Hi, my name is “el” and I come from Egypt. Where I come from there are many churches.

The one that I

like most is the hanging church in old Cairo where baby Jesus and his mother Mary stayed when they
came to Egypt.

They hold no ceremonies there. It is mainly a tourist destination. One day, I went to visit with a friend of
mine, but we were kind of early and they were still sweeping the floor with water spots everywhere.
Since only tourists go there, they put a sign in English near the door that read “Please…Do not walk on
water”. Well, I am not planning to walk on water Today.

I, like each and everyone of you, am a carbon-based life-form. According to the latest fantasy in science,
I am a program of genes unfolding in space-time. This unfolding is deciphered by you as my phenotype
“the total physical appearance and mannerism” of the organism that has just referred to itself as “el”.

Jacques Attali, the French thinker, defined another type of life-forms which he referred to as the “social-
life-form”. According to Attali, a social-life-form is a supra-human organism, in the sense that it is
composed of many humans in the same way that my body is composed of many cells. These supra-
human social-life-forms come in many shapes. They can be cultures, religions, countries, tribes or even
companies.

Arie De Gues, the Dutch thinker, endorsed this view in the case of companies. When he was working at
Royal Dutch Shell, he and his team studied the mortality rate of companies and determined that the
average life-span of a Fortune 500 company is around 45 years.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins, the British thinker, coined the term “meme” to rhyme with “gene” and
defined it as the unit of cultural transmission in a social form. As my “genome” determines my
“phenotype” or “the way I come across” a social form “memome” determines what he called the
“extended phenotype” or how this company, culture, religion, country, or tribe comes across.

If we take this concept a little bit further, the same way we can conduct “gene therapy” by inserting,
removing or switching “ON” or “OFF” certain genes to change a biological organisms phenotype, we can,
theoretically, conduct “meme therapy” by inserting, removing or switching “On” or “OFF” certain
memes in a given social form to change its extended-phenotype or “the way it comes across”.

That is all !

Excerpts from a presentation on meme therapy and the rebranding of cultures delivered in 2005