Meme complexes, "memeplexes", are groups of memes that are passed on together. Like genes, memes often coexist in groupings that further their collective survival and replication. The memeplexes with the fittest and most synergistic memes and are the ones that flourish in the memetic ecosystem, i.e. the collection of human minds.

One well adapted memeplex is the Mormon church I grew up in. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is one of the fast growing religions in the world. What about the Mormon faith makes this possible?

For one, a collection of kick-ass memes. Mormons have lots of offspring, most of which adopt the LDS faith. Mormon doctrine and culture emphasizes marriage and encourages large families. Mormonism also encourages behavior that facilitates financial stability and accumulation of wealth. The church glorifies the small businessman and inculcates bourgeois values like saving money, getting and holding jobs, and low time preference. By avoiding the debt and divorce that attend financial hardship, Mormonism increases the fidelity with which the faith is transferred to offspring, makes Mormons respected and enviable members of the community--aiding conversion, and encourages satisfaction with the Mormon lifestyle status quo and the belief that the Mormons really are favored by god--thereby reducing apostasy and back-sliding.

In addition to powerful memes, the church also benefits from the multitude of ways that these memes work together to amplify their effects. The memes for financial success combine with the tithing meme to finance proselytism around the world as well as institutions like the Mormon welfare system that encourage organizational allegiance. The financial memes also help make possible Mormonism's most impressive meme: missionary work. Mormon families pay out of pocket for their young men to put their careers and educations on hold and devote two years of their lives to work more than full-time recruiting new members. These, and other elements of the Mormon memeplex, gives it a leg up against other religions--like the celibate, and unsurprisingly moribund, Shakers--in the competition for human mind space.

One comparatively poorly adapted memeplex is the libertarian movement. Much of this is our fault. We have bundled our ideological memes like "Don't initiate coercion." with incompatible and ineffective praxis memes like the Libertarian Party and electoral politics in general. In all fairness, libertarian memes also start out with several inherent disadvantages. The whole point of libertarianism is to combat a number of particularly virulent and pernicious memes. Richard Dawkins showed how genes, not organisms, are the basic unit of evolution and that the sole interest of genes, reproduction, does not always line up with the interest of their carriers, i.e. organisms, hence the title of his book “The Selfish Gene.” It's the same way with memes. The meme "The state is indispensable." is bad for the well being of individuals and societies, but it has achieved dominance because those with power and wealth accumulated through plunder have used these resources to disseminate it and have made holding it as a prerequisite for social advancement and some semblance of a normal life. By rejecting statist memes we renounce use of the reproductive power which made them such a common problem in the first place. The anti-politics political movement faces obvious challenges just as an anti-technology movement would have trouble getting its ideas heard. As a result, libertarian ideology, no matter how ironclad its arguments and beneficial its potential effects, languishes on the margins of the marketplace of ideas.

I think the solution to these problems for libertarians lies in superior memetic engineering.

Diabetics used to depend on insulin extracted from cattle and pig pancreases. In the late 70s, scientists figured out how to produce insulin by splicing animal insulin genes into bacteria that would then produce insulin as well as more insulin producing bacteria. Today most artificial insulin is produced with modified E. coli bacteria or yeast at lower cost and higher quality. This is called recombinant DNA.

E. coli genes co-evolved to create a highly efficient system for their rapid and accurate expression and reproduction. All scientists had to do was piggy-back another bit of evolved genetic machinery onto this complex and the resulting chimera would reproduce and express the desired genes for them.

If someone could put together a neutral carrier--a collection of memes that, like the E. coli genome, was an effective machine for reproducing itself--he could splice in whatever ideas he liked and set it loose. The recombinant memeplex would then, barring mutation, spread the message for him.

This already happens all the time. The basic self-reproducing ideas behind the chain letter or pyramid scheme have been used again and again in the service of many different ends. As our knowledge of how memes work improves, even more powerful and complex "recombinant memetics" should become possible. By swapping out different memes for L. Ron Hubbard's ravings, the Church of Scientology, stripped of its crazy-ass belief system leaving just the mechanisms used for churning out zealous Scientologists could be used for producing zealous vegans, zealous Pastafarians...or even zealous libertarians.