"Meme" Your Way to Wealth & Happiness

"My God, what was I going to do about the me that was buried beneath all that, the me that I was stuck with, that was real?" ~ Lauren Bacall

You can listen to me read this essay here:

One-time or recurring donations can be made at Ko-Fi

I always loved Lauren Bacall. She seemed a lot realer than so many other actors. But as it turns out, she suffered from the same problem as everyone else.

“I was transformed from a nothing to a combination of Garbo, Dietrich, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn. I was everything Howard Hawks had always wanted. My name would be on everyone’s lips all over the country, my words would be immortal—my God, what was I going to do about the me that was buried beneath all that, the me that I was stuck with, that was real? How could I live up to all that—how could anyone?”

Transformed from a “nothing”. Isn’t this what so many people fear? Being a nothing. Living and dying without recognition, without anything to show that you were here. Having children to carry on your legacy is not part of this longing. This is a completely selfish desire. And those in power know very well how to exploit it.

Lauren Bacall was plucked out of obscurity by someone powerful and given the ability to live beyond the end of her physical existence. But the price for her transformation was to bury her real self.

Billions of people want what she was given. But 99.9% of the masses will never have someone powerful to help them. So, the powerful figured out a way to fool everyone into thinking they can achieve this kind of immortality, too. Through the metaverse. I think the metaverse is the best term, since it simply means “a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.”

This is where we are pushed to live now. Especially, it is where our children are being captured. Anyone can be transformed there. Anyone can bury their real selves under layers upon layers of a new, fake self that they have been promised will give them relevance in a brave new world.

How did these tech gods convince us that we were so worthless, that the real world was beyond saving (they are convincing us of this now), that we gladly buried it all under fakery that is fast becoming realer to us than reality?

Remember Imane Khelif? Check out this Vogue cover.

It’s not a real Vogue cover, but that’s beside the point. It’s a meme, created by someone called Cheikh Boumsersseb, and it’s spread across the metaverse like wildfire. The more it has spread, the realer it has become. Do you remember what the real Imane Khelif looks like?

What do you mean, real? This is real now.

Millions of people saw Imane Khelif for the first time when this person fought in the Olympics. Everybody developed their own opinion of who this person really is. And very few of those opinions had any foundation in reality. Before the Olympics Imane Khelif was nothing more than a real person living and struggling in an obscure village, dreaming of becoming “somebody”.

Now, who is Imane Khelif?

“Beauty Code” launched a beauty campaign and transformed the boxer into this:

It’s not real. It’s AI generated, just like the Vogue cover. But that’s what we expect now. If you disapprove of “her” new image, don’t tell me you haven’t fiddled with filters to make yourself look better. Imane Khelif is the story of so many of us. A door has opened to billions of people that was never there before. We now have the possibility to lie to ourselves, and since everyone else is doing it too, it’s accepted as reality. How long before we truly believe the lies and don’t even see our true selves as real anymore.

As long as the Imane Khelif memes keep spreading, Khelif stays relevant and whoever he or she really is, ceases to exist.

JK Rowling might point out: "It's important to highlight that launching a PR campaign and applying layers of thick makeup requires far more time and effort than simply making DNA test results public."

But the viral memes say otherwise. JK Rowling has meme power too, so the battle rages as to which viewpoint will win. All of this has nothing to do with truth. I mean, JK Rowling might be right, but the algorithms will say otherwise. Whatever is the most popular will grow and grow and become reality—in a fake world.

You can look at the Beatle’s Abbey Road album cover as one of the best meme examples. This cover keeps living on, copied over and over in various ways inside the metaverse.

In his book The Selfish Gene, famous atheist Richard Dawkins (although he now calls himself a “cultural Christian”, acknowledging the value of Christian principles while refusing the faith upon which those principles are founded) noted that in a society with culture a person need not have biological descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.

Memes are like genes. As we identify more and more with our altered selves within the metaverse, it will be the memes that survive in the “meme pool” that define us.

A meme:

…acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

…successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.

The transmission of memes can be likened to the spread of contagions, and we sure are obsessed with contagions these days. Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas.

In fact, the meme goes even further. It is the perfect expression of a new religion. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.”

It’s a lie, but such a good one, people love it. The lie keeps us going. Okay, maybe we didn’t quite reach nirvana this time, but we will next time. Our next incarnation—not in the afterlife, but in the metaverse right now—will bring us happiness. And so, it sometimes does, for a brief moment, only to leave us grasping for more.

The old religions, like Christianity, were just too difficult. Nobody wants to do what Jesus commanded. Give up everything and follow him, even unto the cross. Not when we can have everything we want right now and live forever in the metaverse.

Jesus wasn’t a very good salesman. Who would want to suffer and die like the Apostle Paul did? Jesus said that his was a hard road, and few would follow him. To give up everything goes against all we have been programmed to believe will make us happy. We are assured we will be happy, we will be successful, if we buy lots of stuff. Buying lots of stuff means we have lots of money—another lie since it really means we have lots of debt. Just take a look in your garage, what is all that stuff? To give up something, to have less than my neighbor, well, that’s being a loser.

Master manipulator, Elon Musk, knows very well how to tantalize his followers; how to make them want more; how to the make them dream of being gods in their own little kingdom in the metaverse, just like he is.

Take a look at this short video, Runway of Power, that he shared on his platform, X; it’s pretty brilliant:

As the richest man in the world, Musk bought Twitter in large part to reproduce himself a billion times over, while selling his products to a captive audience. Musk has 195.5 million followers on X, far more than anyone else, of course. In contrast, Donald Trump has 89.9 million followers, while Kamala Harris, in her new role as presidential candidate, has 20.8 million followers.

In Runway of Power, Musk seems to mock the most powerful leaders of the world. But he is really mocking us because the truth is, most people can’t help but look at these parading monsters and wish they could be just like them. To have a meme like that made about you, well, it means immortality in the metaverse.

At the same time, we are being desensitized to what the elites are doing to us and our planet. Elon Musk wouldn’t dare put Hitler in his cool runway show. Or Stalin. That would bounce us back to the horror of it all. That would bounce us back to reality. But the guys he has put in there, the guys who rule our world today, are no less horrible. They are responsible for the deaths of billions of people. They control the minds of the masses and feed us all garbage.

And yet, there they are, made into a meme by AI that is passed around millions of times.

One person in the comment section said, they just couldn’t stop watching it. You know a meme is successful when that is the result. This pushes us further and further away from reality and into accepting the Funhouse world of fakery.

Musk even includes himself in the mockery, so we know he’s being fair. But notice who he gives the most runway time to: Barack Obama. There is no mockery when it comes to Obama. He is portrayed as the coolest, most powerful dude in the metaverse. And it’s real, isn’t it. He is very real to us. What is the message written on his outfit? Hope. And that message is fed to us over and over again in the video. Obama is Hope.

If Obama as hope, who is despair? Musk’s tech rival, Bill Gates is the very last leader in the video, and he is holding a monitor screen with a message implying that Microsoft is stealing your data and lying to you about it.

Musk is telling us, on the platform that he bought expressly for this purpose, to switch from allowing Gates to steal your data to allowing him to steal it instead. Because, you have to trust someone right? I’ve even heard people say, well, someone’s going to put a chip in our brains eventually, so I’d rather it was Elon Musk.

Just today, another tech god, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, was arrested at an airport near Paris.

Telegram is one of the top social media platforms, ranked just after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat, BBC reported. The platform is expected to have one billion users by next year. It offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and “channels” for groups of users. In contrast, X has 550 million users.

France's OFMIN, an agency tasked with preventing violence against minors, had issued an arrest warrant for Durov as the “coordinating agency in a preliminary investigation into alleged offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime and promotion of terrorism”.

But hey, forget Telegram. When it comes to drug and sex traffickers, Jack Dorsey’s Cash App is King. So why hasn’t Dorsey been arrested? Maybe because Dorsey is working closer with the government. It isn’t that governments are against any of these platforms, they just want to find ways to gain more power through collaboration. Those who resist face more scrutiny.

In response to Durov’s arrest, Musk shared a theoretical idea that it’s now six years later, after Durov’s arrest, and people are “being executed for liking a meme.”

To say, “come on, it's just a meme”, is foolish. Memes are powerful. If there’s anything to take away from what I’ve written here, it’s a deeper understanding of the power of memes in manipulating our thoughts and opinions.

The simple fact is that all of these guys—Dorsey, Musk, Durov, Altman, etc., are members of the same league, like a football league, they just play on rival teams. They compete with one another, but the entire league looks out for each other because that’s how they stay “in the game”.

Elon Musk is in essence an “influencer” but there are others with perhaps even a larger reach. For example, the influencer, MrBeast. Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube star better known as MrBeast, has over 300 million subscribers on Youtube. That’s even more than Taylor Swift. At just 26 years old, he’s the biggest Youtuber in the world, thanks to his videos featuring unbelievable stunts and mega-giveaways. His image is squeaky clean. Parents adore him and entrust their children to watching his show.

It’s just a meme…

Last year, his longtime friend and collaborator Ava Kris Tyson, came out as a transgender woman—therefore a man who pretends to be a woman. It was a big sensation. And of course, it was all fabulous, and Tyson started documenting his journey for his 2.3 million Instagram followers, not to mention tagging on MrBeast’s 300 million.

Tyson has said how much happier he is now (I refuse to call him her). Thanks to the drugs that he takes—drugs he markets to millions of people, especially impressionable children.

In a July interview with Smosh’s Anthony Padilla, Tyson said that the treatment saved “her” life.

“I’ve really never felt connected to my body until I started taking HRT,” he told Padilla, adding that he’d been “fully confident” in his transition for over a year.

HRT, or transgender hormone therapy, is a form of hormone therapy in which sex hormones and other hormonal medications are administered to transgender or gender nonconforming individuals for the purpose of more closely aligning their secondary sexual characteristics with their gender identity.

But wouldn’t you know it, Tyson is now being accused of sending inappropriate messages to a minor who he has been grooming. It is being claimed that MrBeast knew about it. Allegations were then made that MrBeast’s new Amazon Prime Video show had unsafe working conditions and that he made racist and homophobic comments in the past.

But you see, when you get that big in the metaverse, there is no stopping the machine. The algorithms keep spreading the virus and nobody is going to pull the plug on all that money. In fact, MrBeast has gained about 3 million subscribers since the incident involving Tyson.

His Prime-Time video show is called Beast Games and it’s about money.

The show will feature 1,000 contestants vying for a single $5 million cash payout, believed to be the largest single payout ever in TV history. What would you do for $5 million in cash? How far would you go to sell your soul?

Lauren Bacall worried about losing her real self to a lie that she would have to pretend for the rest of her life. Now, everyone thinks that faking it is realer than reality, and that the faker you are, the more success and happiness you will have.

It’s perfect that an intellectual like Richard Dawson thinks he can be a “cultural Christian” without actually being a real one. This is exactly what has happened to the majority or people. Being real is too difficult, too impractical. It just isn’t modern (funnily enough, a very old-fashioned word, but appropriate).

To be healthy in your body requires denying yourself the “pleasures of the flesh”. It’s so much easier to inject yourself with a drug and then gorge yourself with hamburgers.

It’s so much easier to take a drug for anxiety than face fears and overcome them.

It’s so much easier to put a filter on a phone and pretend to be someone else, especially when everyone else is doing it, than to look at your real self with all the imperfections. Just look at everyone’s profile photos in the metaverse and you will see what I mean.

And now, taking the lie as far as we can in this mad, mad world, it’s so much easier to take hormone therapy and become someone else—or at least convince yourself that you have—than to face who you really are and deal with it.

The lie will fall apart eventually and who knows if humanity will survive the shock of being forced back into reality. No matter how engaging, how funny, how cool, how progressive, how promising, how dazzling, how enlightening, how overpowering the tech gods’ products and AI creations have become—and with each passing day, they become more so—they will never outlast the truth.

Your real self is worth more than all the memes that promise immortality in the metaverse. Your real self is priceless to the God who created you.