Memeticians/psych_notes.md

Meditations on Narratives and Mass Psychology

The following is presented, and must be presented, without a thorough, logical proof. It is a simple exercise in adductive reasoning and is posited as true based on its explanatory power for human events. Given the complexity of a system as vast as the entirety of human interaction, modeling from first principles to formal proof (deductive reasoning) is impossible. Similarly, making observations and then attempting to model the behavior scientifically (inductive reasoning) is also inevitably biased because observations of human interaction cannot, ipso facto, be made outside of human interaction.

Thus I humbly present the following axioms.

Axioms:

1. Humans understand their world through narratives, not rational contemplation.
2. Narratives are likely to spread when they excite or please the recipient. Stories which:
   1. appeal to aesthetic senses (simplifications)
   2. make the receiver feel important (anthems/occult knowledge)
   3. inspire fear (doomsday prophecy)
   4. humor the recipient (memes)
   5. create rapport with others (cultural narratives)
3. Narratives which do not possess any qualities to spread organically may only be spread through repetition.
4. Narratives modify individual behavior and can thus be a form of power.
5. Narratives, often fictive, are frequently used by elite or sovereign individuals to reduce the cost of compliance of the governed.
6. Narratives need not be logically consistent or even plausible.
7. Crafters or advocates of false narratives may actually believe the narrative.
8. Capacity for self-deception prevents the pain of admitting error of otherwise beneficial or useful beliefs, thus the deceived or self-deceived may be immunized against an appeal to logic.
9. Narratives may only be overcome by more powerful narratives.

Case in Point:

Examples supporting the above axioms.

1. Police are less likely to shoot blacks during encounters than whites; however, the selective reporting by mass media of stories like Freddie Gray have yielded the conventional wisdom that police violence disproportionately affects blacks, despite that being objectively, and provably false.
2. Examples:
   1. "There are two kinds of people in the world"
   2. Doing online "research" of aliens
   3. Climate change
   4. Advice animals
   5. Fictional history of Jewish persecution
3. "Judeo-Christian values" of the 1990s and early 2000s. Christian doctrine is a rejection of and is antithetical to Judaism; however, the nonsense phrase was repeated often enough to be internalized by a large portion of the population.
4. Political formulae. The bourgeiose, climate change.
5. "Mandate of Heaven", "Divine Right of Kings", the Roman Imperial cult
6. New Age spirituality, astrology, etc.
7. Attorneys, pilpul
8. Cognitive dissonance
9. Polytheism to monotheism