omniharmonicMemetic Evolution
Memetic evolution is the process by which ideas, beliefs, and cultural practices undergo selection pressures analogous to natural selection in biological evolution, but operating on memes (units of cultural information) rather than genes. Just as genetic evolution favors traits that enhance reproductive success regardless of the organism’s wellbeing, memetic evolution favors ideas that spread effectively regardless of their truth or benefit to their hosts. The memes that survive and dominate are not necessarily the wisest or most liberating; they are the most transmissible. This creates a fundamental tension between the virality of an idea and its depth, between an idea’s capacity to spread and its capacity to genuinely serve human and ecological flourishing.
The concept illuminates how cultural systems, particularly religious and ideological frameworks, develop through competitive pressures that optimize for propagation rather than accuracy. In the context of Christianity’s historical development, memetic selection helps explain how Paul of Tarsus’s innovation of salvation through belief rather than transformation proved so consequential. A teaching that spreads through mere cognitive acceptance will always outcompete a teaching that spreads through arduous personal transformation, because acceptance is easy and transformation is hard. The version of an idea that can spread fastest will spread farthest, regardless of whether it preserves the original insight. This is not a moral judgment but a structural observation about how cultural evolution operates. Similarly, Daniel Schmachtenberger’s concept of “protector memes,” ideas that defend a memeplex from competition, explains how doctrines like Hell function as enforcement mechanisms ensuring propagation across every domain of human activity: social pressure, political power, economic incentive, cultural saturation, and military conquest.
Understanding memetic evolution is essential for navigating the meta-crisis, because it reveals that the dominant narratives of our civilization, including the story of separation itself, achieved dominance not through being true but through being transmissible. It also points toward the strategic challenge facing regenerative movements: how to create cultural memes that are both deeply true and genuinely viral, that can spread through networks at speeds competitive with extractive narratives while preserving the relational depth that those narratives sacrifice. The contest over civilizational direction is, at its root, a memetic contest, and the tools of dialectical thinking and ecological consciousness must be brought to bear on the question of how life-affirming ideas can outcompete life-destroying ones.