What Do You Meme By That?

Forget about objective reality for the moment.  Psychologically speaking, we most often are affected by subjective reality far more than by what is objectively true.  It is a case of style over substance that results from the ways that we ascribe meaning to our experience.

Where does the meaning come from anyway?

In my previous book, Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving (McCusker, 2004), I discussed memes, a concept coined by Oxford University ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976).   In brief, a meme is the fundamental unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, the fundamental unit of biological transmission.  Memes can take many forms; for instance, they can be verbal, as in the Happy Birthday song, enactive, as in the handshake or “high five,” or purely ideational, as in the commonly held belief that Lincoln was the USA’s greatest president.  To qualify as a meme, the item must be faithfully reproduced, widespread, and long-lasting.  Thus, a fad—such as the Macarena—would not be considered a meme.

So, in theory, memes are the proffered cultural meanings that we tend to “inherit” merely by living in our native society.  I say “tend" to inherit because the meme offered is not necessarily the one accepted by you—the individual.  Harkening back to Lincoln, not everyone accepts that he was America’s greatest president, and in a more contemporary vein, some do not accept that Barack Obama is America’s first black president, since, in truth, he is our first biracial president. 

Just because the culture offers a meme, then, does not mean that you accept the meme as valid, or that you think and act upon it in the exact way that many others do.  What you accept and incorporate actually is filtered through your ego strength—through you history, temperament, personality, and environments.  After you do, the filtered meme becomes an indiveme.

So where is the health-oriented connection?  The point is that every day you are besieged with media-generated advice about how to live your life.  Some of the meme-like advice is correct and some, incorrect.  You need to be able to think about your ego strength as it encourages you to embrace some information and to reject other information.  By doing so you accurately determine what is worth pursuing for you specifically and how to pursue it.  That way you will not prematurely dismiss good ideas or uncritically accept bad ones.

Think indiveme, not meme.

Dawkins, R. (1976).  The Selfish Gene.  Oxford University Press.

McCusker, P. (2004).  Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving.  Iuniverse.