What is a meme? This is not to ask about its colloquial usage (which is itself, of course, a meme), but its technical usage as instances of information which inform the behavior and activity of its propagators. Within this framework Moldbug diagnoses morbid memeplexes, i.e. memes which prove maladaptive to its host. Memes are, ultimately, not living things, but depend essentially upon living things to be propagated, and change as they are found able to be changed by their propagators. In this way, evolutionary memetics takes place. Not through any competition occurring intrinsically between memes themselves, as competition occurs in nature, but by proxy of how those memes happen to be aligned with materially compelling interests. To put that another way, a meme which confers optimal advantage to its holder is not sufficient to propagate itself if its propagator faces material forces which far outstrip its own power. There is a balance between power and propagation; power is unequal and reserved to a few, while memes propagate via social contact no matter what the level. The means by which power relations are situated are those means available for propagation.

Memetic propagation will tend to confer most advantage by providing identity. Throughout history, the success of an individual has in almost all cases depended upon integration with a body greater than himself. The division of labor demands that technical knowledge cannot be easily shared, yet outside the realm of technical knowledge a mechanism which promotes integration despite this difference of technical knowledge proves adaptive for the groups and individuals that adapt them. Memetic propagation at this level is primarily concerned with signaling and acknowledging shared group membership, so that one’s technical knowledge in one respect, though it cannot be assessed at the technical level for itself, can be trusted by proxy of the technician’s ability to signal reliability and trust, that is, through signaling group membership. Memetic propagation confers fitness in the case it confers shared identity with groups. For Progressives, it is politically correct opinions; for hipsters, it’s an eclectic musical taste that evades association with the mainstream; for blacks, it’s Air Jordans. Each group develops a memetic equilibrium which allows one to signal group membership.

However, the advantage of group membership faces an opposing force, namely that of memetic centers. This is, in other words, how to decide who has more or less authority for determining which memetic groupings prove one is most “with it” in a group, and this will tend to be influenced mostly by those who do the most to maintain group cohesion and advantage relative other groups. This produces memetic evolution, and creates a space for competition within the group to best articulate that group’s memetic essence. This will be decided generally by the success associated with an individual; if one has a role of relative leadership within the group, then their memetic propagation has more sway than that put on by the lesser members. This is also why the first rule of social status is to not talk about social status. If one needs to explicitly draw attention to social status within a group, this is the clearest signal that one does not intuit the essence of the memetic propagation within the group. Either one recognizes the memetic center and follows (with the chance of succession when his own memetic propagation proves to confer an advantage), or they don’t and so must be considered an outsider of the group.

Note likewise that memes are not necessarily strings of information or sequences of words. In the most abstract sense, they are simply instances which signal. Words signal, but so does a car blinker. iPhones are memes, and so is the Ford F-150. Memetic propagation is ultimately a description of fashion, and that in turn a description of how we attempt to signal group membership.

But what of the intersection between memes and reality? Most memes are not about anything in particular; they are indicators of shared experience, shared fraternity, shared group membership. There is nothing particularly true or false about Ray Ban’s, and they make no declarative statement about how things in the world work. Yet some memes do portend to propose how things are, and sometimes even beyond that, how things should be. We witness endlessly conservatives and liberals going back and forth, not due to some particular acquaintance with the subject matter that confers authority on their prattling (“muh guns,” “muh body, muh choice”), which might be considered as semantically meaningful as kindergarteners going on about quantum mechanics and dark matter. What’s going on here? Merely the attempt to signal group membership, rather than any expression of expertise. Yet they can cop the supposed experts well enough that most never even see past the words to what’s really going on. In order to create a space safe for conceptual development, i.e. a specific form of memetic propagation, that won’t devolve into drawing lines of group membership, effort must be expended on the development of memetic propagation which are simply irreplicable by those who can only hope to gain group membership and a justification of their sociopolitical sentiment. In other words, a memetic filter, a shibboleth, something which allows those engaged in testing and verifying the fitness between propositions and what they say about the world to gather together lived experience in the construction of a memeplex which confers an advantage on the groups which abide by them not only for the benefits of group membership, but relative those groups which do not adopt that memeplex, a competitive edge which eventually sees the other groups outcompeted, subsumed, and extinguished. (There aren’t any more Lamarckians these days, are there?) Those who place group membership over forwarding the theory at hand will only hold the theorizing back, for the development of a theory cannot guarantee that it will be amenable to the worldviews held previously by those who first engaged with it. Suppose a group of individuals were engaged in constructing a sensible theory of society which produced reliable descriptions and predictions of social phenomena? Would those who were previously socialist become capitalist if the theory demonstrated the welfare increasing function of market dialectic? This is the problem with scientific paradigms; they are social. But they can’t occur without humans, no matter their faults and blind spots, so at best we can hope that those who hold to welfare-decreasing views go ahead and practice those views and are selected out without imposing undue negative consequences on those with the welfare-increasing views.

However, as a successful memeplex takes place and takes on the qualities of a thought-structuring paradigm, it loses its elitist edge. At one point in time, signaling belief in evolutionary theory conferred an advantage of biological authority; now, stressing that one believes in evolutionary theory unlike those dirty creationists only demonstrates that one has taken on the guise of scientific theory to bolster the supposed superiority of their group. The same with the standard social science model handed down to society from Harvard, which has become less a test of intellectual integrity but whether one will hold the line for the sake of the Progressive dogma of equality.

Devising memes which confer an advantage to a group in terms of developing accurate theories of the world is itself a memetic endeavor. How to construct, as it were, a truth-determining machine? How can we both appreciate what role memes serve us as high-IQ monkeys, and also make use of the regularities of memetic propagation which leads to the production of a research programme that will allow a specific group of high-IQ monkeys to propagate memes amongst the rest of the population (specifically by way of those who hold the most power) that confers an overall civilizational fitness? This may be considered the project of neoreaction in a nutshell.