Earlier this week I have written about some of the moral and ethic problems which come from following a purely ideal point of view (the Melian Dialogue, and Tolstoy’s run…), I have presented some information on the idea of memes, and for today we can look over what might be an ‘unconscious meme’. You may have to bear with me, in that I am not certain what a conscious meme is….
Michael Prell has a book which came out lately called Underdogma. His thesis is that we all, in a seemingly unconscious manner, always root for the underdog; we always hope that the hero wins against all odds, and that this will result in some happy ending…
This is certainly a nice sounding idea… and if you look at the growth of the modern novel (at least since the late 18th century) you will see this over and over again. His point (Mr. Prell’s) is that this directly relates to many commonly held (potentially irrational) feelings out there in the rest of our culture. Such feelings as: distrust and actual hatred directed towards large organizations, corporations, governments, management (versus labor), and owners (versus players); this is a basis for most of the modern conspiracy theories out there (at least the emotional basis for needing to come up with them…).
This week I have been posting a couple interesting and related ideas…the notion that large groups can be led by idealist autocrats, that idealism can sometimes be hard to see, and that many ideas, feelings, and perspectives can flourish and move quickly across a society. The Underdogma premise is that this sort of meme may be a means to see that there is indeed a swamp of unreported, unconsciously motivated feelings and beliefs under most of what we consider to be rational common sense… The idea that we feel closer to the underdog is only one of these tropes.
Underdogma
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/12/underdogma.html
David versus Goliath, the American Revolutionaries, the "Little Engine That Could," Team USA’s "Miracle on Ice," the Star Wars Rebel Alliance, Rocky Balboa, the Jamaican bobsled team and the meek inheriting the earth
Everyone, it seems, loves an underdog.
"Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex."
– Mikhail Gorbachev, July 12, 2006
