Human Meme

Human Meme

By David BolesSociety & CultureArtsPerforming Arts
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Human Meme episodes

  • Ten Things to Know
    Now you know! Here are ten things that can help make your life better -- from shaving razors, to mineral water, to The Blues!
    16 min
  • Reckoning with Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby
    A culture is always actively seeking re-definition. Things change. We are not what we were meant to become. The same is true for our stories. Where once "Tar Baby" may have been a childhood term of endearment in a folklore story from 1881, today, "Tar Baby" means entirely something else; and it is our duty to each other to learn the why of the difference when context changes.
    14 min
  • Virtue Signalling
    "I support everybody because I say so." -- Everybody on the Internet. We live in a virtual world where talk tends to have more compunction power than the act of actually doing something. Listen to this call to change to move forward and to leave blood and bones split on the street.
    12 min
  • Salting the Souls of The Hollow Men
    The Hollow Men killed George Floyd. In 1925, poet T. S. Eliot wrote to expose, and to and warn us, against the invisible intentions of -- "The Hollow Men" -- and we, the people, have yet to heed his words; and so we are left behind with hunger, and anger, and illness festering in the stillborn breech between the visible and the hollow.
    17 min
  • Thinking by Proxy
    We have given up original thought for translation by computer. Where once we used to think progressively on our own, we now relinquish our independent thought process -- out of a warrant for a misplaced convenience -- to a mechanical process we do not control. Neural networks do not become us, they merely imitate the worst of us, and amplify our faults, temptations, and digressions in full view of the Panopticon.
    15 min
  • Deference of the Winners
    Democracy demands comity from those who lead us. If, and when, that kindness falls, everyone in the community is at risk of being forsaken and forbidden from free thought. The winners in any context are required by morality and higher purpose to abide by, and support, the dreams of the losers -- if not, the entire world collapses into a distant, but purposeful, cruelty.
    11 min
  • Blood in the Library
    Discovering new worlds begins in the constructed word. We descend into darkness together, to discover the light hiding below what we know. The secret to surviving a world afire is knowing how to extinguish threats to liberty, and freedom, with reading comprehension and a sharp thought.
    13 min
  • Violence and the Interwoven Falsehood
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood Art can fight violence. What happens when violence becomes an Art? What happens next when a nation is cleaved into The City and The Valley by purposeful, political, rage, and there's no way to negotiate the differences in the home? Violence then becomes the remedy in the crevasse, and not a tenterhook for reconciliation.
    14 min
  • Boy with a Bone
    Some eat all evidence of the living. Hunger, hubris and wanting to be fulfilled are all notes of advocacy for those among us who are able to successfully erase a carcass -- or a corpse! -- before our disbelieving eyes. They eat to be fulfilled. They swallow to erase. They digest to rewrite history. The result of the cleansed plate is a palate of soul destroying musk.
    9 min
  • Plucking and Withering are Inseparable
    We are made to magnificently fail. In the ever going onward march from humility to humanity, we search for signposts that we are on the right path. The Artist and the Poet both share in the re-stitching of our souls, and so we look to them to divine the precious secrets to surviving a perilous life of sorrow.
    10 min

About Human Meme

From the publisher's feed

The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns…