losing or winning The Game

the_alchemist posted about The Game, though she wasn't the first person on my friend's list who's ever done so. For those who don't want to click to read about it, here's the rules of The Game:

1. Knowledge of The Game is the only thing required to play it.
2. Thinking of The Game causes a player to lose.
3. A losing player must announce the loss.

This is a classic meme!

The word meme was coined by evolutionary biologist (and professional atheist) Richard Dawkins, as part of a thought experiment to suggest that "selfish replicators" like genes were not confined to the realm of biochemistry... that perhaps there are many sorts of selfish replicators in existence, propagating throughout various media and competing against one another for survival.

The meme theory is rooted in the suggestion (or observation) that humans are very good at mimicing, and that the evolutionary source of our intelligence is our ability to mimic sounds and meanings we see displayed by other humans. Large portions of our brains are "pre-programmed" to analyze movements and sounds made by other people with the goal of figuring out how to replicate them, and this is a skill which we have to a degree greater than any other known animal.

Humans' ability to mimic one another made it possible for memes to exist. And we are happy to replicate memes because many of them have made our lives so much easier that the use of memes conferred an evolutionary advantage. At some point roughly 1-2 million years ago, proponents of memetic theory argue, memes gave so much of an advantage that they began to drive our evolution.

So, if memes are selfish replicators, then the success of a meme can be judged by how willing people are to repeat it and pass it along. Catchy tunes do better than complex, un-catchy ones. Funny jokes do better than unfunny ones.

Not all memes are passed on because we enjoy them; some of them invoke in us a sense of obligation to repeat them via some sort of emotional manipulation. A long time ago i wrote about inauthentic religion as exactly this sort of meme.

The Game is another such meme, boiled down to its essentials. The text of it labels you as an obligatory "player" simply because you've heard about The Game. The Game says, You've heard about The Game now, so you are now a player! You are therefore obligated to speak out when you "lose" the game, thereby passing on the meme to others. It also plays on the desire to be "cool," because The Game is self-referential, and self-referential stuff is almost always cool.

But in the sake of human freedom i hope you realize:

You are not obligated to play The Game!

That statement applies in the larger sense, too. I recommend you give yourself permission to refuse to pass on any emotionally manipulative meme. Do not feel guilty about throwing chain letters in the garbage, or refusing to take part in multi-level marketing schemes, or deleting rather than forwarding chain email spam. Do not feel guilty about refusing to proselytize for an inauthentic religion, or pass on any other sort of meme that implicitly or explicitly tends to suppress human free will.