Using memetics to inquire what has been the religion of the 20th century
Memes that hijack survival instincts tend to spread, like, the story of heaven and hell in middle age catholicism. Those are not conscious decisions by anyone, it's a result of how the brain works. What is the equivalent today, what memes spread through fear, as in, below cognition and bypassing the executive function, to be inherited throughout generations, Jung's global unconscious where memes are, during childhood, inherited without filtration (Leigh, 2010). What is the religion, inherited without being aware of it, of the 20th century?
Trojan memes allow backdoor access to associated memes
"Civilization itself is a memetic enterprise, an edifice of memetic replication, refinement, and evolution. As civilization became more complex and more interactive with civilizations of other areas, the status quo-oriented memes also became more complex and more reinforced and rigid. These tradition-sustaining memes are only for themselves and are no longer concerned with the survival of the individual. " - Hoyle Leigh, 2010
Belief that results from how humans are "bound together", the word religion from re-ligare, "to bind together", is a product of the social organization that is used, it shapes how memes, via multi-level selection, spread. There is no conscious intent behind how those types of memes, religious memes, memes that result from the structure of a social organization, spread, nor is there awareness about it.
With middle age catholicism, lower level systems in the brain, the paleo-mammalian brain and the brain stem, together with the broader social organization at the time, propagated the idea of hell and "eternal death" by threatening annihilation of the genes on one hand, and promising “eternal life” on the other, two ideas that survive because they appeal to evolutionarily older systems in the brain.
In the 20th century, what is the image of hell, that exploits similar "memetic pathways" to proliferate, without its "hosts" being aware of it?
Highly rEsteemed!
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