MEMETIC ENGINEERING
The consensus of forward-thinking authors I read is that humanity is overdue for a major upgrade in our collective mindsets, or in our funda-mentality.
Given the perverse pressures on this planet exerted by our teeming population—consuming resources voraciously, fouling the soil, the sea and the atmosphere, and wreaking high-tech havoc on each other—we require more than an attitude adjustment; we need radical reprogramming.
Short of genetic engineering, we need memetic reengineering. But how can that be done?
More simply: we need to change our minds—big time. Continuing business as usual is a lethal option, but how do we break the cycle of our deeply enculturated ways and means so as to imagine healthier, saner, wiser options and then to inculcate them as our new modes of operation? Call this procedure memetic engineering: the changing out of faulty memes for well-functioning memes.
Now that we’ve adoped the concept of memes as the psychic correlate to the genetic element of genes, we have a new way to imagine how our thoughts and attitudes are constituted of idea-units (memes) that enter minds as viruses invade bodies, replicating themselves through a population and altering behaviors accordingly.
But to the larger issue: what new memes does the world now need to be hosted by human psyches? Which are the failed memes to be up-rooted, and which memes are viable and vital for planting a New Humanity? Here are my proposals:
MEMES TO REMOVE
- rankism
- empire
- affluenza
- a dead universe
- reckless thrill-seeking
- raging animosity
- chronic anxiety
- depression/hopelessness
- emptiness/nihilism
TO BE REPLACED BY
- dignitarianism (Robert W. Fuller)
- community (David C. Korten)
- voluntary simplicity (Duane Elgin)
- a living universe (Duane Elgin)
- blissful serenity
- blissful serenity
- blissful serenity
- blissful serenity
- wholeness/holiness/health
*
