Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, has popularized the idea (the meme?) that “a human being is a gene’s way of making copies of itself.” Cute, maybe, but inherently illogical and, if taken seriously, harmful.

Having not read his book, I’ll give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt and assume that his central thesis is rather more nuanced than this. But it’s the meme that I wish to refute here, anyway, which has certainly propagated further into more minds than his complete text. (Ironically, Dawkins’ book is the origin of the word “meme” itself, which is to culture as a gene is to an organism.)

In 1976, when the book was published, I’m sure this was a controversial and forceful idea, creating an antithesis against the influence of the still-dominant thesis of intelligent design, or any approach that equated “success” with the quality of life of an individual organism. Rather than trying to imagine genes as “helpful” to an organism in the way that a tool is helpful, Dawkins suggested viewing the individual organisms themselves as peripheral to a fundamental calculus of gene survival. As the saying goes, “Having children is hereditary. If your parents didn’t have children, chances are you won’t either.”

It is a useful way to shift perspective and thereby be able to develop a model of gene propagation with greater predictive power. But as a popular belief, it is at best a self-defeating teleology, and at worst a poisonous one, in the same family as paranoia, and with the same sort of effect. Some other examples by way of demonstration:

• “I wish I’d never been born.” OK, you get your wish. Now, uh…nothing. In fact, nobody to make the original wish. When people are driven to say this, they typically mean, “How can I stop suffering like this?” I’m sure that in fact, many people who are driven to utter this statement really do wish they’d never been born, an impulse to meta-suicide. But despite the truth of the emotion, the wish to have never been born is self-defeating, the kind of thought that leads the mind holding it to stop considering more answers to the real question.

• “People are out to get me.” Start holding this thought, and as people reach out to you in an effort to dissuade you by their friendship, you will understand that it is only a trap to hide their true, ulterior motive, which is to abuse or defraud you in some way. The lengths to which they try to win your trust and affection only reveal the cleverness and subtlety with which they pursue their nefarious agenda. You can see where this ends up, or maybe you even know someone who is on this path. Eventually they have no friends in fact, or at most, a few weary stalwarts who are reconsidering their investment. The argument was unassailable logically, but it was neither good for the mind holding it, nor even true in fact, at least not at first.

• “Language is inherently meaningless.” So why are you bothering telling me, when a mere silent exhalation would have rid you of an equal amount of carbon dioxide? It’s the ultimate conversation-stopper, if truly believed. Again, in practice, most of the people who say this are intending to communicate something else, like the idea that there is no perfectly objective viewpoint, perhaps, or that promises that are not fulfilled should not be made. As a person begins to seriously digest this idea, though, they will start to separate from other people, their mind slowly going blind and deaf.

Look at the meme we started with, now, in this light: “I am primarily a link in a chain of gene propagation.” Once you believe this, then at the very least, you’re going to start viewing your moment of reproduction (if you have one) as the bright center of your life, the moment of most meaning, with all your pre-reproduction life a sort of running start and your post-reproduction life increasingly irrelevant. If this sounds basically true to you, I suggest that it may be on account of the recent popularity of this meme.

I also suggest that it is not true, not generally, not teleologically. Am I preferring to wrap myself in a comfortable delusion, telling myself that my life has meaning?

Before I answer that, what happens if you poison your body, say by ingesting something tiny, like a cyanide pill? A little chemical hacks your metabolic system and quickly shuts down your body’s entire ability to burn its fuel. Shortly thereafter you are dead, an inert pile of organic compounds.

Of course, even when you were alive, you were just a pile of organic compounds anyway, right? So what happened? What’s the big deal? Did your body simply give up the comforting delusion that it was “alive”? What is “alive”, anyway? Just a series of chemical reactions in a certain order. After you “die” some different chemical reactions will transpire.

Wrong. It’s a matter of life and death, and you know it. Break the spell.

Honestly, we have to be careful with some of these ideas. Like industrial chemicals, they are useful when handled by experts in their proper context, but are not at all healthy to have in the water supply. We ascribe significant power to what we put in our mouths to affect both our physical and mental health; we are careful of clicking on unknown email attachments; we fasten our seat belts when we climb in the car. When it comes to some of these memes, though, we seem to believe that as long as it’s “true,” we can breathe it right in.

Your mind runs on narrative and meaning. And you’ve only got one.