In 2009 I had the opportunity to meet Robin Williams.  I was attending the TED conference.  It was the evening before I would be speaking and I was nervous and excited. There was an evening event, a social with food and drinks.  It was opening night for TED 2009.  I had already met and talk with a number of amazing people and was about to go back to my hotel room when I found myself next to Robin.  He was sitting on a ledge.  I decided to sit next to him.  He said “Hello, how are you?”  So I told him.  I was nervous about speaking the next morning.  Then I said “And what do you do?”  He paused for a moment before I said “just kidding.”

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I’ve been a huge fan of TED for many years, even before I spoke on the TED stage. I first discovered TED in 2001 after searching for “signs of intelligent life in the universe,” to quote Lili Tomlin. I became an immediate fan and set a life goal to attend TED. That goal became a reality in 2009 when I not only had the honor of attending the conference but also gave a talk.

Since then, I’ve watched TED grow to a multifaceted organization that is making the most of their “Ideas Worth Sharing” mission. They’ve recently collaborated with Huffington Post on a project called TED Weekend, which gives TED fans an opportunity to expand upon some of the most popular TED talks.  It offers a place for those talks to be elaborated upon by the person giving the talk as well as by guest bloggers.

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I was deprogrammed from a religious cult.  This word, deprogramming,  implies my mind had been programmed, much like a computer, and that a process could be done to reverse that programming.  I see this as an analogy. Of course it is not as simple as working with computer code.  The complexity of the human mind cannot be reduced to that of computer bits…yet, but the parallel can be drawn.

Robert Lifton’ work on totalism describes criteria for thought reform. When that criterion was presented to me during my “deprogramming” it was a devastating moment.

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The concept of a memeplex is critical to a more peaceful and cooperative world.  I know that’s a strong statement, but I believe it to be true.

This concept gives us a means to view, from an evolutionary perspective, how and why we have tended to  clump together into groups with highly polarized ideologies. We can start to understand the pull to view the world from a “Us” versus “Them” perspective.  To fully understand how memeplexes work we must examine the psychological elements present in the most powerful and dangerous memeplexes currently in our existence – as well as in our history.

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Let’s face it; we have all been taken advantage of one time or another.  No matter how cunning you are, come on admit it, at one time or another you have bought the snake oil.  You have been “had”.

Maybe not as badly as me, probably not as badly as me, but it must have happened.  You believed the person you loved was telling you the truth when they were cheating on you, or you bought into some pyramid scheme that was supposed to make you rich, or you thought Santa Clause brought you toys for being good.  It was probably frustrating and disappointing when you realized what you thought you were getting wasn’t as expected.

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