The End Of Culture

For years now, I’ve collected ideas for fixing cultural drift, and tried to judge which seem more promising. Thankfully, my efforts seem to finally be converging. Let’s set aside the terrible or infeasible options of restarting cultural evolution either by collapsing society so far that we revive the simple harsh world of centuries ago, or by fragmenting our world into many sufficiently insular units. Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering.This general approach requires us to accomplish three big things, none of which are easy. Our specific options vary mainly in the order we do these, and in how much each helps the others. These three things to accomplish are: 1) learn more about how to manage culture, 2) create governance systems better able to achieve the goals we give them, and 3) change the values that we use to direct our governance…