communist memes

Currently reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006), and stumbled across the following passage on p. 142:

Before we look at speculations about rituals as symbolic expressions of one deep need or belief or another, we should consider the case that can be made for rituals as memory-enhancement processes, designed by cultural evolution (and not by conscious designers!) to improve the copying fidelity of the very process of meme transmission they ensure. One of the clearest lessons of evolutionary biology is that early extinction lies in the future of any lineage in which the copying machinery breaks down, or even just degrades a little. Without high-fidelity copying, any design improvements that happen to occur in a lineage will tend to be frittered away almost immediately. Hard-won gains accumulated over many generations can be lost in a few faulty replications, the precious fruits of R&D [design work = research and development, my insertion] evaporating overnight. So we can be sure that would-be religious traditions that have no good ways of preserving their designs reliably over the centuries are doomed to oblivion.

Now, I am aware that Dennett is talking about organized religion that had centuries to develop or evaporate etc, but this passage just struck me as aptly describing part of what explains the vast amount and degree of repetition inherent in Chinese Communist texts from the 50s that I'm dealing with: the Anti-Hu Shi-campaign texts. I wonder in how far one can actually establish that repetition, which occurs within any ritualization process, is a kind of evolutionary automatism. If so: when does this automatism set in? How do people realize their need for a ritual to consolidate an idea, which is in turn surpassed and replaced by evolutionary "meme programming"? Something to think about.