On Sun, 19 Sep 2021 03:16:53 +1000, Alex Goodwin
<xxxxxx@multitel.com.au> wrote:

>On 18/9/21 9:43 am, Jeff Zeitlin - editor at freelancetraveller.com (via
>tml list) wrote:

>>> How would a single-metameme-dominant religion, as a class, vary from one
>>> where two of them are roughly equal in import?

>> Mostly in the style of ritual, and possibly the role of clergy. Both of
>> those are to be covered in other sections of the document.

>> Right now, I just want to make sure that I have an exhaustive (or very
>> nearly so) partition of Models (or metamemes, as you've put it).

> On further thought, and nicking liberally from Winchell Chung of Atomic
>Rockets (who dug upand applied Mendeleev's observation that building a
>framework allows you to look for interesting holes), that gives you 7
>categories (with somewhat blurry lines between them) of religion - 3
>independent binary variables (given metameme dominant or not), trivially
>excluding the empty-dominant set.
>
>For a first attempt:
>
>{Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-dominant - named metameme
>dominates the two others;
>
>{Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-deficient - named metameme is
>dominated by the two others roughly equally;
>
>Co-dominant - all three metamemes roughly equally dominant;
>
>I have no idea how the resulting distribution will shake out, barring a
>suspicion that a currently co-dominant religion is at an unstable
>equlibrium.
>
>_I_ think you've got a solid first cut at a breakdown (am reluctant to
>call it a partition, as it's possibly not exhaustive, and the resulting
>subsets are explicitly not disjoint). 

Actually, I'm not sure that codominant models actually works; I suspect
very much that true codominance represents a comparatively short-lived
transitional form - your 'unstable equilibrium'. An interesting question to
ask (though I don't know if it can be answered) is whether that transition
is _guaranteed_ to move forward into new-model-dominant, or whether it can
'fall back' to an old-model-dominant form, whether fundamentally the same
or fundamentally different from the pre-transition form.

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