “the positive boolean” for all your human associations with “winning” the coin toss. Always “The One” as in Neo, "never the zero, always the hero".
The purpose of this work is to inform a larger populace of the teme that is temetics, it is my intent to "infect" the "hosts" of memes with a new "mind virus", in short: some ideas are provable, others are not, all our problems stem from attempting to implement atemetic ideas, and in the memetic "soup" there already exist vast, reliable, structures of temes that can and will be intentionally adopted by hosts, and hosts that resist temes are committing temetic AND memetic AND genetic suicide however slowly.
"Temes are technology memes". I chose "technology" (google says "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes" or: tools and tool making) as it is the visible results of truths, it is not abstractly what "might work" but the provable existence of work building upon work, "progress" in the Americanism of science improving quality of life.
More to the point (all puns intended), an example is the class of tools called "blades".
In the past we used flint knives for the "preserve the host" (memes emerge from genes, claims biology) learned skills of eating and clothing and shelter, then the discovery of smelting metals improved blade technology and tells the story of cultures (read: memes and their hosts) rising and falling as the bronze age succumbs to the steel age, and as our imaginations wondered what we could cut with ever sharper blades we are now using lasers instead of scalpels.
I am typing this document on a machine that is made of "true" in several amusing ways, and as I do I am expressing the temeticity of the word "teme", the existence of temes in our memesphere, of temes in our word of mouth day to day, attached to our fingertips, in our power grids, that their existence is proof that "truth" is specifically one outcome of infinite irreducible booleans, they are the yesses in a sea of maybes, and that they are "good" and also “better” by the provable standard: all falsehoods result in net experiential negatives for the aggregate host that is Us, in both the societal and spiritual sense of that word... with a single exception loosely called "art".
If there’s a roof over your refrigerator you love temes. If you wear clothes, have a phone, take medicines, or enjoy a cold beer you use temes.
There may be better ways to explain it, and better minds to refine it, yet the above are my proposed definitions and why I chose "teme"... though I admit finding it alliterative. As well, the above definitions should be plenty to infect, if you value honesty.
Good, truth, falsehood, “experiential negatives”… yes the scope is comprehensive and no we do not have to kill all liars to survive, their fate is as certain as the slowest antelope’s.
- Examples -
To evade metaphysical definitions - the "single exception" above - I cited "art".
"Art" is not strictly temetic, nor is a joke, myth, urban legend, nor any collection of ideas that is not strictly limited to a series of boolean "yes" statements further specifying the limitations of what is provably 100% reproducible.
Scientists must confirm the temeticity of that definition of “technology”, the evidence is reproducibility, the standard is reality qua facts qua the experiential past, i.e.: the collapsed wavefunction and the boolean observation of what happened versus what did not happen, and the methodology is Science. Science, properly defined, is a teme. Scientists are notorious teme users too: a plumb bob, a yardstick, a telescope: all temes. They are technologies that reliably work to measure our universe.
An adjustable wrench is a complex of tools or “features”, simpler machines, from gross to fine, in an intentional process of adding known effective features for ever more specific applications. By adding a slider and a knurled screw the wrench gains adjustability, and we gain a few novel utilities. A common adjustable wrench of any size has the exact same "feature complex" - the boolean yesses - and when it varies enough - the singular maybe - it becomes a "pipe" wrench, or a "socket" wrench, etcetera.
Temes can be massively complex (ex: putting humans on the moon), yet their ability to 100% return a positive boolean (I.e.: humans return to earth alive) requires every super and subcomplex of ideas and definitions needs to be 100% temetic, and the success of the missions are proof qua proof of the temeticity of the whole: it worked, repeatedly. F+MA is a teme, and "a highly temetic teme complex", and most technologies account for this "fact of reality" in one way or another.
Yet temes are not "anti-meme" to any worrisome degree: whereas in the long term they are the superior competitor for hosts, they are "tolerant" as a byproduct of a great many views on what is "good" for any one human - much less life on Earth. “Subjective truths”, "metaphysics", opinions and mismeasurements are not temes, but neither are they threats. By 2030 hopefully everyone will be driving electric hoverboards, but neither I nor my temes can resolve a 100% yes to the statement "it is wrong to ride a horse, if the horse approves". And if I cannot it is not a teme: it is instead an open question.
And this is a feature not a flaw, "good art" is a function of its temeticity.
Music is built on sciences, performed modernly and historically on high technologies, and personally as a lifelong musician I can comment on whether a performance is "isotropic", "mathematical", and "musical" to very scientific measurements.
There's also "music" that is "unmusical", and as per temes the refutation of self-identity identifies at least one fallacy incorporated into its construction, i.e.: "unmusical music is atemetic" even if made on a computer with an electric guitar. The definition of “musical” is not “created with technology”, even if Music itself is a teme.
Yet I would not outlaw your ability to make it, I do not “fear” it, I will simply not listen after a while... if I want to hear bad music I will simply listen to my first band's first session, and “apparently unmusical” is not the same thing as atemetic: one has to actually be able to read the code and thus some people hate jazz.
Atemetic claims have zero intrinsic merit, their utility = 0 except in meta-markets like psychology. Saying "dirt tastes blue" only gains utility in relation to a truth and Art can be a way to do that.
Temeticists are thus "forgiving" of memes and opinions and speculations, they are NOT threats.
And though a person can have an opinion on anything, a temeticist cannot ascribe a positive to someone spreading anti-temetic memes. Disinformation may be legal but it can never be "good" and always will result in net experiential negatives, just as if a scientist lied on the moon missions about some essential technology.
Thus, it is to be understood from the first: temes are not anti-meme, “it is not a war”, memes are not the enemy, they are just “ideas” and do not by definition have to make sense.
Consider: the aggregate sensations (images, emotions, “memories”) I associate with the noun “my (deceased) maternal grandmother” cannot be said to be true. That noun, in my usage, cannot have a “temetic definition” (her definition of herself might be, depends on the wording, but I cannot claim to have checked all her everything for errors in logic, “a great old dame” and “I love her dearly still” while honest are opinions only).
It’s easy and dangerous to think your temes need to fight memes, yet the truer truth is your genes need you/we to persuade anti-temetic people to behave more temetically, thus propagating both genes and temes and Art.
Got that?
You can go swim in the soup and slay memetic dragons and, real human person, it is so easy to forget that there’s also a real person hosting that meme.
YOUR work will not be “temetic” if you do not improve the tool that is the gene-created brain in the other person, as “another temeticist” is an extraordinarily valuable temetic tool. "Make the world a better place" is a "weakly temetic meme" and thus has a grain of truth in it.
Temeticists are islands of truth in a sea of chaos: the burden is on you to be the most temetic of all possible yous all the time, and so you want "smart people" and "skilled labor" around you, "not unpredictable" and thus likely to exhibit high reproducibility in behaviors. Temes reveal their utility in relationships like employment, representative governments, even a football team... and the principle method of creating same is training, or more generally teaching.
So go easy on my dear sweet Grandma: people are imperfect probably including you and me too.
Temes and temetics out-perform simple memetics: it's not a war. Be the example or you are not the example… it’s in the definition, intentionally. The positive boolean is not a spectrum of attempts - try to be rigorous, real human person - the temes demand this of you and they’re worth listening to.
The last paragraph prepares the following statements as temetic, in the context of millenia of discussions of art and beauty and truth and whatnot, to split the Gordian knot of the “goodness” of “truth”. They are synonymous, some think.
"Memes cannot hurt temes."
Temes essentially "outrank" memes, no atemetic meme can survive the error correction temetics invokes, "bad code" does not compile and lists errors that are synonymous with the logical fallacies in common english and expressible in strict symbolic logic.
This is immediately observable in the "brought a knife to a gun fight" model: the superior technology wins easily, the gun laughs at the knife as a mistake, the lesser tool, and: “in issues where the host(s') perceived safety is threatened ‘temetic supremacy’ always reveals itself, if it exists in one of the hosts”.
Yet this is why neither temes nor temeticists are unavoidably threatened by atemetic memes, observe: at no time in history has a memeset survived the temes that arise from its observation. The worst tyrants bullsh*t artists in the world have caused enormous pain, popular memes have enslaved and slaughtered millions without any help from a regulated military, all the erroneous thought in the world is just "evidence" to the temeticist: observably not everyone is sane, fair, or even nice... yet even at their worst they are observably defeated, confined, less powerful and less influential, today compared to yesterday in the toto, as we observe their memes and identify the flaws and implement new temes to contain their less than optimal performance.
If I am mugged at knifepoint, the ultimate error is not in the memes of the thief, but in my own: I should have brought the proverbial gun. This does not make the mugger “good” or "righter", merely more temetic than me in that instant as he has the sharper knife, and thus he can “offload the cost of his errors” onto my suffering, hence why the "theft" meme has survived: it is profitable to its host and thus survives... absent temetic solutions.
As per above temes exclusively identify as "positive" and thus atemeticism creates all experiential negatives - a good knife in bad hands - and as at least one atemetic meme exists in both the thief and the victim each, the victim perpetuates the existence of two falsehoods by failing to prevent the successful transfer of negatives onto himself in preventing the mugging.
If I say "stealing is bad'' to a child, I am really exposing him/her/you to the teme that identifies a successful theft as "the perpetuation of a negative by transferring the cost of its badness onto the undereducated and undeserving victim", and both parties must be somehow atemetic for the theft to succeed.
Errorless anti-mugger code might utilize a gun, kung fu, and a police department... yet the proof of its utility is measured in whether I am 100% theft proof. If I am, I will not fear the mugger, nor the knife I will jiu-jitsu away from him, ad infinitum; and the experience need not be a negative, but merely more evidence of atemetic memes that are still causing problems.
“That’s not a knife,” sayeth Crocodile Dundee, “THIS is a knife”.
"Muggers" seek to pay bills that "theft" only adds to the cost of: it is net more expensive to fail to prevent theft societally... that’s why it’s illegal, and why we teach our kids very early.
Ignorance of the temetics is no excuse, the same transfer of costs exists in most things we call "crime".
Memes can hurt people, temes emerge from the gene hosted memes to prevent this. “Fire burns” is a tautology but also “good advice”, experiential negatives usually follow the implementation of atemetic memes, however primitive, and our large brains evolved to perpetuate the gene by distinguishing temes from memes.
It might be argued that burning a book is the greatest of all crimes.
"Temes protect their hosts."
Memes do not. As per Dawkins a meme has no motive to "preserve" a host if it can propagate to a new one: the meme lives on (ex.: “anti-vaxxers”).
A meme can be “chemically” “selfish” in hosts in Dawkins genetic meaning. An untrue song that makes you sing publicly exploits dopamine rewards, and its temetic superior “the ABCs” is a teaching tool using a similar mechanic, yet it has no self-awareness, it ignores itself and has no opinion of its own nature, as observed in non-sensical yet popular memes like "I can haz cheezburger", we ask: is the cat "happy" it is popular?
It can be catchy, have “high fecundity”, and be untrue. Its host might like it, believe it, spread it (see facebook), but IT has no opinion - all motive rests on the host wanting to host it "for profit" in whatever way (endorphins, cash, sex et al) - and some memes are better at exploiting flawed hosts than others (see “targeted advertising”).
With no comment on spirituality, observe American "megachurches" wherein a highly ritualized and formulaic exchange of memes results in one individual getting (and spending on themselves) millions of dollars from people who usually cannot really afford it, and neither asks whether this is abnormal, likely to be sustainable, actually what their scripture says, or good for society overall.
On the contrary, all parties "feel good" about it until the consequences cannot be denied and the costs come home.
Not incidentally the same pseudo-temetic memes underlie both the mugger and the (money) preacher and every victim of theft: for there to be a temetic definition of “theft” all cases will implement the same error - give or take a few extras for flavor.
A temetic definition of “theft” is a (short, why we teach children) string of exclusively boolean ones until a single error of definitions, all forms of “theft” have exactly the same starting “code”, the same number of ones of the same correct definitions about reality and humanity, and all the variations are variations within the misformulated zero and whatever follows.
In the case of “grift” and “con” the flaw is followed by more ones, as many as they can get to hide the error in what are now truisms - in the believing in the efficacy of lying the conman has overlooked an error in his “temetic” worldview (e.g.: his map of reality) and is a fraud and defrauded - yet observe the conman actively hides the lie in temes: the memetic adaptation of the genetic strategy called “camouflage”, which in turn is part of the temetic process at work in the meme and gene spaces.
The true parts of the con are “trying” to preserve the true qua True parts of it, despite the error or conman’s values: camouflage is a successful genetic strategy for preserving genes, memes, and temes… the “con” is always that one little flaw in the argument, and the con survives by protecting it’s hosts, and thus cons can exist at all levels of society, unless and until temeticists exist and identify the rip-off, the untruth that enables the transfer of costs.
It is good that “memes have learned lying” (long, long ago, in this galaxy): for one it is rarely that hard to figure out where the error is, and for two it is proof of temes surviving in “bad” hosts and alongside “bad” memes, and it is thus provable: “all people can be saved”, and the “how” is not unknowable. Up to you to try, including on yourself.
Some memes are anti-host, overtly suicidal, and some are anti-teme and anti-gene, but even as such they are analyzable, simply reviewing the definitions within any meme will reveal where the errors are, and it is harmless to a temeticist... whether or not the human hosting it is.
Temes, however, are very invested in themselves and their hosts, so to speak and as a function of human health and "reason", i.e.: scientists love science, the scientific method, the prior scientists who built the foundations of current inquiries.
Temeticists "love" their temes, as love is "the highest of all possible evaluations": they are utile, reliable, and 100% effective at stopping the transmission of "bad memes" when used correctly.
They are internally rigorous, skeptical of self, constantly re-confirming their temeticity, and cannot by definition permit even one "maybe" anywhere in the logical chain except for in the very last slot, the "what if..." it is designed to test.
In this self awareness is the awareness of "hosts", and memes, genes, chemistry... and babies and weddings and dolphins. These are not things to fear but to question: what temes can I find in this memespace, and are there any problematic atemetic structures to dismantle before the unscrupulous can transfer their costs onto the undeserving, including myself?
There are no "expert atemeticists", there are merely unchallenged ones. Lies are not 100% effective, there will always be a gamble in whether the victim is exploitable, if not the costs can be severe, and in the current global memesphere one can at best be a moderately successful liar to an ever shrinking pool of fools.
The idea of a teme is a teme, in this sense it is the teme "teme" protecting its hosts (me, and now you) on behalf of itself and of symbiosis: temes can survive in irrational minds, but they thrive in rational ones, and the more strictly logical the better.
"Memes can cause problems, only temes can 'solve' problems."
A teme has existential incentive to preserve the existence of hosts, preferably temetic. Consider: books, and writing. They are technologies created to solve “known problem” atemetic memes like "lying" and amemetic genes like “death”.
They prevent the breaking of promises, contracts, laws, and transcribe oral histories of tribes into semi-permanent storage, that is: the temes of the past (consistent food supply, economic trade) had found slash manufactured hosts that could perpetuate them and themselves in a more comprehensive mode than just oral transmission.
Yet in books we see how far the idea has come.
Newton's Principia is a meme (in toto, its history and reputation included) containing many temes (note: it cannot be called a teme (in toto) if it contains any error, not even a typo (if it does, outside our scope)).
It is a vastly more temetic work than "merely a book": almost entirely temetic, dense with truths, few mistruths, individual copies have been preserved for centuries, it's easy to reproduce and has been many times, it's highly infectious with a global reach infecting millions of the healthiest hosts for its contents.
There is a temetic explanation for why Harry Potter may have sold more copies (if it has), but it is not that Rowling or her work is more temetic than Newton’s, nor that the wizard is more temetic than the physicist, or that a yarn spun about the former is more temetic than the rigorous deduction of the latter. Ad Populum and the rest, one for every metaphysic anyone wants to cite in pursuit of a flaw in this construction, and why I have cited no “philosophers” herein.
Debate these amongst yourselves... I “invented” a tool and am using it, and it answered those debates.
And incidentally among the memehosts that hath hated upon the poor wizard lad in the media - noticeably very few scientists, eh? - it is not temeticists that are famous for railing against young adult fiction, or any fiction, including “unprovables” like religious texts, or “metaphysics”.
The Principia is also a collection of "solved problems" with explanations of both problem and solution, in a linear series of "proofs" each (usually) resting on the prior... however imperfectly, it implements the definition of "teme" in essentially all the high level structures, and in many detailed specifics on every page. He did not identify the work as "temetic", yet I am correctly re-identifying it as same, or at bare minimum proto-temetic (“before they self defined” - arguable), "legacy code" that is is still eminently comprehendible, informative, relevant to preservation of host, still taught by experts to students, aged to youth, describing aspects of truth that are still valid in their particular domains (read: despite Einstein improving on some formulae, etcetera).
Algebra illustrates essential temetic "problem solving" - the adjustable wrench - it is a subset of symbolic logic that allows for "variables". A fully temetic subgroup of math, statements such as "A = L x W" meaning "area (of a rectangle) equals length times width" wherein the logical statement works for any value or unit of the variables, utilize only boolean positives until the last slot for the various variables.
It is not a philosophical "proposition", it is a temetic statement. It describes how, what operations to perform, to find only the true solution given a set of inputs.
It does not describe how to get untrue solutions, nor does it work only on the first Monday of any month, nor will a claim that the solution is false affect the outcome of experiments I make with it. It is ("merely") a form of the testable unknowns that exist at the end of specific chain of positive booleans.
And importantly, whereas I cannot reproduce Newton's tome from memory, I do not need to: I have many parts effectively recall-able on demand for my limited personal use, and the ideas proved so valuable to so many hosts it is extremely unlikely that zero faithful copies will exist, or that errors will be introduced into same.
It contains more temetic attributes than just the characters on the pages: its continued popularity, as well as the temes it contains individual usages, are proof unto itself of the utility, fecundity, and "goodness" of temeticism, temeticists, and transferring truths to allies for mutual benefits, economic and otherwise.
The broad trend of humanity's quality of life improving over the millennia is a symbiosis between temes and genes (“brains” are “complex genespaces”), the latter adding: some capability to physically manipulate some conditions, memory ("reproducible"), and the fundamental affirmative of the state of being alive versus the negative of death, health versus incapacitation, full belly versus empty.
It is thus stated: everything sane people call good is measured in its "temetic purity", with the one exception being "art as commentary".
There is nothing immoral about "fiction" in the abstract, it becomes immoral when it is used to transfer costs onto victims.
As any example gets rapidly enormous in scope, I leave it to you whether the Avengers movies are "good" overall, yet if its existence increases the ratio of temes in the largest memespace it will functionally cause the quality of life to net increase in that same memespace.
Fiction that does not increase this ratio is, when not inconsequential, is almost always controversial (and that is the hook that dangles for the deeper fish, artists), and if "art is good" (ask: do parents sing to children?) or there can be "good art", fictions that result in significant negatives should not be called Art nor defended as such.
This “applies to church and state” as both are bereft with the kind of A-list bullsh*t artists of both their respective economics, meaning such questions of “the separation of church and state” are mere canards, distractions from the underlying questions of: is what it purports to be what it is, and if not is it good art? If not it is a) not constructed temetically, and b) probably not a show we want to see.
It is entirely within the scope of temetics and thus human morality to question the utility of the tool for the job, to evaluate its performance and improve it, and to call out the practitioners of flawed code in public, even if unpopular, unless dangerous “genetically”. THAT will never be wrong, though there is a wrongness in how gracefully you fail to pull it off, or in failing to pull it off period, as martyrs attest.
Problems like racism, homophobia, gangs in cities... simply think of "large scale problems" and write a list... as per above there must be, no matter how persuasive the justification for the problem's continuation, there inescapably must be an assumption in the chain of logic that is false. One of the string of boolean 1s is actually a 0, misidentified, ignored, or obfuscated maybe, but present nonetheless.
In "racism" - to pull one out of the hat - it is the claim that of all measures by which a person can be accurately judged, melanin, in America in 2021, is near the top of the list.
As an aside: try "all brains are the same color" as a rebuttal.
"White supremacy" is not largely temetic, nor do its proponents act largely temetically, nor are they regarded by most as "good people", nor is the idea considered a "good idea".
To belabor it, in deep biology there are reasons to be wary of the unfamiliar, more recently of "foreigners'' in terms of tribes and states, but as the temes start out competing the memes an unfamiliar person gains the possibility of not being a threat but an opportunity, a novel chance to test whether my temes are true in the context of other memespaces.
From vanilla milkshake to a triple espresso I am simply not scared of your knife, nor your G_d nor your genitalia, and definitely not your melanin levels.
Temetics does suggest some genes produce experiential negatives, and so "eugenics" is a perfectly temetic question - despite a fairly horrifying history.
If a specialist advises Mr. and Mrs. should not reproduce due to a likely genetic conflict that will have negative consequences for the child and by extension parents: it is not "racist" or "ethnophobic" or immoral in those formulations. It's a profitable service that already exists in the marketplace (ask: is this proof of temeticity?) and is not based on any hidden un-science or unexamined memes... it's all right there in the biological outcomes before any proto-temetic descriptions of "races".
Mitigating negatives = "better experience". It's okay to ask the question, it is NOT okay to ask it twice when you know the fallacy.
I happen to be a "theist" and simply point at the various churches and nazis and klans and advise: you have no idea what the bleep you speak of... because you never bothered to test. Factuality does not come from popularity, and holding on to flawed memes like "racism" will cause our temeticists to flee them - they might be surrounded by similar memeticists, yet their genes and thus life will be denied the "rational world" they need to survive... and they will have done this to themselves.
Thus, if higher melatonin has no significant genetic negatives I have zero reason to care about skin color, though I have very good reason to care about anti-temetic racists.
A fiction is a form of - and not synonymous with - lying; not all fictions are net anti-temetic, but let us not ignore the ones that are!
It is not that they are particularly dangerous to temes or temeticists writ large, but rather they can be used to transfer enormous costs from the antisocial immoralists to the merely gullible, sometimes dangerously and dangerously fast, and there is strong, strong resistance in a temeticist against allowing the possibility of the former to again transfer the costs onto himself or other high quality teme hosts.
This is the origin of states starting in tribalism: the existence of nation states today is a function of how well they work compared to "lawlessness" (read: atemetic use of force).
This is not to say they are temes - there is a flawed assumption in “State”, too - yet in 2021 they are still mostly a vehicle of positive influence and are getting more temetic and thus more equitable, transparent, reproducible (not memetically "popular"), and so on. The popularity of a teme is measured only in its reproducible utility... this is not true for memes.
It follows that the only moral justification for a state, and thus enforcement of laws and all relevant legislative mechanisms, is the protection of its temes and its net positive memes.
The good memes group are "arts and culture" and all net negative fictions cannot be included under either term, e.g.: conducting a genocide on an ethnic group can not be said to be part of a nation's art, nor its culture, and I say this to kick the legs out from under all who would say that "it's a cultural thing it's okay".
As memes cannot hurt temes, I am not overly incentivized to get involved in whether it's illegal to get one's belly button pierced in Latvia, yet readers will accept the definitions: "culture" is not an excuse for anti-temetic memes, temes and their hosts will find the errors and try to fix "you" whether you like it or not, and it's not a fight that can be won by any honest student of history... and certainly not if you enjoy the joke I just dropped over these several pages.
Conclusion
(and...)
Ya know, kids... be excellent to each other, we all learned this stuff in grade school, mostly, in first and now second world cultures. And that those terms exist should appall your temes.
The proof of the existence of temes is constructed in the definition, meaning everything I have said around those 8 words is just framing, context, insight. I add the "anti-bully" message last as bullies are the least temetic entity in the soup (and they frequently bring their guns to a not-fight and start one, highly anti-temetic). And after tech and science we emphasized “art” and “culture” as the edge of proverbial blade: where complex temes extend unto the untested, that “last slot in the logical chain” is the observation of our brutish natures and the memetic justifications, amongst other themes, and therein our arts and cultures await the brute and excise the flawed code for fun and profit: high Art.
And frequently it is expedient to actively seek the bully and expose flaws, such as corruptions in our governments.
All mothers, and fathers, know that while "punishment" may be a somewhat successful strategy in managing larger societal issues later, one does not pepper spray the infant merely for being hungry, one does not impose sanctions on butt wiping due to too much poop. It's not a debate, these are the oldest temes we have: nurture, kindness, continuation of self in other, accepting wisdom is acquired and can always be offered and sometimes bestowed (before society gets its claws in). Parental kissing of children is essential to spreading antibodies, the oldest of temes serving the genes, and even into adulthood we kiss what we value most.
Temes are not anti-gene, kissing our babies is pro-gene and we call it “good”.
It is also pro-teme, but it is not pro-meme definitively, memes are not safe a priori, they are not antibodies they are possible irritants and germs: if you value your health and the health of other teme hosts let them neither enter your mouth nor leave it... so to speak and except in the willful and thoughtful creation of good art, the wonderful tool that it is.
"Temeticists" are the class of identities that believe goodness exists and pain is evadable, herein described in the context of "meme" as originally proposed by Dawkins.
Pain sucks, I want you to successfully avoid what I have sometimes failed to avoid, this definition has helped me quantify and mitigate the consequences of existing in a hostile memespace.
If it helps you please monetize this work commensurate with what you can afford and how much you gain from it specifically.
Christopher Noyes Roberts
This original work is copyrighted, please do reproduce in part or whole without my permission.