Rainbow of memes

Posted 04:28 GMT
Mangala spoke:

The rhetoric of war is the toolkit of memes. When the tongue-tied son of a tongue-tied father finds his voice, when Cato the Elder deploys his troops with a sneer and a winning smile, when de Torquemada, having draped the nude statues of Justice in a proper modesty, promises to root all evil out of our midst, each speaks from a place in the spectrum of memeplexes that governs the Vir Auld, the root of the World, the fleeting “Age of Man” in opposition to the good Earth, which for us is eternal.

These are the ideas of Ken Wilber, who presented a rainbow of memes in his book
A Theory of Everything.

The red meme speaks of hatred and fear, the language of antique revenge. He tried to kill my daddy. He gassed his own people. Everything changed on September 11.

The blue meme speaks of rules and the judgment of a just god: He has had (pick a number) of (years or months or days) to come into compliance. Resolution 1441 says he must declare all weapons of mass destruction. It is too early for war; we must give the inspection regime a chance. Any recent statement of Osama bin Laden. Material breach.

The orange meme speaks of logic and profit: We will help the Iraqi people create a free and democratic nation. It's not about oil, but we cannot stand by while the world's economy is held hostage by a tyrant.

The green meme speaks of peace, consequences and conditional love: We are in Baghdad as voluntary human shields to protect the Iraqi people. War is an admission of failure, there is no excuse for war. Those who would make war are criminals.

The higher memes—yellow, turquoise and beyond—have been mainly silent in these mad days. Or perhaps they speak and we cannot hear. Yellow and beyond speak the language of value and acceptance. Each meme has its role in the Vir Auld, and each has value on its own terms. The higher memes guard against the runaway passions of the red, the rigid rule-making of the blue, the logical twists of the goal-pursuing orange and the self-righteous love of the green. They must be guided, and perhaps even warred upon, but always with unconditional love and with a deep appreciation of their merits.

Wars are sold like this: Politicians favoring war use blue meme rhetoric to achieve orange meme purposes and soothe red meme fears while politicians opposing war use green meme rhetoric to achieve orange meme purposes and revolutionaires use red meme methods to promote blue meme goals.