I woke up before the sun rose on that particular saturday morning, and slowly made my way from my relative’s house at Malta campsite , towards the rocky coastline with my friend Kevin. When I reached the end of the cliffs I found somewhere not covered with sharp rocks and took the best seat in the house for the sunrise.
To beat the cold sea breeze I pulled up my jacket collar, sitting patiently waiting. my phone was long dead by now, so to kill time i lit up a cigarette. i must have been two puffs into that beautiful cigarette when I witnessed the sun peeking at me, from below the horizon bringing with it a strange sense of warmth inside of myself.
I thought in that moment about true raw beauty and how a personification of it lay right in front of me. It was as though the sun was floating over the horizon. Watching the sun slowly rise and light up Malta was truly mesmarising that morning.
In that moment I was taken back to an 8:00AM philosophy lecture I had the day before where we were looking at Plato’s allegory of the cave and his idea of forms. What stuck with me was that he imagined our physical world is a set of imperfect changing forms which are but imitations of their orignal forms. I imagined the eternal Dao which Lao Tzu talked about in the Dao De Jing . reading Aristotle’s take on the golden mean in class ,drawing parallels with daoism I tried to imagine the perfect form. my mind jumped from Aristotle and Daoism to the dankest of the dank meme. I was trying to gauge whether the rising sun was true, in that moment with the sea slapping the rocks below me, the wind blowing past me, i wanted to know in that moment was i truly experiencing the sun rising; was my perception of the sun sound or was it just a shadow on the wall in relation to Plato’s allegory of the cave ?
The word meme (Richard Dawkings, The Selfish gene, 1976) traces it’s etymology back to the greek word mimesis. Memes can be found everywhere and internet memes which are very popular culture are essentially as Dawkins talks about items of cultural transmission which remain alive as long as we remember and repeat them.Sperbers critique on Dawkinson is also noteworthy as he says we do not copy most cultural ideas faithfully and that we are reconstucting ideas rather than replicating it and that it draws upon our cognitive faculties to transmit itself similar to a contagion.For Sperber a meme is “A pattern that minds repeatedly recreate because something about it fits human cognition.”it is crazy to comtemplate on memes, we keep meme’s alive by remembering and repeating them. But then all these question beg the more important question: the question whether there exists a form, a perfect golden meme, the orignal idea, the idea so entirely human we can call the “Golden meme” an idea which we have transmitted across time, a question maybe the search for meaning, love, god?We must probe into this to get closer to the ultimate goal of enlightenment.Then while reading Albert Camus’s la peste the word “elle-même” stuck with me .même in french when used by Camus talks about sameness, the banality in existence. We can see the concept of the “Golden meme” being represented in the work of aristotle in his book the “Nicomachean Memes” (This essay is literally a meme).
“Though Aristotle lists a number of memes, he sees them all as coming from the same source. An enlightened person is someone who is naturally disposed to exhibit all the memes, and a naturally memely disposition exhibits all the memes equally.”
“The golden meme represents a balance between trolling and intellect. The importance of the golden meme is that it re-affirms the balance needed in life.”
(Duke of Duck aka Aislin, June 18, 2015)
“6/18/2015 at 7:52 PM, Tommy Shmurda said:
The memes are as real as the air we breath. If we have common memes, with a quantifiable scale of meme quality, then should there not be one theoretical apex of memes? Some… perfect meme?Else, all memes would be equal in your eyes, would they not?
By denying the Golden Meme, you deny the existence of varying qualities of meme.”
I believe there exists a meme with an absolute nature, something truly elegent , graceful and maybe even borderline divine. It is our duty as rational being to seek out the dankest of dank meme.
a meme is reposted.
The Golden meme inevitable. (Avik,2025)
But do the ends truly justify the memes?
(Peter Chivay, June 18, 2015)
Dan Sperber — An objection to the memetic approach to culture
(in Robert Aunger ed. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 163–173)
Nicomachean Memes – Aristotle
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