Meme Hygiene

Meme hygiene is similar to the plain hygiene, except it wards off bad ideas rather than parasites.

Same as with parasites draining your resources and producing toxins which are harmful to you, bad ideas, bad memes make you do stupid shit and reject patently better ideas.

We live in a state of poor meme hygiene. Evolution just has not yet equipped humans with abhorrence for bad thinking as it has for bad health. We should instill it culturally.

A first good step would be to outlaw spreading unsubstantiated memes that purport describing reality, e.g. torsion fields, structured water, resonant frequencies, faith healing etc. Throw in most religions as well.

Second, we should encourage spreading memes appended with their adherence-to-reality check, which should be clearly stated. In doing so we achieve three things. First, proven memes are communicated as such and leave not a doubt in anyone's mind that should a competing meme arise, only extraordinary scientific scrutiny should be able to move the initial proven meme to the side to make way for new knowledge (same as we updated Newton's interpretation of gravity with Einstein's relativity - Newton wasn't wrong, he was merely less correct). Second, we can indulge in fantasy and fiction and know for a fact that nothing in it aspires to be a scientifically sound look at the world. Third, reinforcing our first step, we will know that a meme is not welcome in neither our nor other's minds if under skeptical scrutiny the evidence is found lacking.

So, once again, we end up at Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Everyone should be carrying a mental version of it in their brains. Think of it as soap for meme hygiene, use it every time you expose yourself to other's ideas or just after you have been mentally masturbating to private nonsense.