I’m it — and I don’t want to be . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I first heard of the idea of memes in 1986 or so. Analogized to a gene, a meme is a transmissible idea. We’re apt to think of things like “Dood!” or “Dyn-o-mite!” when we think of memes — linguistic fads — but the idea can run much deeper than that. For example, the principle that it is better to die for your principles than to renounce them did not originate with Socrates, but because Plato made the death of Socrates famous, he essentially transmitted the idea that defines Western Culture. That’s a big deal.

On the flip side of the coin, the analogy to genes is troublesome, insofar as it implies unavoidable transmission and relative immutability. The United States was founded on the meme “rights,” but there was no one among the founders who would have thought in terms of a “right” to subsidized food or to a subsidized crop. The meme persists, but the original meaning is vastly diluted.

That much is me, a sort of mild taste/distaste relationship with the idea of memes. I’ll get over it.

This much is the RE.net: I have been tagged by Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato in what he says is a meme game. I don’t get why it is, but I don’t have to. I will play along because I like Jim, even though I detest party games, chain letters, etc.

My challenge: To tell you five things you did not know about me. My life is outrageously public, but — all appearances to the contrary — I don’t do very much to publicize it. If I tell you something about my life, it’s because I think it’s important to the point I’m making. Anything I don’t mention — I’d rather not mention.

So, here goes nothing. Five things you didn’t know about me:

1. I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about and writing about political philosophy at a very arcane level. The school I work in is called Agorism or Market Anarchism or Anarcho-Capitalism, depending on who you talk to. My own philosophy is called “Janioism” (a meme!) after a character in the book target=”_blank”>Janio at a Point. The book was written to be the epilogue of a novel I’ve never written, so it doesn’t stand all that well on its own. I may rewrite it as stand-alone non-fiction when I retire. The essence of the book is a description of how a polity could work without systemic coercion. If you don’t like having your presuppositions undermined, you might give it a miss. At the time that I wrote it, I thought that a society such as I envision might come to exist in 500 years or so. Now, with the advances in technology in the 18 years since I wrote the book, I expect to see more and more Janiolike culture in our own time.
2. From 1988 to 1996 or so, I wrote a ton of Macintosh software, mostly utilities, almost all of them devoted to high-end, high-volume publishing problems. If you have a PPC-based (that is, non-Intel) Macintosh with OS 9 loaded, these little pigs will still run. I haven’t learned the Cocoa programming environment, so I don’t know how to port them. I’m hoping my son Cameron will get interested enough in the Mac world to bring them across.
3. My knowledge of Latin is deeper than it is broad. I’m interested in everything Roman, and we may end up spending half of our retirement in ruins. But my ability to read Latin doesn’t go much beyond Caesar — newspaper Latin. I can puzzle my way through Virgil or Horace, but it’s a word at a time, a page a day. This is something I’d like to get better at when I have more time to give it. But I’ve always been interested in word roots, and roots in Latin go down to the atom. A complex word in Latin is akin to a molecule, a collection of atoms, and what that word means is an amalgamation of the implications of each of the atoms. Plus, once you’re down to the atoms, you can carry them off to cognate forms in other languages. Incidentally, I’ve written a ton of Latin study aids, which makes me very popular when mid-terms and finals roll around, along with Latin study software for the Macintosh. Another retirement goal: A software-based Latin Scrabble dictionary.
4. Do you wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love? It was me. It’s called The Unfallen, and I wrote it as a sort of user’s manual for what I wanted and wasn’t finding in romantic relationships. I was also making fun of romance novels, so I see it as being a joyous book about sex and philosophy — stipulating that I can’t think about either without thinking of the other. There is a very deep secret about me in that book, and, if you guess it, I’ll be afraid of you forever.
5. I truly, madly, deeply love my wife. I didn’t write The Unfallen about Cathleen. I didn’t know her then. But I knew I wanted to know her, and, whatever that book might do for other people, for me it was a map to her. On my very best days, I manage to live up to it — live up to her. I think that’s my best advice to the lovelorn: Find someone who makes you want to be your best self, with your best growing ever better with each day you spend together.

Here is the tortuous route that led to this rout of tortures:

• Drew of Drew’s Marketing Minute
• Starbucker
• Trevor Gay of Simplicity
• Phil of Make it Great
• Kammie of Passion Meet’s Purpose
• Success from the Nest
• Dave of Rothacker Reviews
• Andrea Learned of Learned on Women
• Ann Handley of the Marketing Profs Daily Fix
• Nedra Weinreich, Spare Change
• Toby Bloomberg, the Diva Marketer
• Paul Chaney, Strategic Blogging
• Mark McKnight, RSS Pieces
• Jim Cronin, The Real Estate Tomato

And: I am expected to share this pain with others. Luckily I have home-grown victims upon whom to prey. Here are the four BloodhoundBlog webloggers who have their own weblogs:

• Kris Berg,
• Jeff Brown,
• Dan Green and
• Doug Quance.

You’re it…