The Meta-Meme of the New World
On Nihilism and the Aura of Agency
America has long identified with the future more than the past. At its best, America represents the dream of the New World, an ongoing project towards achieving utopia. The true America is indefinitely unfinished, always ahead, always pulling us to strive beyond ourselves.
However, the last few decades have drained Americans of this feeling. Many act as if we’ve reached the end of history― but of course, the story goes on. If anything, the complacency that came from this attitude has allowed history to roar back with a vengeance, a history which feels harder to steer than ever. We need to reject postmodern paralysis and choose meta-modern meaning-making for our own stories’ sake. We need to actively write history once again; we must choose to build a New World.
A certain invaluable feeling is cultivated by exposure to the best of our idealistic American inheritance― our poets, philosophers, and prophets. This is the feeling of living at the edge of an ever-emerging reality, pushing into the unknown. It’s the feeling of entering the stage during a pivotal scene in the drama of life, free to contribute your verse. It’s the feeling of entangled will, of human agency minnowing within the winnowing river of time. It’s the feeling that the world is consequential, for keeps, deeply meaningful― the feeling of God as your future selves, of Heaven as your grandchildren’s joy. It’s the feeling of being awake just before dawn to see the sky change colors and the first light tremble. It’s the feeling that the best is yet to come, and that what will come emanates from your outstretched palms.
This is the feeling, the myth, the meme of the New World. Memes are cultural genes― they evolve, reproduce, and spread. The meme of the New World― the meme of emergence, recreation, adaptation, and novelty itself― is a sort of ur-meme, or meta-meme, a meme that enables and facilitates the creation of more memes downstream. Ideas, cultures, and values truly do influence materials, agents, and choices. Cultivating the felt sense that we live at an evermore consequential frontier of history can have unthinkably rich downstream consequences. It widens and diversifies our future. It’s a memetic lubricant for evolution itself.
The widespread propagation and adoption of the New World meta-meme was a core driver of what made America wonderful for hundreds of years. It was present in every signer of the Declaration, every community experiment, every Emerson essay, every immigrant family settling Iowa, every abolitionist, every invention of Edison, every Constitutional Amendment, every progressive movement, every evolution in morality, every psychedelic scientist, every Silicon Valley dreamer. What these all had in common is valuing ‘newness’ itself, and the belief that the intersubjective world should keep evolving as all life does.
The success of the smallpox vaccine helps lead to the Apollo Program, not necessarily due to direct scientific lineage, but simply because each success reinforces the meta-meme of newness. The success of a New World in one direction implies the potential success of newness in other directions. We want to strengthen the narrative of innovation, of novelty for its own sake; we want to support the story of the New World. New inspires new. If we want to reinvigorate America’s youthful spirit, we will need to take advantage of this memetic reinforcement effect.
The meme of the New World is at a low point right now in American history. We need to rekindle the meta-meme, spread it widely and deeply in the minds of Americans, and restart the virtuous cycle of re-inspiration from one New World to the next, from one new idea to another new project, from one new invention to a new way of life.
We need to roll up our sleeves and work on concrete experiments in order to counteract the spread of nihilism, which threatens to tear apart the fabric of American society. Nihilism is a natural response to a felt lack of agency, a lack of context, a lack of connectedness. The less we feel meaningfully entangled with the world― responsible to the world and responsible for the world― the more nihilistic we become.
The opposite of consuming is creating. Creating creates more than the thing created; it creates a superlative aura of agency. Building, making, innovating― genuinely creating new things is like an antiseptic to souls sick of nihilism. America generates meaningful energy and agency by undertaking grand projects, from the Erie Canal to the Moon Mission to the founding of a new city. Much more frequently, we build agentic momentum by rolling up our sleeves and tackling the tough, but immediate, projects of renovation― reforming our institutions to slowly and concretely move towards our dreams, amending rather than replacing our Constitution, recreating our public life piece by pragmatic piece. Even the smallest improvements represent a better New World, and make larger renovations more possible.
We need to propagate the aura of agency across America in order to replace cultural pessimism with a new, sincere optimism for the potential utopia of the New World. This optimistic orientation towards the possibility of utopia is the dream that has inspired all other dreams, the dream that has underpinned all genuine progress in this country. That utopia of mutual freedom is not guaranteed― but if we believe, and if we reach, it may yet emanate from our outstretched hands.
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Further Reading:
This essay, “The Meta-Meme of the New World,” was adapted from a section of an earlier essay titled “America and the Shape of the Far Future” on Beatinpaths.com