#i considered including the original meme image as like source material but its too fucking awful lmao

[tangledinink]

she's not like the other girls. (she's a snapping turtle.)

this is what the prompt 'traditional garment' meant, right? week two of @tmntfashioncompetition! me and @cupcakeslushie did a ninja mind meld. extra points (again) for those who find the easter egg :3c

[we-future-first]

[In-Depth] The Internet and Memes are Proof that Humanity is an Organism and Money is a Lie

I know this sounds asinine but just give me a few paragraphs to get some momentum.

You can't exist in 2020 and not intuitively just know what a meme is. Even those that exist totally cut-off from the online sphere would get the picture after a few examples. Most typically we think of image macros like this, or this, but these are just a couple of modern, digital memes and don't begin to scratch the surface of just exactly what a meme is, and why the answer to that might be really fucking important.

For example, a picture doesn't need any text to be a meme - similarly, a picture can be only text and still be a meme. A phrase can be a meme, or even a single word. A sound. Symbols. The structure of the building you're in and the design of the device you're reading this from are memetic artifacts. Musical subgenres, fashion and style trends, social patterns and institutions including family, marriage, property, law, crime, and punishment. Even complex ideologies - religious, political, and philosophical - are essentially very nuanced and enduring memes that span hundreds and thousands of years.

It's difficult to think of anything that is not a direct result of memetic repetition, as this is the way in which all information, beliefs, and ideas are shared and become socially entrenched - this method of transmission is directly related to, and reveals something specific about the origins of power, authority, control, and choice, and how we relate to those concepts and ourselves.

Human behaviour and response is memetic - a product of pattern, repetition, and context rather than a series of conscious “decisions” we make at every moment - this is not to suggest we are totally bound and determined by fate, but only that we are bound and determined to act only in accordance with our own character - we are not something responsible for our decisions, we are our decisions, and for that we bear responsibility.

Can you imagine Trump acting like anything else besides a caricature of pure petulance?

That’s his role - his constitution.

I think the belief that he, or you, or I, "make decisions" is backwards - partly a product of the language we use to speak about ourselves and the world, and partly just our basic instincts - it's plainly obvious that I am aware and alive and can consider many possibilities so it only seems to follow that I must exert some influence over my choices.

To me, there is little distinction between Me and My Choices - I am those choices, not a separate entity that chooses - that stands separate, considers, and then finally pulls the equivalent lever corresponding with the 'choice' I’ve made.

Those final three words are superfluous - to me they all reference a single thing - a localized happening from my specific perspective.

This idea is naturally unpalatable as it would seem to not only absolve one of all responsibility for wrongdoing, but also rob one of their ownership over both their good actions, and artistic creations.

I think this is simply a knee jerk reaction to protect the ego's sense of itself as something distinct and in control, as to accept the opposite comes with a great sense of powerlessness.

Responsibility is not something we take - responsible is what we are.

Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like the imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of change. This is why great orators have always possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single, unified force of nature.

I don't believe individual human action is ever the true catalyst to change - I think it is human action predicated on and driven specifically by the memetic concepts we have at our disposal - most importantly, "What is good, right, valuable, and true?".

Language is itself inherently biased, limiting and divisive - Black Lives Matter means absolutely nothing until it is interpreted, and language is always loaded with judgments. As much as it is the primary way we communicate, ironically it just as often obfuscates and confuses because the kind of language we have available to us directly determines how we understand and conceptualize the world (and ourselves). It is not a matter of merely being Peterson-ianly "precise" in our speech, because precision is meaningless if the principles that precede it are incompatible.

How many proponents of any ideology have actually read and engaged with its foundational and supporting texts?

Probably very few.

How many have absorbed bits and pieces through their specific context - language, culture, family, friends, media, and memes?

Probably almost everybody.

These repetitions of pattern connect us to something far greater than any single one of us - our collective human ideas about value, function, purpose, and their relation with each other - memes are a portal to the sum total of all human knowledge, experience, and feeling - memes are threads sewn into the fabric of the tapestry of reality, connecting us to the past, present, future, each other, and something totally separate - something unspeakable that yet demands to be spoken of.

You may have felt it when engaged in something everyday and ordinary, yet struck as if for the very first time by the majesty and totality of all there is - all experience happening right now, billions of distinct and separate simultaneous happenings, disconnected and separated only by virtue of the limitations of their own collective conceptions of what is real, what is true, and what is possible.

This universal need to communicate and share - to be heard - is intimately linked to creative expression.

Memes are innately communal and creative - they are meant to translate a feeling or thought into a shareable format that can be used, related to, and understood, and concepts of community and creativity have a direct connection to both art and play, two qualities that (partly) define the human experience.

Memes and artistic expression both reflect something crucial and universal in the spark of our human spirit - they represent the human need to share, something intimately linked with altruism (and collectivism). Art can of course be done selfishly, but there is no artistic expression at all without the memetic patterns that allow that expression and an audience to engage with the artist's creation.

Memes are thus quite a bit more significant than just funny and relatable pictures we share - what a meme is has direct implications regarding what we are, and our current shared cultural conception of them is simplistic and, as a result, limiting. If we don’t fully grasp what a meme is, we lack the capacity to both comprehend their true power, and the ability to wield that power to our own collective benefit. Instead, we persist in an ordering of society that enriches only a small handful that have fallen to the top through nothing other than circumstance and who insist this must be the natural ordering of the world simply because it is the current ordering of it.

Can we really trust those who wield inordinate amounts of power to fairly consider how it might be meted out differently?

Is the fate of society directly tied to the fate of the billionaire class, or to the current institutions of policing and governance?

From where is their authority and power actually derived?

The primary source is our shared belief that these institutions are legitimate and just.

The secondary source is their ability and willingness to inflict violence on us if we do not accept the first source.

Violence is of course the most powerful and persuasive avenue of acquiring and maintaining power - both literal violent acts, and indirect violence inflicted and facilitated by a system of organization that regards the principle of one person's right to hoard obscene amounts of wealth as a higher and more just one than providing the material necessities of life for all people.

That is the basic moral principle that serves as the keystone of the structure of our society as it is currently ordered.

Do we really believe those with obscene means deserve it?

What about those with such means that they could lose a thousand yearly salaries in a single day and not have that impact their quality of life in the slightest?

The Divine Right of Kings still rules, although now it's simply the Divine Right of the Wealthy.

We are meant to believe this is just The Way the World Is?

I find that idea just as intolerable and narrow-minded as those that believe it.

Society bears little proof of functioning properly anywhere - properly as in for the common good of all people.

If we instead understand "properly" as to the obscene and perverted benefit of a small few at the expense of everybody else, then it is functioning tremendously properly.

Individualism is too often championed by those who don't understand the distinction between it and selfishness, and this crucial error acts as the basic foundation for an entire wing of political and philosophical thought which insists might makes right, and "value" is directly related to money and money alone, where everything can be spoken about in terms of its relative worth in US dollars, one of many currencies that can, has, and will, become as good as worthless in an instant due to nothing other than our shared confidence in it.

Now I want to make some statements that are broad and general, but ones that I think are fairly common and subconscious. These are not meant to be statements of fact, merely word and concept associations to get us to see how we arrive at 'facts'.

The relationship between progressivism and conservatism is like the relationship between masculine and feminine, which itself is like the relationship between individual and community.

Consider this disharmony between two opposing (or complementary) principles as essentially the basis of all philosophical (and thus political) thought. Also consider opposing principles as really a single thing as opposites always exist only in relation to each other.

This sounds a lot like some meaningless new-age woo, but I think many people make these associations subconsciously anyway, even though we can offer legitimate arguments against them.

Just conjure up some typically conservative imagery and symbols in your head - what kind of qualities are emphasized? What is deemed valuable, good, and of worth? What foundations precede these symbols?

The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and the smartphone was a pivotal evolutionary shift in human history, comparable to our discoveries of fire, agriculture, steel, and the combustion engine - all of which are only useful through memetic transmission.

The Internet and our constantly connected culture has allowed us to, in a sense, act as a very rudimentary hivemind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody there is - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who perhaps don't even share the same primary language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of hours.

You, me, and everybody else has a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for?

Memes, of course.

To crowdsource the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the centre of all action and belief. The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is not to be tutted at or wished away, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, spread, copy itself, and propagate to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd.

Accepting all of this, it is possible to understand Humanity not as an abstracted collection of billions of separate individuals, but as a single, unique happening of organism/environment that can, given certain factors, act in unison.

The most important factor is, of course, each self knowing and feeling that they are a part of this greater self, which is not something that can be forced, but something, like creation itself, that happens spontaneously.

One can edit and correct and obsess over the minutiae of an artistic object, but inspiration strikes, it is not conjured - it is never willed into being, it is rather being itself which then acts on our will.

Those advocating for either a progressive or conservative approach to policy can not compromise, not because the facts are in disagreement (although that is true), but because what comes before the facts is not in agreement - that is, the way the world is structured and ordered, or The Way The World Is, which always itself acts as the background for an ideology rather than the reverse.

The idiom 'seeing is believing' is actually totally backwards - the truth is that believing is seeing.

So, if memes are the true catalyst of human action and social change, can we then "meme ourselves" into a better reality? Can we, together, engineer, build, or construct a meme to spread and transform our shared, collective (un)conscious and the ideas that follow about not only what is true, but what is possible?

I believe so, and I think a good place to start is to understand the illusory and mutable nature of money and wealth, and their direct relationship to power and authority and the distribution of these things. Money is a real 'thing' that performs a necessary function, but our shared understanding of it holds real power over it, and in this way we can collectively shape and alter that power it commands over our lives.

We can't function without money, but we absolutely can function with a novel way of distributing it so as to lessen the total amount of suffering directly related to poverty and the inability to provide materially for oneself.

Does Jeff Bezos really have billions of actual, tangible currency, or is his currency really in the form of power and influence as represented by money?

Is the standard work week from Monday to Friday, or Monday to Thursday?

Whatever the answer, is it because this is simply The Way the World Is, or is The Way the World Is directly shaped by our collective ideas about it?

The state-sanctioned brutalization and modern lynchings of black men at the hands of “Law Enforcement” in the U.S. is itself a memetic pattern - “Law Enforcement” tactics are memetic, including their violent response to protest, organization, and the legitimate outpouring of anger directed at the inhumanity of the institutions of "Justice". The video of George Floyd's horrific and senseless murder was spread memetically, and so too were the calls for protest all across not only the U.S., but the entire world.

A memetic call for collective struggle has been sounded, and heard by the entire planet - now is the time to take this opportunity to understand ourselves as one, to tear down and rebuild the arbitrary social patterns of power and control that rule all of our lives.

The 'legitimized' armed wings of state, police and military personnel, should stand with the people, not as their opposition - stand with them in demanding justice and equality for ALL PEOPLE and the dismantling of a system which treats all conscious beings as resources, and like its treatment of every resource, exhausts it to the point of annihilation.

A single officer taking a principled stand, to cross the illusory barrier of us/other could be the crumbled brick that begins the collapse of the whole structure. All it will take is one person of good conscience to do something difficult, but something good, to memetically begin a shift towards a better, more equal society.

If you can't bring yourself to do that, you just may be an enemy of the people.

See how compelling language can be? Nested within every word is paragraphs of subtext, assumption, and implication.

Enemies of the people are just that - enemies to a free and emancipated existence.

To preserve life violence may sometimes be the only option, but violence can be avoided memetically - you cannot put a bullet in a concept, and it’s just as futile to do the same to those who espouse, exemplify, or believe it, not to mention a wee bit of a moral grey area. Violence can be lessened with the correct memetic foundation that underpins our conception of 'self', 'other', and 'world', and the reciprocal nature of those things - violence is given power by distinction and separation, but that power can be neutered by understanding that not only are you yourself, you are every other self, too.

The global economic and social reaction to the Coronavirus is proof of this shared power our collective thoughts have over the world we inhabit. Of course we cannot simply will it out of existence through a shared psychic exercise, but we can decrease the destructive potential through the memetic spread of ideas like social distancing.

It has also laid bare that the distinctions and lines in the sand we use to divide and categorize are mostly illusory - the global community, as the aggregate of every other community, group, faction, and individual, is where we must focus our collective efforts. There is no nation but Earth, and to shift our reality in the direction we want, it will take collective effort.

The emancipation of all humanity must happen together because of the memetic nature of change and our connected world. There is no freedom until we are all free.

Somebody called the police because of a suspected counterfeit $20 and here we are.

Imagine what can be accomplished together, by simply altering our beliefs about what is inherent and immutable, and what is merely a byproduct of antiquated memetic artifacts and the resulting methods of ordering and structuring society?

We can meme ourselves better.

Black Lives Matter.

White supremacy does not.

Land matters.

Landlords do not.

People matter.

Profits do not.

Billions matter.

Billionaires do not.

These things are only true or false based on our collective ideas about what is right and what is valuable.

Justice should not be owned by anyone, it is owed to everyone.

Humanity is an organism - a unified field of conscious relationship and pattern from micro to macro, comprised of each one of us.

Knowing what we are is the first step to becoming what we can be.

We can meme ourselves into a better tomorrow, together.

submitted by /u/thegreatself [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/hf0k6k/indepth_the_internet_and_memes_are_proof_that/

[deathghost8]

Memes are Channeling --Parable is a meme -- humanity organism - memes, money, hope

VIA thegreatself on Alan Watts community I know this sounds asinine but just give me a few paragraphs to get some momentum. You can't exist in 2020 and not intuitively just know what a meme is. Even those that exist totally cut-off from the online sphere would get the picture after a few examples. Most typically we think of image macros like this https://imgur.com/Sc1nBL7 , or this https://imgur.com/yW2QUqt , but these are just a couple of modern, digital memes and don't begin to scratch the surface of just exactly what a meme is, and why the answer to that might be really fucking important. For example, a picture doesn't need any text to be a meme - similarly, a picture can be only text and still be a meme. A phrase can be a meme, or even a single word. A sound. Symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S#/media/File:%22Cool_S%22.svg . The structure of the building you're in and the design of the device you're reading this from are memetic artifacts. Musical subgenres, fashion and style trends, social patterns and institutions including family, marriage, property, law, crime, and punishment. Even complex ideologies - religious, political, and philosophical - are essentially very nuanced and enduring memes that span hundreds and thousands of years. It's difficult to think of anything that is not a direct result of memetic repetition, as this is the way in which all information, beliefs, and ideas are shared and become socially entrenched - this method of transmission is directly related to, and reveals something specific about the origins of power, authority, control, and choice, and how we relate to those concepts and ourselves. Human behaviour and response is memetic - a product of pattern, repetition, and context rather than a series of conscious “decisions” we make at every moment - this is not to suggest we are totally bound and determined by fate, but only that we are bound and determined to act only in accordance with our own character - we are not something responsible for our decisions, we are our decisions, and for that we bear responsibility. Can you imagine Trump acting like anything else besides a caricature of pure petulance? That’s his role - his constitution. I think the belief that he, or you, or I, "make decisions" is backwards - partly a product of the language we use to speak about ourselves and the world, and partly just our basic instincts - it's plainly obvious that I am aware and alive and can consider many possibilities so it only seems to follow that I must exert some influence over my choices. To me, there is little distinction between Me and My Choices - I am those choices, not a separate entity that chooses - that stands separate, considers, and then finally pulls the equivalent lever corresponding with the [] 'choice' I’ve made. [] Those final three words are superfluous - to me they all reference a single thing - a localized happening from my specific perspective. This idea is naturally unpalatable as it would seem to not only absolve one of all responsibility for wrongdoing, but also rob one of their ownership over both their good actions, and artistic creations. I think this is simply a knee jerk reaction to protect the ego's sense of itself as something distinct and in control, as to accept the opposite comes with a great sense of powerlessness. // Responsibility is not something we take - responsible is what we are. // Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like the imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of change. This is why great orators have always possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single, unified force of nature. I don't believe individual human action is ever the true catalyst to change - I think it is human action predicated on and driven specifically by the memetic concepts we have at our disposal - most importantly, [] "What is good, right, valuable, and true?" []. Language is itself inherently biased, limiting and divisive - [] Black Lives Matter [] means absolutely nothing until it is interpreted, and language is always loaded with judgments. As much as it is the primary way we communicate, ironically it just as often obfuscates and confuses because the kind of language we have available to us directly determines how we understand and conceptualize the world (and ourselves). It is not a matter of merely being Peterson-ianly "precise" in our speech, because precision is meaningless if the principles that precede it are incompatible. How many proponents of any ideology have /// actually /// read and engaged with its foundational and supporting texts? Probably very few. How many have absorbed bits and pieces through their specific context - language, culture, family, friends, media, and memes? Probably almost everybody. These repetitions of pattern connect us to something far greater than any single one of us - our collective human ideas about value, function, purpose, and their relation with each other - memes are a portal to the sum total of all human knowledge, experience, and feeling - memes are threads sewn into the fabric of the tapestry of reality, connecting us to the past, present, future, each other, and something totally separate - something unspeakable that yet demands to be spoken of. You may have felt it when engaged in something everyday and ordinary, yet struck as if for the very first time by the majesty and totality of all there is - all experience happening right now, billions of distinct and separate simultaneous happenings, disconnected and separated only by virtue of the limitations of their own collective conceptions of what is real, what is true, and what is possible. This universal need to communicate and share - to be heard - is intimately linked to creative and artistic expression. Memes are innately communal and creative - they are meant to translate a feeling or thought into a shareable format that can be used, related to, and understood, and community and creativity have a direct and intimate connection to both art and play, two characteristics central to the human experience. Art is itself its own distinct form of language - a language that transmits ideas and feeling only through its interaction with another. Art is our way of speaking telepathically - a way to contain and convey something enormous and infinite bound in the confines of an object. Memes and artistic expression both reflect something crucial and universal in the spark of our human spirit - both are inherently creative and communal - they represent the human need to share, something intimately linked with community and altruism. Art can of course be done selfishly, but there is no artistic expression at all without the memetic patterns that allow that expression and an audience to engage with and be receptive to the artist's message. Memes are thus quite a bit more significant than just funny and relatable pictures we share - what a meme is has direct implications regarding what we are, and our current shared cultural conception of them is simplistic and, as a result, limiting. If we don’t fully grasp what a meme is, we lack the capacity to both comprehend their true power, and the ability to wield that power to our own collective benefit. Instead, we persist in an ordering of society that enriches only a small handful that have fallen to the top through nothing other than circumstance and who insist this must be the natural ordering of the world simply because it is the current ordering of it. Can we really trust those who wield inordinate amounts of power to fairly consider how it might be meted out differently? Is the fate of society directly tied to the fate of the billionaire class, or to the current institutions of policing and governance? From where is their authority and power actually derived? The primary source is our shared belief that these institutions are legitimate and just. The secondary source is their ability and willingness to inflict violence on us if we do not accept the first source. Violence is of course the most powerful and persuasive avenue of acquiring and maintaining power - both literal violent acts, and indirect violence inflicted and facilitated by a system of organization that regards the principle of one person's right to hoard obscene amounts of wealth as a higher and more just one than providing the material necessities of life for all people. That is the basic moral principle that serves as the keystone of the structure of our society as it is currently ordered. Do we really believe those with obscene means deserve it? What about those with such means that they could lose a thousand yearly salaries in a single day and not have that impact their quality of life in the slightest? The Divine Right of Kings still rules, although now it's simply the Divine Right of the Wealthy. We are meant to believe this is just [] The Way the World Is? [] I find that idea just as intolerable and narrow-minded as those that believe it. Society bears little proof of functioning properly anywhere - properly as in for the common good of all people. If we instead understand "properly" as to the obscene and perverted benefit of a small few at the expense of everybody else, then it is functioning tremendously properly. Individualism is too often championed by those who don't understand the distinction between it and selfishness, and this crucial error acts as the basic foundation for an entire wing of political and philosophical thought which insists might makes right, and "value" is directly related to money and money alone, where everything can be spoken about in terms of it's worth in terms of the US $ - one of many currencies that can, in an instant, become as good as worthless due to nothing other than our shared confidence in it. Now I want to make some statements that are broad and general, but ones that I think are fairly common and subconscious. These are not meant to be statements of fact, merely word and concept associations to get us to see how we arrive at 'facts'. /// The relationship between progressivism and conservatism is like the relationship between masculine and feminine, which itself is like the relationship between individual and community. /// Consider this disharmony between two opposing (or complementary) principles as essentially the basis of all philosophical (and thus political) thought. Also consider opposing principles as really a single thing as opposites always exist only in relation to each other. This sounds a lot like some meaningless new-age woo, but I think many people make these associations subconsciously anyway, even though we can offer legitimate arguments against them. Just conjure up some typically conservative imagery and symbols in your head - what kind of qualities are emphasized? What is deemed valuable, good, and of worth? What foundations precede these symbols? [][] The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and the smartphone was a pivotal evolutionary shift in human history, comparable to our discoveries of fire, agriculture, steel, and the combustion engine - all of which are only useful through memetic transmission. [][] The Internet and our constantly connected culture has allowed us to, in a sense, act as a very rudimentary hivemind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - [] it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody there is [] - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who perhaps don't even share the same primary language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of hours. [] You, me, and everybody else has a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for? [] Memes, of course. To crowdsource the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the centre of all action and belief. The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is not to be tutted at or wished away, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, spread, copy itself, and propagate to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd. Accepting all of this, it is possible to understand Humanity not as an abstracted collection of billions of separate individuals, but as a single, unique happening of organism/environment that can, given certain factors, act in unison. The most important factor is, of course, each self knowing and feeling that they are a part of this greater self, which is not something that can be forced, but something, like creation itself, that happens spontaneously. One can edit and correct and obsess over the minutiae of an artistic object, but inspiration strikes, it is not conjured - it is never willed into being, it is rather being itself which then acts on our will. Those advocating for either a progressive or conservative approach to policy can not compromise, not because the facts are in disagreement (although that is true), but because what comes before the facts is not in agreement - that is, the way the world is structured and ordered, or The Way The World Is, which always itself acts as the background for an ideology rather than the reverse. The idiom /// 'seeing is believing' /// is actually totally backwards - the truth is that [][] believing is seeing. [][] So, if memes are the true catalyst of human action and social change, can we then "meme ourselves" into a better reality? Can we, together, engineer, build, or construct a meme to spread and transform our shared, collective (un)conscious and the ideas that follow about not only what is true, but // what is possible? // I believe so, and I think a good place to start is to understand the [] illusory and mutable nature of money and wealth, and their direct relationship to power and authority and the distribution of these things. [] Money is a real 'thing' that performs a necessary function, but our shared understanding of it holds real power over it, and in this way we can collectively shape and alter that power it commands over our lives. We can't function without money, but we absolutely can function with a novel way of distributing it so as to lessen the total amount of suffering directly related to poverty and the inability to provide materially for oneself. [][] Does Jeff Bezos really have billions of actual, tangible currency, or is his currency really in the form of power and influence as represented by money? [][] Is the standard work week from Monday to Friday, or Monday to Thursday? Whatever the answer, is it because this is simply The Way the World Is, or is The Way the World Is directly shaped by our collective ideas about it? The state-sanctioned brutalization and modern lynchings of black men at the hands of “Law Enforcement” in the U.S. is itself a memetic pattern - “Law Enforcement” tactics are memetic, including their violent response to protest, organization, and the legitimate outpouring of anger directed at the inhumanity of the institutions of "Justice". The video of George Floyd's horrific and senseless murder was spread memetically, and so too were the calls for protest all across not only the U.S., but the entire world. A memetic call for collective struggle has been sounded, and heard by the entire planet - now is the time to take this opportunity to understand ourselves as one, to tear down and rebuild the arbitrary social patterns of power and control that rule all of our lives. The 'legitimized' armed wings of state, police and military personnel, should stand with the people, not as their opposition - stand with them in demanding justice and equality for ALL PEOPLE and the dismantling of a system which treats all conscious beings as resources, and like its treatment of every resource, exhausts it to the point of annihilation. [][] A single officer taking a principled stand, to cross the illusory barrier of us/other could be the crumbled brick that begins the collapse of the whole structure. All it will take is one person of good conscience to do something difficult, but something good, to memetically begin a shift towards a better, more equal society. [][] If you can't bring yourself to do that, you just may be an enemy of the people. See how compelling language can be? Nested within every word is paragraphs of subtext, assumption, and implication. Enemies of the people are just that - enemies to a free and emancipated existence. To preserve life, violence may sometimes be the only option. Violence can be avoided memetically - you cannot put a bullet in a concept, and it’s just as futile to do the same to those who espouse, exemplify, or believe it, not to mention a wee bit of a moral grey area. Violence can be lessened with the correct memetic foundation that underpins our conception of 'self', 'other', and 'world', and the reciprocal nature of those things - violence is given power by distinction and separation, but that power can be neutered by understanding that not only are you yourself, you are every other self, too. The global economic and social reaction to the Coronavirus is proof of this shared power our collective thoughts have over the world we inhabit. Of course we cannot simply will it out of existence through a shared psychic exercise, but we can decrease the destructive potential through the memetic spread of ideas like social distancing. It has also laid bare that the distinctions and lines in the sand we use to divide and categorize are mostly illusory - the global community, as the aggregate of every other community, group, faction, and individual, is where we must focus our collective efforts. There is no nation but Earth, and to shift our reality in the direction we want, it will take collective effort. The emancipation of all humanity must happen together because of the memetic nature of change and our connected world. There is no freedom until we are all free. Somebody called the police because of a suspected counterfeit $20 and here we are. Imagine what can be accomplished together, by simply altering our beliefs about what is inherent and immutable, and what is merely a byproduct of antiquated memetic artifacts and the resulting methods of ordering and structuring society? [][] We can meme ourselves better. [][] Black Lives Matter. White supremacy does not. Land matters. Landlords do not. People matter. Profits do not. Billions matter. Billionaires do not. Collective ownership over the instruments of profit, production, and class stratification is OUR right. Food is a right. Water is a right. Shelter is a right. Healthcare is a right. Education is a right. Freedom of expression is a right - this includes the right to quell and dismantle the violent rhetoric that enables violent expression. These things are only true or false based on our collective ideas about what is right and what is valuable. Justice should not be owned by anyone, it is owed to everyone. Humanity is an organism - a unified field of conscious relationship and pattern from micro to macro, comprised of each one of us. Knowing what we are is the first step to becoming what we can be. [][] We can meme ourselves into a better tomorrow, together. [][]