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Positive Feed-Forward

If you hadn't noticed, there are a lot of widespread negative memes out there. Why? Well, simply because people aren't well-equipped to fend them off anymore. "Wait Phlegm...anymore?" Yeah. "You mean...once upon a time...they were?" Yeah.

See, back in the day, before the Information Age, people learned their values mostly from their parents and family. Sure, schools might have made an attempt here and there, but let's face it, the problem childs typically had problem families or neurological problems. As a result, by the time children typically came into contact with outside negative influences, they were already under the influence of their parents' positive memes. This transmission of memes from parent to child is called vertical transmission.

Today, however, most children are raised, moralistically-speaking, by sources beyond their families. Music, television, movies. Religions are well-aware of this, which is why such things were/are considered evil, sinful, devices of Satan; they can turn people away from religion, thus harming the survival of that religion's meme. No good meme wants to be wiped out. (Ironically, I think the preposterousness of religions claiming these things are "works of Satan" has somewhat backfired. I really do think that if religions are to continue to survive in a COMPATIBLE way in this modern world, then they must dispense with all the fairytales, but that'll be another entry.) This demon-spawned transmission of memes from non-parental influences is called horizontal transmission.

My point in all this--yes, there's ALWAYS a point--is that a majority of parents these days aren't brainwashing their children enough with positive memes. Many are under the impression that what protected children from evil before sitll applies today. Some ascribe to the highly successful yet horrible meme that tells them to let their children decide things for themselves. Others simply don't have any positive memes to pass along, so they end up doing the media's job for them, which is an ever-increasing problem as horizontally-influenced children themselves become parents.

As much as we get tired of hearing politicians talk about the breakdown of the American family, that is one thing they are actually right about. However, they don't have the right incentives for preaching about it, which is one reason why the meme for keeping families together is failing. It's not about only having a mother, or having two dads, or even a homo dad. Heck, I'd even argue it doesn't matter if you have a traditional family. What is needed are constant figures in a child's life to condition them with positive memes. A longer period of veritcal transmission of positive values before the negative, horizontal transmission becomes dominant. That's it. The rest (unconditional love and so on, which all us children love to abuse) is just a bonus.

I'm pessimistic whether it can be overcome. I mean, look at other countries with supposedly more stable family and religious structures than America. They too are falling prey to the slop of American media, mostly through the children. If India and Japan, countries with more tradition than you can shake a booty at, are/have fallen to horseshit American pop culture, what hope is there?

posted by Phlegm at 11/23/2003