Bob believed. He believed he could build a game that would mimic life. He would be a god himself. He reckoned if life was a system, if the universe is a system, if nature is a system and the mind is a system- then what he has to do is build a very big system. He would build it out of components, modules of code. And this system would feedback onto itself and correct itself and find the true balance of .... the true balance of everything. And it was good. And Bob would call this the eclectic meme connection because every module would represent an idea, a single unit of knowledge. It was the beginning.
But Bob didn't come up with the idea of memes, that was Richard Dawkins, the same Dawkins who wrote the selfish genes and popularised the idea that we, human beings, you and I, were merely machines, vessels for our DNA, our eternal masters. But it wasn't Dawkins who came up with this idea, nope. So we go back before that beginning and meet Mr Hamilton and Mr Price.In 1967 American George R. Price went to London after reading Hamilton's little known papers and discovering that he was already familiar with the equations, that they were the equations of computers. He was able to show that the equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness, spite, since these behaviours could help the genes. John Von Neumann had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence, that humans were the machines.
This had a bad effect on Price, and Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though the equations disproved the existence of God.
Price's attempt to disprove Hamilton's theory had utterly failed, and he comes to believe he is being followed by the hound of heaven. He finally reveals, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.The sleepers didn't mind killing each other. It was no more pointless than sleeping.The experts started talking to each other via the new mediums. And they start to realise either they are ALL wrong or they are ALL right. With the help of some esoteric teachers, including a large number of Buddhist, some of the experts (mainly the quantum physicists and the psychologists, the explorers of inner and outer space, and then the Artists, Musicians and Computer Programmers) began formulating theories which allowed for more than one objective or even none at all. Rather than looking for building blocks of matter, they looked at the universe as a whole, or at the relationship between different objective viewpoints.
(Don't worry we'll get back to this.)
So, there are the Hidden Masters who want everybody to be experts, and there are The Old Masters who want to remain the Elite. Since the Old Masters were already in power, it was very easy for them to maintain the power. Meanwhile, the New Masters were obliged to move underground.