Remember when this newsletter used to be weekly?
I can assure you the intent is still there, but the reality of my life has resembled my daughter’s 96-pack of Crayola crayons: theoretically, they all fit in there, neatly ordered, but every time I try to cram them all away the flimsy cardboard bulges and bends and begins to tear at the folds. Just a little extra space would make all the difference. Luckily, it looks like a little extra space is on the horizon (more on that in a minute).
So yes, it’s been a long time. There is much to report.
Paige turned 3. We sold our house. We bought another house. Many pleasant things happened. Some unpleasant things happened. Mostly it was good, but my god has it been busy.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, I discovered that it was—quite beyond my understanding, and with total disregard for the sequential nature of time—Spring Break. We had plans to visit Florida. We had plans to backpack the Trans-Catalina trail. Instead, we decided to stay home and start packing the house.
(Remember how I said more space is on the horizon? We’re moving closer to my work, which should reclaim about 10 hours per week of my time. It won’t happen until July, but just the knowledge that the time is there waiting for me has already expanded my mental space.)
Spring break is my favorite religious holiday. The Great Margarita descends from on high, I adorn myself with the holy flip-flops and prostrate myself on a beach towel: Hallelujah! Summer shall come again! There is a balm in Gilead, and it comes in 30 SPF.
I made the most of break. I read at the beach, I climbed a mountain with a friend, I puttered around and tied up many loose threads (some of which have been loose for months). Somehow, before I knew it, Spring Break was almost over.
And!
I also wrote!
I finally wrapped my head around what I was trying to say next in the Giant Cultural Parasite, and organized my thoughts into a semi-coherent structure without getting sidetracked by all of the super-interesting (to me) tangents about the way memes run our brains and shape our behavior. It’s not polished, but this is an email newsletter, not a book, and right now it’s more important to me to get it out than to make it perfect.
As a bonus, and just because you’ve waited so long, I’ve also included my favorite reads from 2021. Yes, I know it’s April. But that’s the nice thing about books: they’re still here, all those months later.
I can’t tell you how good it feels to finally get an email out again. I honestly felt as if one of my limbs had gone numb, and I was beginning to doubt whether it would wake.
I suppose I should tell you a little about the new house: It’s in a great neighborhood in Novato, about 15 minutes away from my work in San Rafael. More indoor space. Less backyard space, but it’s close to trails and it has a huge heritage oak tree in the backyard named Harry. He’ll be part of the family, I’m sure.
Okay, onwards to the articles!
This issue…
Part 13 of The Giant Cultural Parasite Series: Human Cogs
My favorite books from 2021
Articles about Kids and Nature, Sliced Bread, Covington’s Scissors, and Anarchy
Here we go…
Human Cogs
The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 13
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
As far as memes go, this one’s insidious and brutal. It’s filled with unspoken assumptions and value statements:
-Your choice of career will drive your identity (ie, says something about you as a person)
-Your primary value to society is as a worker.
-Your interests and passions only have value as a potential career path, rather than for the joy they might bring.
-You should select a job from the predetermined options (as opposed to inventing a previously unimagined job)
-The value of the present moment is determined by future outcomes.
That isn’t to say that the questioner actually believes any of these statements or that they are the only values being propagated, but clearly the unexamined question helps buttress other memes and assumptions floating around in our culture. The question is but one tendril of the Giant Cultural Parasite, the complex replication machine whose only purpose is to continue to grow.
Our first choice, as individual components of the culture, is either to comply or to abstain from participation. Compliance brings rewards. Abstaining excludes us from not only the rewards, but often from society as a whole.
Nearly everything in our society is built to bring us into the fold, to reward our full participation and cut us off if we stray from the norms. We are expected to find niches and roles for ourselves, often before we even have the capacity to understand and weigh whether the system we were born into is itself worth participating in. I believe that one of the major drivers of teenage angst and anger is the emerging awareness that the culture into which they are expected to conform does not match the values and joys that are essential to the human animal. And as our parasitic culture drives us farther from paradise, that anger will continue to grow and fester and at times erupt in violence.
It begins from childhood, as the people around us look for talents and aptitudes, wondering what career and interests we might have.
As we grow older, the desire for status leads us to interests in which we show some promise or ability to excel. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The people around us praise us for the interests that match up with their established values, which have themselves been selected by the meme propagation of the society they were born into. “Wow, you show such an interest in animals, you should be a veteranarian.” Interests that don’t fit those preconceived values are questioned. “Don’t you think you need a backup plan?”
(An aside here: My point is not simply to criticize these comments or to question their good sense—we do need to eat and make a living, and we must confront the reality of the world we live in, not the fantasy world we might wish for— my point is to recognize one aspect of how the meme system propagates itself deeply into our identities and replicates itself in generation after generation, often to our detriment.)
And so we begin to specialize, finding our niche in academics, or sports, or music. These specializations begin to crowd out other interests as they start to demand more time, practice, and learning.
We first might choose our roles and interests based on the status they confer, the people they connect us with, or the pure joy of the activity. But before long we find ourselves confronting the practical realities of adulthood, and any role or activity that doesn’t fit into the structure of the system—by which I mean something that increases production and puts food on the table—must take a back seat to the roles pre-approved by our culture. Some of us get lucky and find niches that match our passions. Many do not.
As we gain skill in a domain, we find ourselves further incentivized by praise, status, and prizes (money, awards, etc.). In search of larger rewards, we compete at higher levels, whether that means growing our audience, seeking out promotions, or competing against better competitors.
We can keep turning that ratchet until we eventually find ourselves competing against those who are better than us. In the words of the inimitable Ben Folds, “there’s always someone cooler than you.” And so we are faced with a choice:
On the one hand, we can pour in more time and effort, optimizing every action and decision, so that we can compete at the very highest level. We can become the olympic gold medalist in our particular domain. This choice is time and energy intensive, and there’s no promise it will work. Every innovation and optimization can be imitated by our competitors, and like the Red Queen, we have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.
Our other choice is to move in a different direction. We can begin to carve out a place for ourselves that is relatively free from competition. Rather than becoming the single fastest runner in the world, perhaps we can become an effective coach in our local community. What we lose in status on the world stage, we might gain in financial stability, mental health, and time for other interests. We compete against a smaller pool, which gives us more reliable access to certain incentives. What we lose in status on the wider stage, we trade for a more intimate status with the people who matter to us in our community.
The local coach still has many of the same concerns as the elite runner: status, praise, prizes. But now, instead of chasing tenths of seconds of speed, the incentives drive him in a different direction: find new talent and incentivize them towards success in the running world. He has effectively become a local proselytizer for the “running” meme.
Or perhaps, instead of a coach, he becomes a designer of better running shoes. Now his incentives push him towards marketing (more proselytizing) and competing with other shoe-makers. Even if he designs something that has never been seen before, any niche that proves profitable will quickly attract competitors.
If marketing and proselytizing are a meme’s replication organs, then competition serves as its organs of longevity and fidelity.
The first running shoe was an innovation, but now runners have any number of options, and if Nike were to go out of business tomorrow, it wouldn’t significantly threaten the longevity or fidelity of running as a sport.
Likewise, a high school can always hire another running coach. And the same goes for politicians, judges, soldiers, teachers, CEOs, and religious leaders. In established niches, there will always be plenty of incentives for another human to come along and become the new cog in the meme machine.
Competition within a niche means that any individual in that niche is replaceable. The meme can continue to propagate even after the individual host expires, just like our bodies continue despite the minute-by-minute deaths of our individual cells.
As surely as the creation of a profitable new niche leads to competition, that competition leads to interchangeability. And that means that we humans are essentially interchangeable in most of the systems we have created.
Mostly that’s a wonderful thing. It means that we can trust and depend on the systems that support us. Nations don’t dissolve upon the death of their leaders; education isn’t reinvented from scratch with every new teacher; we can have pencils, even though no living human knows all the individual steps required to make a pencil.
But there are downsides, too. In some cases—and this is one of the main points of this entire series—in some cases, the interchangeability of humans means that nobody has control of the system. And if the vehicle is headed off a cliff, wouldn’t it be nice to have a driver?
Next time, we’ll start to dig into some of the systems that make up the major organs of the Giant Cultural Parasite—systems like governments, religions, and corporations. We’ll talk about the ingenious but completely undirected ways they self-propagate, ensure their own survival, and resist change, in order to fulfill the evolutionary laws of replication, longevity, and fidelity.
After that, we’ll talk about how a particular ancient technology supercharged the development of the Giant Cultural Parasite and allowed it to not only dominate every competing meme system, but to begin to assimilate each of them into its own Borg-like singularity. Hopefully from there I’ll be able to shed some light on why we can all see the cliff we’re barreling toward, but we still seem powerless to hit the brakes or turn the wheel.
And although I can’t promise a solution, maybe once we can see the problem we can all start to reach for the wheel instead of yelling madly at a driver who doesn’t exist.
My Favorite Books from 2021
For the Time Being, Annie Dillard
Breathtaking. Dillard is like no other writer I know. In For The Time Being, she struggles mightily with the question “what’s the point of it all?” Her cast includes a paleontologist, a deceased Chinese emperor, a neonatal nurse, a Kabbalist rabbi, and occasionally, you. Each of these characters sheds a different light on what it means to be alive, to encounter one another, to seek purpose as an individual drop in a great ocean. The answers (which is too tidy a word) are scenes filled with unexpected juxtapositions, by turns heart-wrenching, sublime, jarring, disturbing, and frisson-inducing. A word of warning: do not expect Dillard to deliver neatly arranged thoughts to be chewed and digested like hors d’ouvres. Expect 600-lb gorillas, and plan to wrestle. That’s not to say that her writing is opaque—far from it. But you will pause after scenes and interjections and ask yourself “Why did she put that there? What did that have to do with the scene before it?” The effort you expend to unearth these unexpected cross-pollinations is exactly what makes her work so gratifying.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
An empire comes to take over young Baru Cormorant’s small island nation. A child prodigy at strategy and accounting, she sees no hope of resistance, unless she can work her way up through the system as an insider. But in order to do so, she’ll have to betray everything and everyone she ever loved. Dickinson has created a modern fantasy classic that will sock you in the guts.
One Man’s Meat, E.B. White
This one is a series of personal essays written by the author for a column in Harpers magazine. It made me want to travel back in time and go live on a farm. My favorite from this series was “Once More to the Lake,” in which he visits a favorite childhood vacation spot with his son, combining nostalgia and promise in one.
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
I am so grateful that I discovered fairly early in my life that classics are generally more accessible than people assume, and surprisingly enjoyable to read. Even so, for some reason I continued to assume that Dickens would be dry and dense, but I kept seeing him recommended by authors I respected. I had a completely boneheaded impression! His scenes drive you forward, his characters pop, his language dances, his plot will twist you in knots. I couldn’t put this book down. Can’t wait to read more by him.
The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson
I love watching complex systems in action, and I love books that shift my paradigms. I understood that the oceans were very large. I understood that they were deep. I understood that they had a gargantuan effect on the world's weather and climate. But there was still so much to see and experience. Rachel Carson will draw you in and awe you with the complexity and interconnectedness of the last great earthly frontier. The way she reveals second-order effects is stupefying and, in the age of climate change, entirely terrifying. This book was written over 50 years ago, but again and again I found myself watching her connections unfold in a manner that seemed prescient for the problems we are experiencing today. Of course, she wasn't prescient, she just grasped the systems accurately (and described them beautifully). It's amazing how much of this research is still accurate all these decades later, especially when you realize that Carson was writing before the science of tectonic plate motion had entered the scene. Brava, Carson, brava.
Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber
Graeber was an economic anthropologist and one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He argues that money was not created for the sake of exchange, as Adam Smith and others have argued. Instead, it was created as a way to account for debts. Interesting enough, as it goes. But where it gets really interesting is how he traces the evolution of debt. He provides an overwhelming abundance of well-documented examples of debt entering an indigenous tribe (usually from the outside), replacing a well-established culture of reciprocal care, and forcing the members into indentured servitude, turning them against one another, and compelling them into crimes against humanity. If you’ve been following my series about meme systems, Debt is a fascinating and terrifying case study of how a meme can run amok.
Articles…
The Curse of Sliced Bread
Why you’re so busy.
Kids who spend more time in nature become happier adults
Yeah, duh.
Covington’s Scissors
Covington’s Scissors are issues designed to divide us. They’re insidious, destructive memes that are tearing apart society. The media love them. I believe that we have a moral obligation to learn to recognize them and avoid engaging with them. Just try to read this article and stay rational (i.e. non-partisan). You can’t do it, can you?
Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out
Rethinking history with David Graeber (see “Debt” above). Very apropos of our discussion of memetics. This book is high on my list for this year.
Quote…
“Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. you are not human beings; you are the cogs in a machine. You suffer patiently, submitting to the cruelties of environment, when you, individually, have the possibilities of changing them.”
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Please share with someone you think would enjoy this, and write back if you have a chance.
Nick