One of the beauties of having extra analytical tools, without the responsibility of academic position, is the power they give you to tell other people why they act the way they do. Evolutionary biology and memetics have enormous explanatory power. As I set off on this page I feel like a ten year old with a machine gun. It feels good, but I know I shouldn't do it. This is a power that you shouldn't exploit, but what the hell...
To express my individuality...
by following the crowd.
Why do people do such crazy things? I don't know but it sure is fun to speculate.
Piercings
Two theories spring to mind when I think about piercings. The survival of the imitators and the handicap principle.
Susan Blackmore has written in The Meme Machine that we as a species developed our intelligence in order to spread memes. There was a benefit to be had by selecting mates who were good imitators. This had benefits for the survival of both your genes and your memes. If your children were good at imitating they would be successful in a society and gene pool that favours good imitators. Therefore imitation behaviour is a self catalysing runaway effect. Once started it will take off and continue to escalate.
Piercing your tongue shows you are a total dork. But piercing your tongue as imitation behaviour, especially of a respected person, is exactly the kind of behaviour that a prospective mate should have. Once tongue piercing becomes accepted outside the carnival and fetish circles it is a behaviour that must spread like wildfire. One of the Queen's granddaughters has a pierced tongue, a Spice Girl, Blink 182; hey, that's everybody, join the queue.
The fact that it is painful, unpleasant and dangerous also appeals to the handicap principle. A signal to the opposite sex must have a penalty or else it will encourage cheating. You can express your single minded devotion to mindless imitation better by copying something that is obviously painful and dangerous rather than something that has no costs. Wearing your jeans cut off at the knee is an easy thing to copy so it is much less value to show that you are a fashion victim than something that is painful and dangerous, like piercing your tongue or belly button, putting a plate in your top lip or wearing corsets to give yourself a 13" waist.
Right. So that is that explained. Twice over for good measure. Now how about taking the piss out of fashion victims? Why do they say they do it? The number one explanation is absolutely laughable. To express their individuality! Imitation in the name of innovation. Just like that advertising slogan, Don't Imitate, Innovate. As if they really expected you sheep to follow that advice. They were counting on the opposite effect. We all want to imitate because it is doing our memes and genes both good if we do. There is a fine balance to be struck though, because we must not imitate imitators, we must imitate innovators. That is what shows our innate intelligence and so our worthiness as a mate for another upright walking ape with pretensions to sentience.
So who do we chose to imitate and when do we chose to innovate. That is the problem. Wearing modern style cycling gear would have been the surest form of suicide imaginable when I was at school in 1978. That would have been too far out of the ordinary, unless Johnny Rotten or David Bowie did it. Now certain people can appear in public dressed as fluorescent battenburgs and they can get away with it. But that particular gentleman could not have got away with it in 1978, he manages to do it now because cycle clothing is not too unusual, his innovation behaviour is limited to the colour scheme.
Spitting
Have you ever noticed how often boys spit? They may not do so in your culture but teenage boys in England are constantly spitting. The explanation cannot have anything to do with biology. Puberty does not affect the salivary glands. The explanation has to be memetic. Spitting is seen as rebellious and cool. I often see boys straining to spit. They do not have a problem with excess saliva, they just feel the urge to spit to show their cool disdain for the world. I rarely spit, I have no need to very often and no desire to. I wonder how often they spit when they are alone? I guess about as often as I do. Spitting must be a meme.
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Spitting really annoys me. When I wait at the railway station I have to watch out where I put my bag, in front of every seat is a big wet bubbly dollop of infectious mucus. Lovely. |
So, what about me? Time to point the machine gun at myself. Why do I do what I do? I enjoy it. I enjoy people thinking that I am clever. It makes me feel better about myself. The better I feel about myself the better I can spread my memes. It really is that simple. My memes have an easy time getting spread because I enjoy doing it. The memes have latched onto reward mechanisms my body already possesses which drive me to seek status in order to achieve my basic goals of food and mate acquisition. Instead of helping me find friends to help me catch mammoths and find a healthy wife the desire to impress others is now recruited to help me spread my favourite ideas. Because these ideas are spread they deserve to be regarded as memes.
In many ways I am in the process of building you in my image, I am using your brain to carry the same ideas. The tools I use are rhetoric, humour and analogy. Pure word power. I cannot hope to convince you of the rightness of my cause with sword or fist, but I can change you, literally, with words.
Why do we lie to our selves about our motivations? Simple. Our bodies do what they were going to do anyway and leave our selves to come up with an explanation, a justification, after the event. Most of what we do has nothing to do with the kind of rational explanations we tell our selves. Note I put our selves, not ourselves, that is deliberate, selves are a separate fictional character we invent, and constantly reinvent.
Why do women wear high heels? To make themselves look taller they say. To make them feel more "dressed up" they say. Because we want to, they say. So, nothing at all to do with imitating each other or making your arses stick out more provocatively then? No, of course not.
Free will is a cherished illusion. We make a lot of effort to show that we are deciding things for ourselves. But in many ways the self we talk about is a hollow entity, incapable of either having or expressing a will. We are simply the latest coalition of memes that is operating the survival machine that our genes have built for their purposes. We operate in their interests. Our goals further theirs. The self is simply making up the explanation of why it chose to do what it didn't chose to do, because the body was already doing it.
We are constantly lying to our selves about our motivations. Why? Because we can't stand silence in our heads and we need to feel that we are in control. We dare not accept the idea that we do anything because we might actually have biological needs and drives.
So many people are totally unaware of the single most important fact in their lives; that they are not wearing a primate's body, they are a primate.