What do I mean when I use the term “meme war”?

When ideologies clash to such an extent that human beings are completely submerged in the defense of their memes and harm each other because of them, that’s a “meme war.” We’ve been fighting meme wars since the dawn of human culture, but now that we’ve got virtually instantaneous global communication, these wars have escalated. Memes are delivered in so many new, sense-bewildering ways that our psyches are on full alert. This creates stress, and so we fall back on comforting memes to bolster our fading strength.

Those who have made it their business to use memes to dominate the will of others are, themselves, puppets of memeplexes as well.

Advertising has developed a plethora of strategies for delivering content and changing minds. It’s a meme-eat-meme world out there, and it behooves us to wake up and try to choose our own memes more wisely rather than let them be chosen for us. We are never “free” of them; they are encoded in the structure of our brains, according to some researchers. But we can use memetics, itself a “recursive” meme, to become more aware of them.

“The God of Battles” features a meme war. It’s turning out rather nicely, I think. Look for it in early 2015.