I can’t explain it any better than this.

In this new regular feature I’ll investigate some popular memes that I think need to be questioned or critically examined.

Today I’ll take a look at the Property Ladder meme. In the UK we are experiencing the beginning of a house price correction / crash, supposedly there one already underway in the US. Now the reasons and consequences of this are varied but I believe the Property Ladder meme has played some part in it, at least on the consumer side of things.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the term:

The property ladder is a term widely used in the United Kingdom to describe an individual or family’s lifetime progress from cheaper to more expensive housing. According to this metaphor, cheap houses for first-time buyers are at the bottom of the property ladder, and expensive houses are at the top. ‘Getting on to the property ladder’ is the process of buying one’s first house, in the hope of leaving it for progressively better houses as one’s salary rises.

The above paragraph explains the crux of the matter. These two words are just a metaphor for a reality. The metaphor isn’t necessarily an accurate description of what is really going on.

First of all ‘Property’ in this phrase implies that the average person signing a mortgage owns that house. But an investment is something that puts money into your wallet. Like a business you own or a stock that pays dividends. A house is a liability, it takes money out of your wallet.

Most people don’t own they house they think they do. The bank owns the house. When you take out a mortgage ( mortgage means ‘a pledge till death’ in French) you are taking out a loan with the bank to pay for the house. The bank owns the house, they’ve invested in it and it puts money into their wallet in the form of your mortgage payments.

The second part of the phrase is even more insidious. What else are ladders for other than climbing higher of course. See how all the associations you have with ladders are brought to your false idea of owning property. You are tricked into thinking that you own something and that it is a normal thing to try and get bigger and better property when you can.

So a couple of years ago someone came up with the term Property Ladder to describe what they were doing. It has a nice ring to it and seems to describe succinctly what people were doing and wanted to do, so it caught on. But here’s where the real memetic effect takes place. It started spreading and affecting peoples behaviour. All of a sudden everyone wanted to be a property investor, and hold a property portfolio. UK TV was flooded with programs about becoming property and buy to let investors.

This deluded idea that everyone could become a property millionaire overnight (and the availability of cheap credit to those that couldn’t really afford it) is causing a massive financial problem in quite a few countries. This isn’t an isolated problem, the credit crunch, commodities bubble and inflation are all related.

Now these issues have been going on for years, but as long as everyone thought they were benefiting no one really seemed to care. It’s incredible but I have friends that studied economics and business that just parroted the term ‘getting on the property ladder’ like mindless automatons, without thinking what it actually means. They just assumed that because everyone else was trying to get onto this property ladder then it must be a good thing to do right?

When the Matrix first came out in the cinemas some people enjoyed the philosophical questions and ideas of the film. Soon essays and books appeared discussing those concepts. It surprised me that so much of what was written focused on the, in my mind, relatively inconsequential questions; to what extent is what we experience ‘real’ and is there such a thing as free will. This is the material of introductory philosophy courses looking to introduce students to Plato and Descartes.

Now I accept that films have many layers of meaning and ways to interpret them, there is no right or wrong explanation. But I was surprised that most of the mainstream commentary seemed to miss one of the most obvious interpretations. The Matrix described is a metaphor for the consensus reality that we humans live in. A reality consisting of social conventions, the language that we use to describe the world and our experience, our beliefs and emotions. All these things filter what is out there in the world before we experience it subjectively. It’s pretty obvious from the following dialogue:

Morpheus : The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

The advertisements on TV attempt to create associations between certain emotions and products. ‘Buy X to feel Y’ or ‘You can not be happy until you own X’. The world religions have instilled certain kinds of morality which have now been pervasive in our culture for so long that they are taken as given. Politicians keep telling us we live in democracies when it’s hard to reconcile that with what we experience day to day.

It’s scary once you realise how so much we take for granted in life is completely arbitrary and conventional. The great thing is, once you know it’s all a game you can start changing the rules.

The first part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders explains how an airline is looking to start a new branch of it’s business to compete against other low-fair airlines.

They show how they have built up a profile of their ideal customer in order to get an idea of how to best market their airline. They probably built up this profile using market research data and information about spending habits from supermarkets, shops and banks.

As one of the commentators points out, it seems that a lot of advertising is becoming more and more focused on grabbing our attention in any conceivable way just to get through the noise of all the other advertising out there. I’m sure we all remember some really interesting, shocking or funny ads, but can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling. Marketers will say that it’s more about gaining repeated exposure with consumers, but that’s something that’s hard to measure.

Contrast that kind of advertising with traditional sales letters, where you can measure the success rate of different kinds of copy and adjust it to get the best results.

PBS has a really good 90 minute documentary on their site about how advertisers, marketers, think tanks and politicians are using the latest ideas in psychology and memetics to persuade you to buy their products or vote for their political party.

Frontline Persuaders

I’ll write an analysis of some of the concepts and ideas presented in the documentary at some point.

I remember being told about the Knowledge Economy in school and that the resources for this economy consist of Data, Knowledge and Information (which I’ll call ‘content’ from now on).

• Data consists of raw symbols that are devoid of meaning.
• Information is what you get when you start to give meaning to the data and the relationships between them.
• Knowledge is the collection of information intended to be useful for a specific purpose.

I realised that there is probably at least another level on top of this and decided to call it wisdom. This is where you have data, information and knowledge and you know what do with it in order to achieve your goal. Wisdom is the ability to interpret content in original ways and separate the useful stuff from the rest. It also allows for someone to question the paradigm in which the content was created and decide whether or not these serve the intended purpose. You can then change the paradigm or look to other paradigms for different perspectives.Sadly for me it turns out I’m not the first one to come up with this idea. A quick search revealed:

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

and

Knowledge economy becomes global

Anyway, the high quality problem we’ve created for ourselves is information overload. Too much data, information and knowledge that we are having trouble sifting through.

I think this is where wisdom comes in. It filters what’s useful from what isn’t and presents us with the right course of action to take with the content we have at our disposal. In the business world this role has been filled by consultants whom you pay for advice on a course of action.

Thanks to the internet we have access to consultants and experts on every conceivable subject and we can get a lot of information for free. This is the domain of the blogger who dispenses advice and expertise on their niche subject. The other example of wisdom in action on the internet is the rise of social bookmarking and new aggregation sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. This is the wisdom of crowds in action, bringing to surface the content it’s users think others will benefit from.

Now I know there are flaws with both of these examples. How do you know that the self-proclaimed expert really is what they say they are? And don’t social bookmarking sites tend to promote content that appeals to the lowest common denominator? Valid concerns of course, but nothing solutions can’t be found for. And at the very least people tend to vote with their feet. If one person or site doesn’t seem to have the necessary wisdom to help users then they’ll find someone or somewhere that does.

I think the Wisdom Economy consists of people adding value to content with their wisdom and being paid for it by clients wanting to save time and money. This will happen either directly through fees or indirectly through advertising.

The term memetic engineering was developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol and Gibran Burchett who were researching and observing the behaviour of humans after they were exposed to to certain memes. Memetic engineering is the analysis of an individual or individual’s behavior, the selection of specific memes and the distribution or propagation of those memes with the intent of altering the behavior of others.

Although it’s difficult to predict which memes will take off, it’s certainly possible to follow guidelines and rules to craft your message so that it is as ’sticky’ and ‘contagious’ as it can possibly be.

A good example of memetic engineering is described in this article: Meme, Counter-meme. It describes how Mike Godwin created a maxim in order to counter unproductive discussions on internet forums.

I sometimes wonder about what led me to my current interests. A lot of it has to do with all the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. Sometimes when I’m watching a film like Star Wars I’ll catch a particular scene that must have been one of many little memes that were planted in my mind when I first saw them.

So where did George Lucas get the memes he put in his films? He was inspired by the author Joseph Campbell who wrote a book called the Hero With A Thousand Faces which is about the arch-typical heroes journey. Campbell incorporated amongst other things some of the ideas of Carl Jung who of course had studied Buddhism and Taoism.

So when Yoda starts talking about being a luminous part of the Force and how there is no difference between himself the rock and the X-wing he is levitating, you could say that he’s another link in a chain that goes back thousands of years (at least). Whatever other value these ideas have, we can at least note how sticky they are.

Do you remember the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confuses the Storm Troopers by waving his hands and saying: ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’? Well that’s a pattern interrupt. The hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used pattern interrupts to temporarily confuse clients so that they would be momentarily more open to suggestion.

Here’s an explanation of how Derren Brown uses his Force powers for evil and entertainment.

Some people have noted the similarity between the Jedi in Star Wars and the Bene Gesserit in Dune, by Frank Herbert. The Bene Gesserit are a group that posses a skill called ‘The Voice’, which is a particular way of speaking that allows them to strongly influence and sometimes control other people. One of the themes in Dune is how language influences thought and this was inspired by Alfred Korzybski who wrote General Semantics and Science and Sanity, books that were read by Bandler and Grinder, the developers of NLP.