a
(I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that attacking rival memes is
always a bad thing. Often, it’s a very good thing. At the societal level,
criticizing ideas is the ultimate source of our moral and intellectual
progress. And at the individual level, critical thinking functions as a
memetic firewall, designed to attack and neutralize certain sorts of toxic
memes: those backed up with poor evidence and logically dubious
arguments.)
a
The more virulent a meme is, the less common that
meme will be. Thus, the martyrdom meme and the celibacy meme will
always be less common than, say, the smoking meme or the apple-pie-and-
ice-cream meme. The fact that we see relatively few highly virulent memes
is not inconsistent with memetics. On the contrary, memetics makes good
sense of the pattern.
a
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