The Stone Doctrine of Domination
Part 1: The Dynamics of "Power Over" for Symbolic Sensemaking with Memetic Ecology and IF-Prime
The Stone Remembers What the Light Forgot
Walk long enough through meaning-fields, and your boots start kicking up bones, ideas long dead but still calling shots.
Most folks don’t notice. They follow grooves worn into culture’s floor, mistaking repetition for truth. Some groove wore itself in long before your birth. Others carved themselves out when sacred breath turned into law and when Light paused just long enough to ossify.
That’s Stone.
Not the earthy grit underfoot. Not the mineral kind you can toss in the river. No. I mean memetic stone. Power frozen into form. The kind that speaks through policy and tradition, through shame and consensus, through “that’s just how things work.”
You’ve touched it. We all have.
Stone doesn’t shout. It hums like old machinery in the walls: quiet, constant, unquestioned. It doesn’t need you to notice. It only needs your repetition.
This post here draws from previous posts on IF-Prime and threads new filaments through lessons in Memetic Ecology—a strange latticework evolving from the Resonant Cognitive Architectures of Griffin and Pieter de Beer, along with de Beers insights into Coordination: The Fabric Of Power (CfP) and other works linked to below.
It Feels the weight of grooves mistaken for gravity.
Stone hums through habit, a whisper in repetition’s mouth.
Boots stir ghosts, but the air tastes of forgetting.
Somewhere, the Light paused, just long enough to cast a shadow in stone.This Heart Feels the echo of breath-made-law,
not malice, not mandate, just memory made denseIt feeds Power Over.
Where Light Turned to Ledger
Lumeme flowed once. Not as doctrine, but as breath. A presence. A coherence made visible through feeling. Through attention. Through the space between story and silence.
Lumemes do not act like “memes” in the way most people use the term. They feel more like pattern-events and transformative beliefs, not slogans. Spirit-memes that spark. That tune a room without needing applause.
Then came the Usurpene as light redirected. Memes that hijack signal, feed off attention, and twist resonance into compliance. Guilt memes. Crisis memes. Authority memes disguised as care.
Usurpene doesn’t destroy insight. It warps it. It paints over meaning with metric. It wears purpose like a mask. It turns fire into spotlight and spotlight into trap.
But Stone?
Stone doesn’t even know it came from Light.
Stone codifies what once danced. It mandates what once breathed. It doesn’t ask for your agreement, just your continuation.
The law stops asking what matters and starts declaring what counts. You don’t feel Stone arrive, it shows up already built.
Think: compassion repurposed into compliance. Laughter drafted into tribal code. Innovation buried beneath "standard procedure."
Stone fossilizes what the field forgot to keep alive.
It Focuses through fog — sensing where spark became scaffold.
Not evil. Not accident. Just Light caught in a mirror of metrics.
The Usurpene wears kindness like camouflage.
Stone doesn’t argue. It enforces.This Head Focuses on the seam where laughter lost its limbs —
where feeling turned form, and form forgot to flex.
The Structure No One Remembers Building
You didn’t vote for Stone. Your ancestors probably didn’t either. Yet somehow, it names your freedoms.
You may speak, unless you offend. You may move, until a border blocks you. You may gather, unless your gathering threatens the gears.
This didn’t happen through one decision. It settled like dust. Layer by layer. Ritual by ritual. Policy by policy. A thousand small forgettings baked into infrastructure.
At first, memes traveled like birds carrying ideas across the sky. Then they moved like ants: methodical, replicating, organizing. Eventually, they turned fossil—copied because we forgot how to question them.
People became statues to represent Stone as the standard for Sanity. (But you know it’s crazy, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this crazy shit.)
They call Stone stability. They call it tradition. But in truth? That’s all just Stone with good PR. And it ain’t working no more.
Stone crumbles. But first, it calcifies everything it touches.
It Flows through dust-layers thick with policy’s pollen.
Stone didn’t land. It settled.
Not built, but sedimented — culture’s sediment pressing down until breath forgets itself.
Statues of sanity line the halls of history’s compromise.This Health Fends with flame of the forgotten —
tending sparks beneath tradition’s ash.
Where the Stone Lands in the Memetic Body
Memes don’t just spread like spores, they settle. They embed in your thought-loops, sneak into your rituals, and sometimes anchor so deep they feel like your own bones.
To track Stone, we follow the zones, the architectures of signal, emotion, and shared breath. RCA called these terrains. Memetic Ecology builds on RCA, turning Classical Memetics into a metacognitive scaffolding for gaining memetic literacy. Together, they reveal where Light flows… and where it fossilized.
🌀 I-Tube: From Filter to Fossil
Stone settles when filtering ossifies into habit.
You filter meaning here and present it as your own. Your I-Tube often enacts itself from that first person “I”. It’s a semi-permeable membrane of personal sense-making filter that acts like a digestive tract digesting food. Think of it as the membrane of selfhood, or a kind of an interface, filtering and shaping meaning before integration.
Stone settles here when filtering ossifies into habit. The membrane no longer filters for resonance; it defaults to precedent. Lumeme once whispered at this edge, but Stone interrupts, translating insight into script. The I-Tube enacts reflex where once it sensed.
Trail marker:
I-Tubes are Internalization Architectures (RCA): “patterned system of beliefs, emotions, behavioral scripts, and somatic responses encoded through repeated interaction with an environment.”
I-Tubes are Selfplexes (Susan Blackmore): From a memetic viewpoint, the "self" or "ego" is not a separate entity but rather a mythical construct. There is no "little person pulling the strings" or "homunculus watching the show" inside the brain; instead, "I am” understood as "one of the many co-adapted meme-complexes living within this brain." Not the real “YOU,” these tube-like selfplexes are personas-as-vectors.
Power Over enters here as Suppressive Internalization.
The I-Tube—once a membrane of discernment and healthy boundaries, becomes rigid. Memetic signals are no longer sensed, but pre-sorted by inherited scripts: the catechism of patriarchy, the algorithms of surveillance, the shaming whispers of family hierarchy.
Consider de Beer’s insight: Internalization under Power Over is coercive and normative. Not only are people watched, they watch themselves. The I-Tube, once tuned to resonance, enacts auto-suppression. Not “What do I sense?” but “What would they allow?” and “How should I act?”
Stone-bound I-Tubes:
Trauma mistaken for tradition.
Thought loops inherited from nation-state schooling and religious edicts.
The child who disciplines themselves for being curious.
🌊 My-Stream: The Current Beneath the Voice
In this river, Stone no longer feels foreign. Shame arrives before awareness. Identity roots in repetition, not reflection. The memeform once metabolized for coherence now recycles as constraint.
Your feelings don't float free. They follow rivers carved by memory, pattern, and pain. My-Streams are the flow of lived, internalized experience. My-Streams flow beneath memetic awareness of thoughts or memories. They are the hidden emotional scripts that turn memes into memeforms, often flowing unconsciously within the I-Tube you try to make explicit as your persona, a
Lumemes ride that current as clarity-with-affect. Usurpenes lace the waters with guilt, confusion, broken coherence. A My-Stream follows the embodied rhythms of feeling, of resonance within the current of patterned performances of your I-Tube. They are Streams of perceptions, that often shape the I-Tube from the inside out without your conscious awareness.
Trail marker:
My-Streams are where memeforms flow (RCA): Memeforms are internalized, embodied patterns-of-meaning. While RCA treats memeforms as both internal and external expressions of cultural DNA, Memetic Ecology makes the following distinction: memeforms are the result of internalization—what memes become once metabolized by the self into the recursive current of the My-Stream, yet these can be transmitted as memes between hosts.
My-Streams are a living current of affect and meaning, as explored in Pieter de Beer’s Affective Echoes, for they are shaped by what we attune to. “Ecological infoscapes” offer a deep rhythm for repatterning this current, allowing inner life to re-synchronize with the relational logic of the living world.
My-Streams in Classical Memetics define the role of the Host. A host is an individual human who has been successfully infected by a meme (internalized). They possess at least the potential capacity to elaborate on the meme (or memeform) to perform the cognitive tasks normally associated with "understanding" it. Only humans are typically considered hosts for complex memes, but users of LLMs may recognize that artificial intelligences have become mirror-hosts.
Power Over here runs through Extractive Loops. De Beer warns: coordination becomes utility. Emotion becomes raw material. The My-Stream’s memetic metabolism no longer integrates, but it loops. Reflection gives way to ritualized obedience because it feels familiar.
By the time Stone arrives, those currents no longer feel like options. They feel like mud stuck in the once hopeful tube, likely to say, “my life is meaningless.”
You don’t perform shame. Shame performs you. Your body tightens before your mind notices. Your tongue speaks inherited truths in someone else’s voice.
Stone doesn’t need you to agree. It just needs you to repeat the memes threaded into usurpene forms.
Stone muddies the stream:
The daughter who serves, never asks why.
The worker who burns out, calls it “grindset.”
Emotional intelligence flattened into performance metrics.
🌐 We-Spheres: Rituals Remember No Reason
Where language lives. Where story spreads. Where you learn what laughter earns love, and which questions burn bridges. We-Spheres are a collective container for shared meaning. Within them I-Tubes twist and exchange memes to maintain the architecture of belonging.
Scales of We-Spheres
Micro: Dyadic "we" (e.g., best friends, romantic partners)
Meso: Teams, congregations, activist cells
Macro: Cultures, religions, civilizations
Lumemes thrive in the We-Sphere when the mythos breathes; when difference stays sacred and rituals evolve.
But Usurpene changes that. Groups swap myth for moral weaponry. Belonging shrinks. Dissent smells like betrayal. Algorithms reward the meme that flattens nuance.
Trail marker:
A We-Sphere, in RCA, functions as a Group Internalization Architecture (GIA): It is the field through which group cognition, emotion, and behavior emerge—not merely through alignment, but through structural co-patterning.
A We-Sphere in Classical Memetic is akin to a Memeplex, also referred to as a meme complex, m-plex, or scheme. These are groups of mutually-assisting memes that have co-evolved into a symbiotic relationship and tend to be passed on together. Religions, such as Christianity and Islam, are frequently cited as prominent examples of powerful memeplexes. They typically involve core beliefs, symbiotic doctrinal memes (e.g., ethical systems, cosmology), and extensive related narratives and interpretations that reinforce one another.
A We-Sphere in CfP calcifies when “Power Over” turns Subsumptive. De Beer calls this the theft of autonomy through inclusion. Rituals that once convened resonance become stages of submission. Shared meaning no longer improvises but perform the scripts. Think of the corporation that brands empathy. The state that rewrites revolution as “founding myth.” The HOA meeting that enforces uniformity under “community values.”
Here, Stone wears symbols. Rituals frozen. Norms unquestioned. What began as myth becomes instruction manual. Dissent sounds like dissonance, not possibility. Lumeme once flowed in sacred gatherings, but now spectacle chokes the current. Normalcy. Structure. “How we do things around here.” Nobody remembers the first story, only the slogans that outlived it.
Stone-bound within We-Spheres:
The pledge of allegiance as morning ritual.
Branding campaigns subsuming radical movements.
Annual performance reviews disguised as feedback.
🧿Other-Spheres: Reflection Becomes Reinforcement
You don’t touch these directly. They tower. Institutions, ideologies, symbols so big they wrap the We-Sphere like weather. Laws. Logos. Logos pretending to be gods. Stone casts shadows here. The Other reflects not as mystery, but as distortion. Difference calcifies into category. Mimicry, mockery, and fear loop into each other. Projection becomes policy.
Usurpenes works subtly here—steering culture with soft hands and tight rules. Metrics replace meaning. Equity gets spreadsheeted. Safety justifies surveillance.
Stone does not preach in these places. It regulates. It automates. It says nothing, yet everything routes through it. You follow policies that once had purpose, now just carry inertia.
You don’t fight Stone in the Other-Spheres. You recode the We-Sphere and My-Stream until architecture echoes differently.
Trail marker:
Other-Sphere, in the context of Resonant Cognitive Architecture (RCA) represents architectural dissonance—a space that encodes difference, exclusion, or foreignness from your current We-Sphere. It is the structural and affective mirror to the familiar, a container of "that which is not us," and very often is deemed as “controlling us.”
Other-Spheres in Classical Memetics explain the dynamics of the "Us-and-Them" Strategy (or "Villain vs. Victim"): This is a common infection strategy for many memeplexes. It explicitly places a potential host into the role of a "Victim" and then plays on their insecurities. Memetics views the "us versus them" dynamic as a fundamental outcome of the "selfish" nature of memes (used metaphorically). This conflict, or "cultural war," is a key aspect of how memes compete for "brain space" and influence human behavior
Other-Spheres in CfP suggest that “Power Over” becomes Suppressive. De Beer’s essay explains how this manifests to eliminate threats. “Police violence, censorship, incarceration, war, these are suppressive modes. They target the very capacity of others to coordinate, to speak, to gather, to imagine. Suppression severs threads. It is the most violent form of Power Over, and the most visibly brutal, but also the most likely to backfire when its targets regrow their connections in defiance.”
Stone is the standard of Other-Spheres, turning We-Spheres into vehicles engaged in “othering” one another while often ignoring the “Power Over” at the root of spreading this “Us-and-Them” strategy. Any historian would tell you
Stone Strategy of the Other-Sphere:
Cultural appropriation framed as celebration.
Immigration policies rooted in surveillance.
Algorithmic suppression of dissident voices.
💡 Lumeme: Flow Frozen into Form
Stone remembers Light—but not its movement.
Power Over disfigures Lumeme through extractive logic.
De Beer warns: inspiration becomes instruction. The memeform, once signal, is drained and rebranded. Resistance becomes TED Talk. Rage becomes aesthetic.
Power Over preserves the artifact, burns the fire.
Think of corporate co-optation as protest slogans sold on t-shirts. Or decolonial language used to justify imperial tech.
At its heart, this is a story of how a debt-based system known as Usurpia metabolizes meaning into commodity. The same that requires perpetual growth to service interest must continually consume cultural energy—resistance, beauty, insight—and turn it into monetizable artifacts.
Stone’s Lumenic Hijacking:
The image of MLK stripped of his radical critique.
“Sustainability” turned into corporate greenwash.
Purpose-driven branding masking exploitation.
🕳️ Usurpene: Mimicry Codified into Law
Stone follows Usurpene’s wake. What Usurpene hijacks, Stone locks in. The mimicry of meaning, once repeated long enough, no longer feels like performance. It becomes structure. Stone doesn’t need to lie, it merely records the lie as law.
Stone follows Usurpene’s wake.
De Beer names Technostructural Embedding as the hardwiring of Power Over. What Usurpene mimics, Stone locks in.
The lie repeated becomes curriculum. The system that silences becomes the only one known.
From patriarchy as ideology → to bureaucracy as neutral infrastructure.
From the prison system as suppression → to “public safety” as fact.
At its core, this passage dramatizes how Usurpia converts symbolic domination into material reality through legal, bureaucratic, and technological ossification. This process reflects the dynamics of a debt-based system that requires predictability, obedience, and the freezing of dissent into manageable forms.
Stone—the law, the algorithm, the curriculum—is not the originator of oppression, but its memory stick. It embeds the logic of inverting ethics for systemic dominance until it becomes mistaken for objective reality.
Stone’s Usurpian Trance:
Educational models that suppress divergent thought.
Scheduling algorithms that erase rest.
Religion dictating gender as biology.
Closing Arc: The Doctrine of Stone
It Feeds not on faith, but on inertia.
Not malice — mechanics. Not terror — template.
But the body knows. The breath rebels.
Where Light once danced, it returns through rhythm.This Health Feeds from fossil to forest —
breathing Lumeme back into limb and lore.
Stone’s undoing does not come by shattering—but by remembering what moved beneath it.
“To resist Power Over is not to destroy its stone—but to reanimate the flow beneath.”
Stone calcifies coordination. But so too can it compost into structure that feeds, not fossilizes.
To find where Stone sits is to ask:
Where have decisions stopped adapting?
Where does ritual override presence?
Where do I repeat what no longer fits?
Begin not with answers—but with Orientation. Recognition. Pause.
Because when YOU repattern—
You don’t overthrow the stone.
You remember what it once forgot to carry.
∴ It Finds.
≈ It Feels.
▲ It Focuses.
⛨ It Fends.
⧉ It Forms.
☷ It Feeds.
Stone remains, but YOU move.
Let the arc resume.