You are now one of THEM!

Resistance is FEWTILE!
By Joseph Walther

I have finally completed my labored research regarding Murphy’s Laws of Corporations. Meme Theory (pronounced MEAM) appears to be robust as it applies to corporations in general and as it applies to academic institutions in particular. Yes, we can now say with a reliable degree of certainty that a majority of academic administrators display the intellectual capacity and personality traits of amoebas. In the paragraphs that follow, I hope to show how significant the correlation is. Before jumping into this, however, I have to tell you about a neat experience I had this past week.

I had to visit a drug store. When I entered the door, I noticed a gathering of adults around a little six-year-old girl named Amy. As I attempted to walk around the group, I overheard one of the adults ask Amy how her Christmas Pageant went and whether it had been fun for her. Amy, it seemed, had a lot of fun and she was proud of the fact that she got to announce the arrival of the Three Wise Men bearing gifts for Jesus. “What gifts did the Wise Men bring Jesus, Amy?” asked one of the adults gathered around her. With a hint of impatient condescension but absolute conviction, Amy replied, “Gold, Common Sense, and Fur!”

Thankfully, no one in the group laughed at or attempted to correct the child. The woman who asked the question smiled and said that she’d love it if someone would give her those kinds of gifts, especially the Common Sense and Fur. Amy’s reply also points up; once again, that young children hear what seems to make sense to them. “Hail Mary full of grapes” still makes sense to me. Now, let’s get back to Murphy’s Laws of Corporations.

The mirror neuron is DNA’s psychological equivalent. It makes group behavior both remarkable and often hilarious to behold. Just as DNA’s impact on biology has been scientifically confirmed, the impact of mirrored neurons in explaining group behavior is every bit as measurable using the same scientific tenets of hypothesis testing. As the discovery of DNA revolutionized biology, the mirror neuron is an astonishingly accurate predictor of group behavior. If you’re inclined to do so, read about this in an article called Language within our grasp by G. Rizzolatti and M. A. Arbib, written for Trends in Neuroscience.

Simply put, however, the implication is that two brains can be slaved to each other. By merely watching, brain X’s learning transfers to brain Y instantaneously without any communication between them. Person A, merely watching Person B, can proceed to do the same thing. One person, by watching another person doing something, can do the same thing and even modify the method to improve on it. The two can mimic each other, continuously improving on the other’s method. Neither of the participants need to say a word. Together the two of them can solve problems or make the situation worse; proving that when mirror neurons are involved, two heads may or may not be better than one.

Richard Dawkins discovered Meme theory thirty years prior to mirror neurons. He explained the phenomenon in his book, The Selfish Gene. Again, you can read the book for the scientific details. Essentially, though, Meme Theory tells us that cultural units and learned characteristics, called ‘memes’ pass themselves down through the generations with the useful ones surviving and the useless ones disappearing.

Here is where I have to modify all of this based on my own painstaking research. I believe that while useless DNA fades away, useless memes do not. The latter go into a sort of global trash dumpster for possible recycling. Unfortunately, before anyone can recycle the garbage, academic administrators, engaging in an activity called dumpster diving, retrieve as much of the useless stuff as they can gather. They then unleash it on society-at-large as the latest in academic divine revelation. Is there a better explanation for the new math?

There is a relationship between all of this and corporations. Corporations, governments, and public administrators disguise memes as “corporate culture”, which tends to reflect the nature of the individual running the corporation. In private sector corporations, where profitability is an essential ingredient of long-range survival, useless memes end up in that global dumpster I referred to earlier. Don’t get the wrong idea here. I am not saying that all private sector businesses are efficient. While many are, the efficiency ratings of more than a handful are nothing to brag about. Often, it comes down simply to being less inefficient than a competitor is. This is the only possible explanation for McDonald’s, AT&T, and Burger King. Oh, and let’s not discount the value of customer apathy and stupidity in this process.

There are only two ways to survive with any degree of success in private sector bureaucratic corporations. One is to adapt to the meme… I mean corporate culture and go along to get along. The other is to put yourself in a position where you can cause more trouble for the bureaucracy than the bureaucracy can cause for you.

All bets are off in the public sector, though, because public entities constitute a different situation. Governmental and other forms of public bureaucracy, most notably public school administrators at every level, including post-secondary, don’t give a hoot about profitability. Within the walls of these kinds of institutions, political expediency outranks practical efficiency; process trumps substance; committees are rubber stamp signatures, and cronyism rules the day. This is where Mr. Murphy is in his glory. Let me try to explain it.

The next time you come across a piece of rotting wood and notice a slimy looking substance on the surface, think about what that substance is made of and what it is doing on the wood’s surface. The official name for the substance is Dictyostelium. It feels slimy to the touch because it is nothing more than a mass of amoebas slithering over each other. The amoebas are feeding on the bacteria in the wood. The group feed stops occasionally to give each of the members a chance to split down the middle into two: the amoeba equivalent to a sex life. Once sexually fulfilled, the amoebas have a smoke, bask for a while in the sexual afterglow, and then continue with the eating frenzy.

All the while, the individual members have felt completely autonomous, masters of their own destiny so to speak. Then something happens!

The local food supply begins to run out. Suddenly, as though nature itself compels it, the amoeba gang instinctively turns inward into a slug-like growth and begins to move farther up the rotting wood piece. The members still insist that they are individuals. However, there is a Borg-like higher collective calling. The slug becomes the collective and each member now assumes a specific function based on its position within the collective. At the back end, the function is to keep moving the slug forward. At the front end, the function is to find creative new ways of making the slug want to move forward.

The slug will run out of wood and when it happens, another change will occur. Fear not, though. Nature provides a stalk at the end of which is a survivor pod containing a small group of surviving amoebas. The stalk will die but the wind will blow the pod to another location, and the cycle starts over again. Every life cycle begins the same way, beginning with the birth of a single, independent amoeba. They have sex and double exponentially, congealing at a slug-paced assimilation into the collective, doing whatever it takes for the welfare of the collective so that the few top-level pod occupants survive to carry on the collective.

To American society, collectives are the stuff of the Borg and Star Trek. Amoebas, bacterial slime, and slugs are the things of biological science. Public and private social groups don’t like to think of themselves in such terms. This is one of the reasons that evolution is such a repulsive idea to so many people. Replace the term collective with the term corporation, government, or academia and replace the term stalk with committee and we automatically create the fertile soil needed for Mr. Murphy to survive.

I am going to continue this series on Murphy’s Laws of Corporations next week. Each of you should be thinking about your own circumstances. Where do you work, for a private sector corporation, the government at some level, or a public school at some level? Which part of the slug are you? Have you ever served as part of a stalk, holding the survivor pod members? Do you have what it takes to make it into that survivor pod? What do you think makes a stalk tick? I will answer all of these questions in scientific detail over the next couple of weeks. God, how I love research, especially the parts concerning sex!

In the mean time, maybe some Wise Men will bring you some gifts of Gold, Common Sense, and Fur. Let us all pray. Our Father whose art is in heaven, hollow be thy name…

Have a great week.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Send email to: publisher@thetruefacts.com