I don't believe that people at the top of the Mormon Church today actually want to lead church members astray or intentionally deceive them. True, as the first leader of the church, Joseph Smith may have intentionally deceived his followers, but that's a question of his psychological state that I'm not prepared to answer. As soon as a social structure forms that involves more than one person, the laws of self-organization of information and interpersonal dynamics come into play. A river is born that sweeps individuals along without conscious guidance, simply following the natural contours of the land in its search for equilibrium with the surrounding elements. The Mormon Church is a river that is flowing steadily downhill to join the ocean of mainstream philosophy and will continue to do so until something changes the surrounding terrain. Church leaders are simply spokesmen for the river and can do little to change the church's momentum.

As unlikely as this is, It would be interesting to observe what would happen if the President Hinckley announced in General Conference that the Mormon Church is a fraud and resigned from his post. Would the members desert the church en masse? Or would the more memetically probable occur -- explanations would be found to quiet members' cognitive dissonance, other church leaders would step in and take over, and the whole event would gradually be glossed over and archived on the dusty bookshelf of "non-inspirational" church history? Actually, such events have occured in the Mormon Church many times in the past, but never yet with a president of the church, as far as I am aware.

Another way of visualizing the Mormon Church as an ideological structure using geographical images is to imagine the evolution of a mountain range. First the mountains appear relatively quickly through tectonic or volcanic action, then gradually erode over hundreds of millions of years until almost nothing is left. Actually, erosion is already taking place even as the range is being lifted, but the range continues to rise because the lifting force is greater than the erosion. And some lifting or volcanic activity may continue to occur after the main thrust, but the erosive force is generally greater than the lifting force. In this allegory, erosion is the force of memetic selection. The more uniform the memetic landscape, the less memetic erosion, just as gently sloping hills are subject to less erosion over time than are craggy peaks and pinnacles.

Such is the case with the Mormon Church. Initially the church's ideological system was quite radical and categorical like the crags and sheer cliffs of a young mountain range. Now many beliefs have eroded and become more moderate. Take a look at today's General Conference talks. What is the church leadership talking about these days? Doctrine? The metaphysics of God? The nature of the pre-earth life and the degrees of glory after death? Or are they talking about how to be a good neighbor, prayer, and other mainstream Christain moral issues?

*****

The whole point of this article is that no one is "up there" guiding mormon ideology and culture or intentionally leading the members astray. Church leaders have little leeway to initiate changes, try new innovations, or play around with organizational structures -- even the Prophet and 12 Apostles! Everything is fixed by tradition and stipulated in handbooks with all the accompanying memes ("there must be uniformity in the Lord's church," "a church leader's job is to implement existing inspired church programs," "we must do things this way until we receive additional instructions from higher authorities," etc.). These rules form the REAL CORE of Mormonism as a social system, even though they are not derived from Mormon scripture! In fact, our interpretation of scripture is determined by these memes!