Philosophers in general have a bad rap nowadays. I cannot say that a lot of them don't deserve it. I have met many, and to be honest - they're a bit of a disappointment in most cases. They tend to be precious, callous careerists who really enjoy - far more than any adults with alleged sensibilities should - what psychologists call relational aggression. It's worth saying a little about this since it is related to both the philosophy of religion and to memetic theory (as in Richard Dawkins' unusual but informed take on what is essentially evolutionary psychology and what cognitive scientists and psychologists call the massive modularity theory.)
Relational aggression, also known as social aggression, involves sneaky, secretive social bullying. The victim is targeted for attack by one or relational aggressive agents who use rumours, Chinese whispers (the more accidental variation the better!), and social networks to defame, undermine, slander, and generally demean the victim. This kind of clandestine defamation and character assassination is so effective because most people are not very discerning in their reception and handling of such misinformation.
A common reason for this is the failure to detect bad agents like sociopaths and psychopaths who hide all, or else most, of their actions from the victim. If the average person has deemed the source of the misinformation marginally credible or trustworthy, then they easily become what some psychologists have called a 'flying monkey': a person used by the relational aggressive as a willing – but often unwitting - tool to cause the victim harm (in reference to the harassing flying monkeys of the witch character in The Wizard of Oz).
Social aggressive agents are usually the kind of personality to rely upon this affability and manipulability of others. (As we will see in a moment - this is something that megacults rely upon too.)
Often relational aggressives are sociopaths, but it is also a well known strategy of smarter psychopaths, who deploy it in more complex and subtle forms. It has been discovered in most age groups, but it is famously prevalent in teenage girls (not to imply that teenage girls' demographic have unusual distributions of psychopaths or sociopaths). The reason is thought to be – roughly – that boys will get in a fight, while girls are socially more clever about dealing with their enemies - because who needs their hair pulled? Also because mimetic jealousy, for example, is a powerful psychological and social-psychological force. There are other theories, but evolutionary development of female psychology due to mate selection pressures and other social dynamics provides the main explanation.
Relational aggression is very prevalent in ‘polite’ societies of professionals. A lot of what passes as networking within such communities is what I call toxic networking. It is networking designed to undermine and damage the reputations of others, including competitors and those perceived as socially unlovely (or just uncompliant with the perpetrator’s beliefs), to get ahead, or else just due to pathological hatred of the victim or target. So – philosophers in universities nowadays certainly deserve some well-earned disdain. However, they’re not all bad (although to be frank – they’re mostly not great) and they’re one group that has been dealing with another even worse, and equally relationally aggressive group (or category of people by personality type, if you like) for a very long time. That group is religious zealots – or megacultists.
Relational aggression (also called social aggression) very much relies upon the transmission of memetic narratives about a person. It can thus be ‘baked in’ to, or facilitated and enabled, by social systems and institutions and their narratives and texts. It can become a pre-programmed and purposed social practice and imperative, critical to the function and survivability of certain groups. For example – if you’re an unbeliever living in a religious theocracy then the prevailing theocratic megacult has relational aggression, exclusion, and isolation (and a good dose of Jürgen Habermas’ ‘othering’) against you already encoded into its transmissible (and largely all-pervading) memetic narratives. The contemporary and trendy term in philosophical circles is ‘conceptual engineering’.
Women in Iran opposed to the enforced wearing of hijab are dealing with this exact kind of pre-encoded, memetic social aggression. It is just like there is a nasty rumour about them already 'out there' in circulation. The social aggressives are the Islamic megacult clerics that hide behind everything from numbers, to the crowd, to religious tolerance, to cultural legitimisation from tradition and prevailing memetic texts. Intrinsically socially-aggressive memetic narratives are perhaps the most powerful force in history. The Japanese cult of the emperor that arose before WW2, and the fast-fabricated religious mythology of the German Nazi Party are famous examples. Such narratives have always been weaponised.
One of the most recognisable social divides and conflicts in the society of the ancient Greeks was between materialist philosophers – whose emphasis was on human effort and knowledge - and pietist religionists, who recommended deferring for life guidance to a bunch of imaginary stuff. Certainly Socrates and Hypatia were familiar with the latter type of people! (Hypatia was slain by them, and not in a nice manner.) Lately philosophers have been shot at fairly comprehensively by both religionists (staying with their form) and scientistic (neo-neo-positivist) scientists (The logical positivists were a movement of scientist-philosophers from the mid 20th century who sought to eliminate appeals to non-scientific, a-priori metaphysics, favouring instead physical science de rigueur.) These are two groups whose memetic narratives are often seen, at best, as what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called 'non-overlapping magisteria': separate and incompatible in principle, if not downright mutually hostile.
The conflict between philosophy – the human search for knowledge and wisdom – and religion is longstanding. It persisted from the time of the Ancient Greeks until anti-religionists became largely suppressed during The Dark Ages. This trend did not begin to reverse until The Renaissance and the rise of protestantism from the 15th century onwards. However, philosophical scepticism probably did not return again to its Ancient Greek standing until the time of the French enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. The socially aggressive (and also openly aggressive!) influence of megacult narratives has plagued much of human history.
Often theistic megacult (religious) texts will emphasise their disdain for human wisdom, referring to it as folly, or as fruitless striving. Just as often they just call it Satanic. During the enlightenment, philosophers mounted a long overdue attack on such megacults.
Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire (French enlightenment philosopher François-Marie Arouet) and David Hume (a British empiricist and British enlightenment philosopher) were frequently scathing of religion, superstition, and religious institutions. However, due to the social and political pressures of their time they were also notoriously inconsistent – or apparently inconsistent – in their views (One must keep in mind that during that era, scholars could not search their own corpus of written work using a computerised search tool on The Internet!) Sometimes enlightenment philosophers would refer to ‘true religion’ and decry only fanaticism (Voltaire) or ‘religious enthusiasm’ (Hume). In other cases they were less scathing, and even endorsed religious practices.
No one reasonably expects philosophers to be totally consistent and not change their views, but social and career pressures also had an influence on such historical figures. Voltaire would sometimes even write about the legitimacy of certain kinds of religion, and his certainty of the existence of a deity, using similar terms to those of his contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was more religionist – religious even - than most enlightenment philosophers, and believed in what he called ‘civil religion’, which he promoted as a necessary part of a functioning democracy in his famous work ‘The Social Contract’.
(It is also of historical note that David Hume thought Rousseau to be quite psychologically unstable. That being said, anti-monarchist Rousseau was bound to be a bit paranoid around Hume, who worked for the British Admiralty and The Crown at one point, even participating in a comical invasion of the French sea port of Lorient. The episode at Lorient is hard to pass over without some attention. The Admiralty had redirected a naval force organised for a different mission at the last moment. Due to failures in intelligence and tactics the British sailed home believing the town well fortified, when in fact the French had already prepared their surrender. Hume recorded in his journal that he had seen shooting and other actions, although he was there in the capacity of a secretary to the commanding officer and scribe, and as a non-combatant.)
Historical context matters in the case of the careers of these enlightenment philosophers. Voltaire and Hume were contemporaries, along with radical democratic, egalitarian playwright and philosopher Denis Diderot. Diderot was also famously more consistently scathing of megacults and their various fanaticisms and bigotries, but French society had more tolerance than that of most other nations for such intellectual adventurism. Nonetheless, even in the increasingly enlightened 18th century in France and England, it was difficult and dangerous to hold and espouse positions critical of megacult institutions.
Hume never secured any university tenure precisely because of opposition from British churchmen to his atheism. Diderot’s new encyclopedia – a work that took fifteen years of his life and for which he wrote at least six thousand articles - was hotly opposed by the Jesuits of the time, who used their publications and connections to attack the work as diabolical and anti-social. Voltaire was arrested and imprisoned in 1717 for his epic satirical poem, La Henriade, which attacked both the politics and religion of his day, causing a furor in the government. The printer of Voltaire’s famous and popular work Philosophical Letters was also imprisoned in the Bastille. The government ordered all copies of the work to be seized and burned.
Megacultists have a longstanding low tolerance for criticism of their deeply nasty and misatheistic memetic narratives. To bypass the use of florid and baroque language: at the end of the day they are grotesque social bullies.
However, not all apparent variation in the imperatives of enlightenment scholars can be simply ascribed to inconsistency due to compromise, or collapse in the face of overwhelming social pressures. Voltaire, for example, clearly thought carefully about strategies for limiting the influence of megacults and their narratives. In the absence of abolition (or, more correctly - induced extinction), which he realised was impossible at the time, Voltaire opted for the clever strategy of secularist syncretism and broad religious ecumenicalism and tolerance.
Voltaire’s idea was that megacults would keep each other in check, preventing dominance of one group and warding off the spectre of Dark Ages theocracy. This was an idea that could gain traction in France due to the enlightenment and because of support from certain elements of the elite and the common people.
Voltaire became famous for his endorsement of this idea that religious tolerance was a foil to both fanaticism and despotic theocracy. This powerful idea has survived well into the 21st century and has been enshrined in the cultural and political institutions of The United States and many European nations. Voltaire’s central conception is presented concisely in the most popular of his Philosophical Letters, titled On the Presbyterians:
“If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.”
There is little doubt that this strategy has been significantly effective in many first world nations in the 20th century. It is most obviously reflected, perhaps, in the social philosophy of American psychologist and philosopher William James: Jamesian pragmatism. In simple terms, James said one should believe what makes one feel happy, and thus works for one, as a life-guiding narrative.
However, there are significant costs involved in subscribing to such an approach. Large megacults still tend to gain a lot of influence, and they are particularly deft at influencing the kind of democratic political systems established in most Western nations. Moreover, it is often the biggest and ugliest memetic-narrative monster that prevails. There is very little in the way of quality control going on, and the marketplace of ideas hardly ensures it (The Middle Ages and Dark Ages lasted many generations, and many innocent lives were destroyed in those eras). Alexis De Tocqueville - a French scholarly commentator on early democratic experiments like those in France and the fledgling United States of America - is famous for coining the phrase ‘tyranny of the majority’. The idea is that basic populist and egalitarian forms of democracy (of the kind espoused by Denis Diderot) were very vulnerable to being undermined by a large majority of ignorant, uneducated, easily-manipulated idiots.
As distasteful as this idea might be to the democratically-minded and to Diderotian egalitarians, more recent history reveals that it was uncomfortably, and hauntingly, prescient. Megacults still powerfully influence our contemporary societies through the propagation of their memetic narratives: misinformation, pseudo-information (fictions and quasi-fictions) and disinformation presented as large-scale, relatively internally inconsistent grand narratives.
Such megacult institutions and their memetic narratives can – and frequently do – make a mockery of democratic institutions and systems. This is borne out by the fact that it is nearly impossible to be the President of the United States without publicly professing an essentially (clinically) delusional belief in a theological god: a magical, imaginary overlord-cum-over-friend. Donald Trump’s waving of Bibles is one of the more grotesque recent demonstrations of this sad reality.
This is one reason why I am so interested in the study of memetic narratives and their influence on the cognition and epistemic rationality of populations.
There are all kinds of philosophers nowadays, and most people are not aware of their existence, let alone possessed of a conception of what they do (I have covered this in the introduction to this post at http://sinorg.info ). It comes as a surprise to many that some of the best philosophers of religion are atheists. If one understands the historical and academic role and classification of analytic philosophy then this makes perfect sense, but most people are not familiar with either. No matter, it is not difficult to get the drift. Megacults, like human psychology, are something to be analysed and understood. In our era, the subject of the influence of memetic narratives – including those perpetuated and propagated by megacults and megacultist – is the focus of study of evolutionary and cognitive psychologists (in the form of both memetic theory and the massive modularity thesis), philosophers of religion, cognitive scientists (who study such topics as mental representations and cognitive information processing), psychologists of emotion, philosophers of information (yours truly), and philosophers of psychology.
I launched the Order of the Cockscomb in about 2013 with the intention of using common, accessible discursive and psychological tools for combatting megacults and their invidious, insipid, brain-rotting influence. The most readily available and effective approach is outright ridicule, fun, and sarcasm. Megacultists hate it because it works. (Similarly, or in a similar vein: one of the best and most effective forms of political criticism comes through the medium of comedy.)
The Order of the Cockscomb also provides an interesting case study (X-Phi and experimental-psychology-wise) into how memetic narratives work in social groups. For example, the prevailing memetic narratives in contemporary Western society are very much like the syncretising, ecumenical, quasi-secular narrative of Voltaire: the more megacult narratives vying for space in the collective social mind and marketplace, the better. To challenge that meta-narrative and its conceptual schemes is not for the faint of heart! (It is fair to say that proponents of the strategy think themselves superior, but it does not logically or necessarily follow that they're not just stoopid and over-confident, and just uncritically believe what their mom and dad told them.)
I am also interested in narrative memetics and the psychology of beliefs and emotions in general. I am specifically interested in how emotions are encoded into cognitive representations and what effect they have on epistemic content and epistemic rationality when combined with pseudo-informational megacult meme content. This is one of my serious research interests going forward.
That is what The Megacult Flaming Brigade is all about. One does not need trademarks and development of personal brands (copyright law usually has one covered anyway). Conceptual engineering relies upon more readily available tools: concepts, language, discourse, art, and information (among others). These are the same tools as were used by French and British enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume.
The webmeme-smiths of social media also have something important to teach us in this connexion. The seed of important (and unimportant!) ideas can be disseminated with ease using simple tools. The encoding of the memes only need be memorable. One way of being memorable is to be controversial, disestablishmentarian, and unabashed when prevailing institutions want one to be bashful, thus stirring the emotions of the information consumer.
The Order of the Cockscomb is about having fun while seeking to ensure that megacults do not survive the information age. It is also about investigating how conceptual engineering and memetic encoding affect group epistemic updating and social movements.
Megacults and their nasty (and delusion-ridden) memetic narratives are an anvil that has worn out many hammers, but I suspect strongly that the time has finally come to for them to pass from history with a loud whimper. I am not naïve, however. Social media and the information age are not, alone, enough. I suspect that transhumanism and the broad access to personal enlightenment that comes indirectly from scientific advances in medicine are also critical to the outcome.
