Memes and ideas as a symbiotic parasite

Why are people willing to die for an idea? To charge into bullets for a flag, a symbol, a word? Why would people kill themselves for a promise? It doesn't make sense from an evolutionary or genetic point of view. There is no genetic benefit to dying for an idea, compared to the sacrifices one would make for siblings or children.

Susan Blackmore explains in her TED presentation how memes can evolve much like genetic organisms. Individual memes are fragments, but a collection of them can exhibit life-like behavior. Let's look at how these memetic parasites coexist with their hosts, the human mind. Most religions have tenets against murder (thou shalt not kill) and against suicide. That is a good example; it is a basic unit of idea; it specifies a behavioral trait; it is indivisible, easily identifiable and embedded in many different sources. In symbiosis, it is beneficial to have more minds for the memes to replicate in. An idea that has more believers is more powerful.

When threatened, though, these mind-parasites have no qualms about sacrificing the hosts. Why didn't Russia surrender to Germany in WW2? Denmark surrendered and bore almost no casualty. Compare the fates of Paris and Stalingrad. The extraordinary power of nationalism and the propaganda machine that pushed that idea compelled millions to sacrifice themselves in the struggle between two abstractions. Many people would die, or kill, without ever truly understanding what they are doing it for, without agreeing on what the Motherland is, or Freedom, or God's will; this is the power and the danger of memes.

I am oversimplifying things, of course, and there were many more factors and causes in historical analysis. But that doesn't diminish the value of this perspective. Of course ideas originate from people. Memes are born from minds. But once they get out, they no longer belong to any one person. Democracy may have originated in Athens, but it is not owned or controlled by Athenians. Ideas and concepts take life, replicating and preserving themselves through the centuries. The sooner we can understand what they work, what the mechanics are, the better we will be able to determine our own fate as a species, and not let ourselves be driven by forces beyond our control.