David Deutsch

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards.

the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition, and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave.

And, to do this, memes sometimes confer benefits. One difference from the biological case, however, is that, while organisms are nothing but the slaves of all their genes, memes only ever control part of a person’s thinking, even in the most slavishly static of societies. That is why some people use the metaphor of memes as viruses – which control part of the functionality of cells to propagate themselves.

Static societies survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet the holders’ individual preferences.

Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness. (Ironically, creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.)

The basic answer is that it should not come as a surprise that we can be badly mistaken in any of our ideas, even about ourselves, and even when we feel strongly that we are right. So we should respond no differently, in principle, from how we respond to the possibility of being in error for any other reason. We are fallible, but through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations we may correct some of our errors. Memes hide, but, just as with the optical blind spot, there is nothing to prevent our using a combination of explanation and observation to detect a meme and discover its implicit content indirectly.

The basic answer is that it should not come as a surprise that we can be badly mistaken in any of our ideas, even about ourselves, and even when we feel strongly that we are right. So we should respond no differently, in principle, from how we respond to the possibility of being in error for any other reason. We are fallible, but through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations we may correct some of our errors. Memes hide, but, just as with the optical blind spot, there is nothing to prevent our using a combination of explanation and observation to detect a meme and discover its implicit content indirectly.

If we find that enacting this behaviour thwarts our efforts to attain our personal objectives, or is faithfully continued when the ostensible justifications for it disappear, we should become more suspicious. If we then find ourselves explaining our own behaviour with bad explanations, we should become still more suspicious.

I think that both those puzzles have the same solution: what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving, to replicate memes. In other words, it was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But the mechanism to do both things is identical, and so in acquiring the ability to do the former, we automatically became able to do the latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human.