We are living through an unprecedented period of human history.  Our population has exploded.  We are now nearing or surpassing planetary limits that call into question the future of the global economy.  And one problematic idea sits in the middle of it all.  That idea is that MONEY = DEBT and its close relative of CUMULATIVE INTEREST.   In order to break the 10,000 year cycle of empire and perpetual growth, we have to employ a different model for economic activity. Luckily, we have one — the ecosystem.

There is immense wealth in the world. It exists in the abundance of physical and biological inputs that have evolved and innovated across the 3.8 billion year history of life on Earth. Net Primary Production (the aggregate of biological output from all energy sources on the planet) has grown in time, along with a trajectory of increasing biodiversity punctuated by short periods of mass extinction.  This growth has been possible because there was more solar energy coming into the atmosphere than there were living creatures consuming it.  As the complexity and richness of Earth’s ecosystems grew in time, there were more calories of energy put to use by the increasing volume of biota in the world.  This is a form of growth that operates within natural limits.

Our current economic paradigm does not.

We need to understand how this living system works if we want to build a global economy that doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse (as all empires have done throughout history). Rather than creating “money from nothing” (e.g. money as debt created through issuance of loans), we can create it from something — specifically the energetic work embodied in human systems. In other words, we also need to treat economies like thermodynamic systems and measure the amount of “potential energy” available in the economy and reframe our metrics for value to reflect this true source of wealth.

Only then will we know how to measure (a) who has wealth to invest and (b) what it means to accurately and legitimately measure the creation of value through the flow of wealth. This is a long way of getting to the answer — which is that people can start businesses and engage in economic activity because they have a combination of commons-based assets that our current system undervalues. These include information commons in the form of knowledge and expertise; social commons in relationships and reputation in good standing; physical commons in raw materials and energy throughputs that can be activated; and so on.  When someone wants to create a new business, they merely need to measure the wealth-in-potential available in real ecosystems and then “activate” it through collaborative practices with those who steward the ecosystems.

This is a radically different way to think about economics than the implicit assumptions of scarcity (imposed by force) throughout the entire imperial age.  It is also how all economic activity has actually been done throughout human history. Its true nature has just been masked by faulty understandings of wealth that persist during periods of growth — then reveal their misguided assumptions during bust cycles and deterioration of cohesion that leads to societal collapse.

So our civilizations have always operated as ecosystems, just not resilient ones!

Growing a global economy based on ecological principles is not really that different in practice from how we’ve always done it. We engage those resources that have flow around us (through our social networks) and build the acumen to create something new.  As anecdotal examples, every company I have created was a “zero capital” startup. I had vision, skills, and knowledge to serve the needs of prospective clients — then brought together other collaborators with complementary skills that embody the “asset” ecosystem from which the company came forth into being.  We tapped our networks to spread the word and recruit clients, all the while acknowledging the many forms of wealth we could draw upon to achieve our goals.

This is really only different from “business as usual” at the semantic level (which is REALLY important!) in that it frames wealth as already existing and embedded in our social ecosystems. We merely activate the wealth that already exists and create value by moving it around.

Economic productivity arises when people operate as “network activators:, either the entrepreneurs themselves do  this or someone in their network providing a support or mentor role will need to. It should come as no surprise that those innovation ecosystems with high generativity (e.g. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Boston Corridor, Puget Sound, etc.) always have network activators in droves.

So the basic sequence for starting a business in the ecological perspective is this:

1. Have an idea to start an enterprise;
2. Identify assets in one’s ecosystem that can manifest this idea in nascent form;
3. Begin cultivating dialogue across existing relationships, then grow into new ones that are “loose connections” in one’s network;
4. Hone and refine the idea to match market structures and needs;
5. Iterate, prototype, and evolve until the kernel of the business is alive!

There may be infusions of money at different stages in the process. They will merely be recognized as available forms of wealth already existing in the ecosystem.

Note how in this model no one is making money off of interest and everyone shares in the risk to the extent that they invest time and resources in the endeavor. As a result, there is no added pressure to service debt (a non-productive flow of money AWAY from productive economic activity) and no one is trapped by a growing debt burden.  Thus they are able to focus on innovating to serve market needs and generate productive value for their customers — profoundly unlike how our financial system is set up today!

So we can break the cycle of debt and move toward a sustainable financial system by recognizing the fundamental truth that all economies are embedded in real-world ecosystems whether we realize it or not.  This enables us to reframe wealth as well-being that already exists as potential energy in the world.  And it further enables us to remove the incredible waste that is interest-based-on-debt (where someone has hoarded wealth to impose an artificial form of scarcity in order to wield power over those who become enslaved to debt servitude).  Thus we can put all our creative energy into doing things that create value for others — a capitalist solution that evolves beyond the myopic and dysfunctional version we are stuck with today.

I hope this helps clarify how easy it is to transform our financial system.  We don’t need debt for it to work.  In truth, we never have.

In the service of humanity,

Joe Brewer
Director, Cognitive Policy Works
Co-Founder, DarwinSF

If you’ve been on Facebook in the last two days, you have likely seen an explosion of red squares that look like this:

This image was created by a designer for the Human Rights Campaign and released earlier this week with a request that people share it to show their support for the rights of LGBT citizens.  Then something unexpected happened.  According to this source, George Takei posted the image as his Facebook profile pic and requested others to do the same.  In a matter of hours, millions of people followed suit.

Mr. Takei currently has 3,775, 263 “likes” on Facebook — making him a major hub in his social network.  This enables him to wield considerable influence as an innovation leader because his actions are seen and replicated by a large number of people all over the world.  George Takei is a powerful meme propagator who can launch new memes into the discourse and really make a splash.

And this is what has happened in the last 24 hours.  I posted a request on Facebook for friends to share their favorite mutations of the Red Square meme and gathered a sampling of images to share here.  Note how they all follow a common visual theme, yet enable anyone to alter and personalize it any way they like so long as the original meaning is preserved.

Why is this important?  Because it reveals how social movements arise and how they alter public perception, thus changing what is possible in terms of policy outcomes.  And because it enables us to see the power of strategic framing and meme analysis in real time.

The Red Equality Square is a visual pattern that contains incredible semantic richness.  For starters, it is minimalistic with only two colors and a simple layout of content.  This makes it easy to process and get the gist of what it is about very quickly — a vital design feature for release to the web where people typically scan vertical news feeds on social media platforms with large amounts of information in them.  It’s red color evokes a sense of danger, activating the “fight or flight” response that releases endorphins into the blood stream to more rapidly focus attention and assess possible threats.

One benefit of this neuronal activation of core emotions is that it increases memory recall and shuts out other information that may distract from threat detection.  Another is that it associates danger with the core theme of equality as we’ll see in a moment.

Everyone will readily recognize the symbol in this image — the equal sign we were all taught in school in order to perform basic math calculations.  This symbol tells us that any objects being compared with each other will have the same value.  1+1 = 2.  5+5 = 10.  And so on.

This basic procedure of making a comparison and finding both sides to be equal is a conceptual model for equality.  Its power arises through its simplicity and ubiquity.  Everyone knows what it means.  It is as self-evident as any truth we have ever been taught.

This evokes a feeling of commonsense insight, the “duh” moment that asserts similarity as being so obvious that any school child will get it.  So we can already begin to see the power of this visual cue for evoking the moral intuition that all people are created equal (one of the most powerful memes in US cultural history) and so should be granted the same protections and rights no matter how else they might be different.

And the red color tells us that this fundamental right is under attack.  We are in danger of losing something precious that runs to the core of what it means to be an American.  Now is the time to take a stand — all you Momma Bears and Poppa Bears — to defend the heart of our democracy.

Emotional sentiments associated with human dignity, mutual respect, and compassion all come through in a rush.  There is no formal argument, no facts to persuade us, or any possibility for rebuttal.  It couldn’t be more plain.  And so the Equality Frame is evoked through the power of design.  So much richness packed into a rudimentary communication vehicle!

Clearly this is a powerful communication vehicle for changing the discourse around gay marriage and a whole lot more.  As the Equality Frame gets activated in the minds of people — bringing with it the moral sentiments around human dignity and compassion for our fellow citizens — it alters our social reality by telling us that this is how everyone around us feels about the treatment of homosexuals.  Everyone who feels this way gets a steady stream of reinforcement as they scroll through their news feed on Facebook.

It is this capacity for a meme to alter consciousness that makes the Red Equality Square a textbook example for how social change occurs.  The stages go like this:

1. A growing sense of concern and unrest lays dormant in the minds of many people.  They feel frustrated about the state of the world and meagerly hope that it will someday change.
2. Like-minded people seek each other out and cultivate diverse social networks around shared ideals, interests, passions, and lifestyles.
3. These networks evolve and grow in a decentralized manner with some individuals gaining many more connections than others, resulting in the presence of key influencers who can operate as communication hubs when the moment is ripe.
4. A powerful communication vehicle is created that captures shared angst in a simple and powerful way, in this case an image of a red square with an equal sign that has been posted to the internet.
5. One or several key influencers take on the role of movement leadership, role-modeling a simple behavior that others can easily follow.
6. Ease of following creates a situation where followers are themselves leaders, replicating the behavior of the original influencer while also bringing their own unique personalities to life by mutating the message without compromising its core meaning.
7. As more leaders step forth, a pattern of activation becomes evident and many people become visible as part of a movement.
8. These collective actions alter the social landscape by introducing a new perceived reality — there are so many of us who feel this way!
9. A feeling of inevitability takes hold as the message become ubiquitous and gains the feel of being universally shared.
10. This is the tipping point that changes what is possible and irrevocably alters the course of cultural evolution.

The internet makes it easy to form networks and introduce viral media.  But all of the right ingredients need to be there for it to activate.  There have to be shared sentiments and values, common concerns about wrongs in the world, social networks of connected people, an easy-to-spread message, and a catalyzing event that sets the whole thing off.

This complex web of social change is the subject of study in the field of meme science.  Only by combining knowledge from cognitive science, complexity theory, network analysis, communication design, and media analysis can insights like these be revealed.

I hope this helps you better understand what is happening this week.  And that it empowers you to stimulate world-changing social change around the issues you care about.  Please let me know if I can be of service in your efforts.

Sincerely,

Joe Brewer
Director, Cognitive Policy Works
Co-Founder, DarwinSF

This video offers an overview of what we found:

And here is the full report:

(Click this image to view the report)

Read, share and tell us what you think!

Joe Brewer & Lazlo Karafiath
The Climate Meme Project

Throughout the last several decades — the entirety of adult political life for most active citizens — we have been plagued with lies and deceit, anger and betrayal, a toxic polarization that has rotted us to the core.  Our civic body (metaphorically speaking) has Stage 4 cancer that has spread through our bones and infects all our soft tissues.

An honest doctor would tell us that our lifestyle is killing us.  Time is of the essence if we are to intervene and restore health to the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free.  Not only must we deal with violent rampages of gun violence, profound levels of money corruption in our governing institutions, and myriad economic woes, but we have to do so in the midst of global-scale climate disruptions, resource scarcity, viral diseases that know no bounds, ongoing threats of terrorist attacks, and all of the other systemic vulnerabilities that come with living in a globalized world.

The question that lurks unasked in America is this:  Can we heal our political sickness before it’s too late?  Is it even possible to recover from the post traumatic stress that now cripples so many among us?

This is a vital question indeed, for not only must the United States get its house in order for the health and well-being of our people, but we need to step up and fill the global leadership vacuum left empty by decades of short-sighted self-interest and national greed.  The world has looked to us for a moral vision and we have delivered to them a nightmare of perpetual war, economic conquest, and financial collapse.  Clearly much more is at stake here than our reputation in the world.

So let’s look at this question through the eyes of a family therapist.  She would tell us that the foundation for emotional health comes from having strong bonds of support from our caregivers early in life.  This attachment theory of psychological resilience is one of the most robust findings in all of 20th Century behavioral research.  It tells us that children who receive consistent care and attention will have the core competencies necessary as adults to ride through hardship when it arises.

Perhaps she would employ the highly successful therapeutic technique of cognitive behavioral therapy to help us deconstruct those stories of ourselves that perpetuate harm and focus on goals that enable us to recast ourselves in new identities that build on our natural strengths.  This would help us see how the cultural mythologies of rugged individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and self-marginalization only reinforce our stories of victimhood and do little to break the cycle of pain that keeps us mired in harmful relationships.

She would also look for signs of chronic stress to help us deal better with the very real anxiety we carry around with us after a lifetime of bullying, name calling, and social violence that too many of us have been exposed to.  This would help us to acknowledge the pain others around us feel and release our anger toward those ghosts that haunt us from our pain-ridden past — a kind of “truth and reconciliation” process of letting go and looking to the future.

But of course, none of this is happening now.  Instead we remain mired in a political system that continually denies the basic truth that we are and have always been a nation Governed by the People, of the People, and for the People. This truth is masked in the lies of media pundits who tell us not to trust our representatives.  It is hidden by the very real corruption that we allowed to happen on our watch.  Yet it is still there for anyone to see, if only we would trust in our collective power to alter our government as we see fit.

I am always struck by the gap in awareness between obvious forms of corruption on the one hand (the Citizens United ruling from the Supreme Court that gives free reign for corporations to influence elections being a clear-cut example), and the legal protections  on the other that we have as citizens to introduce amendments to our state and national constitutions.  For example, we could cast down corporate personhood with the strike of a pen by mobilizing a national referendum to update our US Constitution.  The same could be said for clean elections, universal health care, a price signal for carbon emissions, and any of several other strategic initiatives that would carry the United States fully into the 21st Century.

We have become political “battered wives” who remain in a violent marriage to stories of powerlessness and self-blame.  If only we would face our secret fears in order to take a stand for personal dignity, pack our bags, get the kids in the car, and drive to our mother’s house.  Acts like this always feel impossible until we do them.  The same is true for healing our body politic.

The truth of the matter is that our world IS filled with threats, many of them of our own making.  If we fail to act in time our world will become so turbulent and change so quickly that the very fabric of civilization could be torn apart in our lifetimes.  That is what global warming is really about… and it is scary as hell.

So let’s begin our walk together down the road of healing and discover those stories that have been kept hidden as whispered dreams of a better tomorrow, give them voice, and sing in a great choir of reunion.  The last time our national Union was threatened it was the economic violence of slavery that threatened us and a great Civil War ensued.  We came through stronger and better after that trial of moral character than any at the time dared to believe.  The same can be said of what we are going through today.

Nothing less than the sacred soul of America is at stake here.  Either we dig deep within ourselves and find the resolve to rise above the tides.  Or we drown in the misery of our self-loathing.

I for one stand in the light of humanity and step firmly apart from the shadows.  What will you do?

To begin we’ll need a common definition of complexity science.  Let’s start with a general one that makes intuitive sense and then dig into the details from there:

“Complexity science is the study of things that surprise us.  When a system rapidly changes in ways we don’t expect, there is something going on that cannot be reduced to a simple explanation based on one of its parts.  This system is behaving with complexity.”

One of my favorite examples is the popping of popcorn.  Take a corn kernel and slowly heat it.  For a while nothing changes — until something surprising happens — in an explosion of sound it POPS and is forever transformed into a fluffy white blob with very different properties than the original kernel of corn.

Complexity is the study of how the corn changes from one state to another.  Emphasis is given to its internal dynamics as an object that is being heated.  This gives us one of the important properties of a complex system — that it is constantly driven far from equilibrium until something unexpected happens.

This is the way life works for all living creatures.  Being alive is a dynamic process that only exists while the organism is far from equilibrium.  The only way it can be unchanging is to be dead.  The constant flow of nutrients and energy keep the organism dynamic and alive.  Any study of its internal dynamics will be in the realm of complexity science.

This is one of those questions that often takes the form of “Joe, how do you actually do your work?  What are the steps?  How do you know you are right when you come to a conclusion?”  I LOVE this question.  It opens up the conversation into a web of personal reflections and formal methodologies — where the magic really happens.

The way complexity researchers operate is to build a model for the system they are studying and then test to see if it captures something important about the real-world phenomenon they want to understand.  This often takes the form of a simple mathematical relationship that gets at the essence of what the real system is about.

For example, a person trained in physics will be familiar with the mathematics that describes how a massive object attached to a spring will behave if the spring is stretched and released.  The object will begin to move up and down (or back and forth) in periodic waves that get smaller as friction sucks energy away and releases it as heat.  They might want to study something much more complex like the collective behavior of the Chicago Stock Exchange — where they lack a simple model that captures its essence — and so they look at the behavior of individual traders to see if any part of the mass-and-spring model might apply.

In this way, the researcher builds a “bag of tools” for studying different systems.  They familiarize themselves with different mathematical models and start to tinker with data from a real system to figure out which model (or combination of models) best explains what they see.  The models are tested against empirical data from the real-world system to help the researcher learn whether her assumptions about the applicability of the model are correct or if they were thinking about it in the wrong way.

At this point in the conversation, I usually explain the most valuable skill I learned while studying physics in college.  It is not the knowledge of physics, say the way electric charge works in atomic physics or how massive objects behave in a strong gravitational field, but rather the way a person sets up the problem so that their solution actually works!

This is the real bread-and-butter of the physicist.  It is why most students of physics go through a period of time when their grades are really low.  I experienced this in my first year as an undergraduate when most grades in my general physics class were curved because the highest score on a test was only 40%.  It wasn’t until after a year of coursework that student scores would improve dramatically — not because advanced physics students are “smarter” — but because they have gone through a learning process where they figure out how to correctly set up a problem.

And now — no matter what kind of problem I am dealing with — I know how to check my assumptions and figure out which analytic tool is right for the job.  That is the true sign of a well-trained physicist.  It is also what enables a complexity researcher to figure out which models are “good contenders” for a particular real-world situation.

The researcher uses the models to explore how the system behaves under different conditions.  They may do this in order to predict future outcomes of the real system, as someone who studies arbitrage in financial markets might attempt to do so they can hedge their bets on prospective future prices.  But prediction is often elusive in complex systems — just think of the weather in your home town — there are limits to how far into the future we can trust our predictions.  In these situations, it is more important to characterize the dynamics of the system so that we can explain what is going on than it is to predict it outright.

A great deal of confusion comes from the misunderstanding that science is first and foremost about predicting the future.  Most complex systems cannot be predicted — their internal dynamics are just too sensitive to unknown factors that cannot be measured in practice — and so what is really needed is an understanding of why the system can’t be predicted.  The weather is a good example.  Sometimes it is just as important to know why we can’t predict how much cloud cover there will be in Central Park two weeks from next Saturday as it is to gauge the likelihood of freezing rain late tonight.

In the early days of complexity research, a discovery was made about the fundamental unpredictability of systems that is now known as Chaos Theory.  It was first demonstrated with a numerical model for weather forecasting that was based on the physics of fluid flows — known as the Navier-Stokes Equation — which is notoriously sensitive to uncertainty.  Even when the mathematics was assumed to be completely deterministic, meaning that perfect knowledge of the system at any point in time would allow a person to calculate exactly what the system will do at any future or past point in time, will still be unpredictable in practice if there is any uncertainty at all.

The measure of how unpredictable a system is can be gained by calculating future states of the system for one set of starting inputs, then change them slightly and run the calculation again.  After doing this for a large number of starting values, it becomes possible to measure the statistical spread of future trajectories for the system and how far apart they are relative to their starting conditions.  A “chaotic” system is one whose future states diverge so rapidly from small changes in starting inputs that future errors overtake the range of accuracy — making the future state effectively unknowable shortly after beginning the computation.

The way a particular system distributes ignorance in this manner is a key element for explaining how the system behaves.  It is positive knowledge to know how quickly our confidence in future predictions goes away.  Entire classes of systems can be lumped together based on the rate at which ignorance spreads.

By now I hope you are beginning to see how complexity research is done in practice.  The researcher builds and tests models to figure out how they behave under different conditions.  The knowledge they gain allows them to explain how real-world systems work and what is knowable (and unknowable) about them in principle.  This kind of knowledge can be extremely valuable.

Every example I’ve given so far is for physical systems.  This is not by accident.  The typical way that models are tested for fitness is to gather measurements from the real world that empirically ground us and constrain our theories to what is really happening.  A weather model will make use of temperature and pressure observations to ensure that numerical relationships behave like real physical processes.  This is how the researcher discovers flawed assumptions and makes improvements to their model.

One way they do this is called Scale Analysis.

Scale analysis is the practice of taking all known factors that contribute to making changes in a system and estimating how much of the overall behavior that each one can explain.  When studying the weather, for example, it is helpful to know how much the Coriolis Force (from the Earth’s rotation) is contributing to the rotation of a supercell thunderstorm.  Heat introduced when water vapor condenses into liquid drops will also play a role — but how much?  Scale analysis tells us which factors must be included to paint an adequate picture of the system and how it changes in time.  Some factors can be excluded without making much of a difference.  Knowing which to keep and which to throw away is all part of a strong research methodology.

For physical systems, we can simply go out and make measurements: Coriolis Force = X.  Heat Exchange = Y.  But for social systems there is an additional layer of interpretation that makes it difficult to know if what we measure is real or not.  This is the main reason why complexity research has not been done as much for social systems — our implicit beliefs and value judgments tend to bias us without our knowing it.

Take for example the Rational Actor Model that assumes human behavior is dictated by self-interest and greed.  It is built on several ideological assumptions that could be tested to see if they are correct.  (When behavioral scientists tested these assumptions, they proved that they were incorrect… leading two psychologists to receive a Nobel Prize in economics for their discoveries!)  But for decades the self-interest assumptions were held as sacrosanct.  They biased interpretation without ever going through the scientific process of falsification through testing.

And so we must take special care that our philosophical assumptions are empirically responsible — grounded in the scientific method of theory-testing and falsification — if we want to know how reliable our measures of human behavior actually are.  It is in this domain of empirically responsible philosophy that I have worked for many years.  I have found it vital to keep myself up-to-date on new research in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and a host of other related fields if I want my models for social systems to be robust against the data one can readily bring forth to challenge my conclusions.

The applications of complexity research to social systems are just waiting to be developed.  Recent advances in user-centered design have helped a great deal by bringing the higher standards of empirical methods to bear on the study of human interaction and experience.  What we need to do is formalize our understandings of what a complex system is, how models can be built and tested to explain them, and where our philosophical assumptions are grounded in the model-building process so that we can advance in leaps and bounds.

Two years ago I proposed that we create a new field of science focusing on Human Interface Design for Global Change that expresses where I intend to go with my scholarly work and design practice.  This work is evolving rapidly through collaborative partnerships with DarwinSF, the International Centre for Earth Simulation, Cognitive Policy Works, the Global Leadership Lab, and several others who strive to effect global change.

Let’s have a conversation about this.  Please share your thoughts below or send me an email and let’s see where this goes…

In this article, I will lay out an analytic framework for making sense of ideology and worldview for climate activists. Think of it as a kind of “laying the tracks” on which to build inroads into the undiscovered country of the human mind. My approach will be to show how ideology operates like an ecosystem comprised of cultural units known as “memes”. In order to change a culture it is necessary to introduce new memes that out-compete the current ones. This requires a different way of thinking about culture through the lens of evolutionary principles. Let’s begin, shall we?

When we begin to think of ideologies as living beings that want to survive and reproduce, it gets easier to think about culture as an ecosystem of predatory ideas, symbiotic beliefs, and parasitic values that increase in complexity in the same waves of succession that enable a shrubby woodland to transform itself into a mature forest over time. At any given moment, the environment is filled with available niches for specific functional roles to be filled.

During a time of food scarcity, for example, the ideology that lays blame in a way that resonates with innocent victims will be able to spread across the human population. It will serve the dual functions of (1) reducing anxiety in an uncertain world (by offering feelings of order and control); and (2) being a conduit for releasing anger (in the self-righteous attacks on those who have been painted as the evil creators of harm).

This is why there’s no point arguing with Fox News. They offer a worldview that blames liberal elites for the deterioration of society. Their authoritarian ideology brings much needed coherence and order to a hostile world. Attacking them with countervailing facts won’t do any good at all — because such an approach does nothing to alleviate anxiety or channel anger — only a replacement morality tale can do this.

The same can be said for the anxiety and anger caused by the impacts of industrial civilization. Only a worldview that fits the psychological landscape of needs can replace the mythologies of free market capitalism, perpetual economic growth, and humans as exploiters of natural resources that treat nature as outside the realm of economics. The only way to change culture is to cultivate new memes that replace the current ones.

The first thing you’ll need to know is that ideologies operate according to the rules of cultural evolution. Humans are unique in the fact that we are able to create semantic filters for making sense of the world built on the conceptual capacities of our unusual brains. Our enlarged neocortex — the frontal lobe that stores massive amounts of information as “activation networks” of neurons — gives us an ability to create elaborate cultural systems like no other animal on Earth. Our biological nature makes us a product of our evolutionary history as mammalian primates who walk upright and live in cohesive social groups. What makes us stand apart from the other primates is the way that our minds have become a breeding ground for ideas, giving them a life of their own.

We’ll need to make a “foreground/background” shift and think about ideas as organisms that use humans as a vehicle for their own transmission. This frees us from the constraints of biology that require all organism traits to be shaped by natural selection in order to replicate the genes of the species. What meme science tells us is that the ideas themselves can be replicators — spreading according to their own selection rules regardless of whether they benefit their human host.

This conceptual move allows us to see why people sometimes act against their own best interests. We already know from the massive evidence of psychological and marketing research that people don’t operate according to the rules of self-interest. What this front-back shift does is allow us to explain why… ideologies seek to replicate themselves, even if it harms the reproductive prospects of their human hosts.

This is why people will lay their lives on the line for an idea — be it the nationalism that causes so many young men and women to step onto the front lines of war or the religious sentiments that lead jihadists to strap bombs to themselves in order to attract followers to their cause. The cultural DNA of ideas are what we call “memes” and they follow their own rules of adaptation and fitness. It may not be beneficial for poor people to support elite financial policies that extract wealth from their labors to be hoarded by the rich, but it is in the interest of the worldview that asserts that this is both natural and good to infect as many minds as possible. Clearly, those memes are doing quite well in today’s political environment here in the United States!

By now it should be clear that climate activists need to think about ideologies as ecosystems of memes. This will allow them to analyze the cultural landscape and reveal functional needs that current pathological ideologies fulfill. Only then can alternative memes be introduced strategically and effectively.

The framework we have developed at DarwinSF looks like this:

(Click to enlarge)

We begin by mapping the meme landscape to discover both which memes are present and how they relate to each other. This is where we reveal how the various ideologies compete for mind space in a given culture. Some are predisposed to be supportive of one another while others will be outright hostile and parasitic. Strategic actions cannot be planned in the absence of this knowledge.

Then we link to human ecology to show why successful ideologies thrive in the minds of people — by fulfilling psychological needs within the constraints of human biology — while others flounder and remain on the margins. This is where a pathway forward reveals itself in the analysis. We begin to see which elements of a faulty ideology must be changed so that it can evolve and adapt to meet the needs of its host.

And this leads us to a design of transition stories that tweak the language of the climate discourse into a meme-worthy composition of ideas and beliefs. Now we are ready to engage the hearts and minds of people with the tools that have been created during this journey of discovery. The memes we’ve found that work for humanity in the current context can be crafted as “attack stories” that weaken oppositional ideologies alongside “dream stories” that empower people to participate in the making of a better world.

Climate activists everywhere can participate in this effort. It is probably obvious to state that cultural change is difficult and will only work through the coordinated efforts of like-minded people. The ‘memes-eye-view’ presented here makes explicit what it means to be like-minded — those minds that harbor and nourish the same memes are built on shared values, beliefs, and vision.

You can get involved in many ways. Here are a few that come immediately to mind:

1. Share these memes with others!

Our memes have brought us to this place, with powerful insights about the evolution of culture. You can spread these memes by passing this article along to your friends, talking about them in conversations you have with colleagues, incorporating them into your own writings and presentations. Feel free to credit us… or don’t! All that matters is that these memes take on a life of their own.

2. Join the Climate Meme Project!

Our memes can evolve together by remaining in continuous dialogue. You can support our crowdfunding project, sign up for our newsletter, post comments below, hunt for memes, become an action partner, and friend us on Facebook. This way your mind will be connected with ours in a shared meme space.

3. Build on these themes!

Bring your own expertise to bear on this body of work by creating materials that build upon, challenge, and improve on our thinking. You’ll be spreading memes with every word typed, video produced, song vocalized, and graphic visualized. This is extremely important because we know that memetic change will only come from a buzzing diversity of creative practice.

I hope this introduction to the memetics of ideology brings you greater insight and empowers you to create ripples of change in the cultures you are working with. Please let us know how you’d like to see materials like this developed further so that it becomes even more useful.

Thanks for dropping by to play with our memes!

The evolutionary principles of variation, inheritance, and selection have shaped the artifacts of culture in much the same way as the biological attributes of our unique human bodily nature. Our evolutionary history is what made us into hairless primates who walk upright and live in complex social arrangements. In the same manner, our cultures have evolved according to the cultural laws of biology with their own idiosyncratic histories of inheritance and adaptation.

This can be seen in the architectural forms of buildings, as suggested above, and also in other key arenas of society such as the style of hats we wear or our preferred ways to express ourselves through song and dance. Cultures that arose around cyclic concepts for space and time have tended to cultivate tribal rituals that take place in a circle — such as those in many North American societies that arise around a central fire or the drum circles of Africa’s indigenous tribes. Others have evolved along linear notions of causal events that gave way to a historic continuum of passing generations. Examples include the lineages presented in the Old Testament and the westward progression of “manifest destiny” that lead to a full conquest of North America by the burgeoning United States.

While this conclusion holds true for many aspects of culture, it lacks rigor and completeness when placed under the scrutiny of our modern-day institutions of mass media and the communications technologies they use to set agendas and spread particular ideologies. Vast networks of think tanks, television and radio outlets, newspapers and websites are routinely orchestrated to promote one ideological vision of the world over others in the grand battle of political and economic orthodoxy. Agenda-setting is a professional industry for people trained in marketing, policy analysis, communications, community organizing, and so much more.

This begs the question whether the spread of ideas is a natural phenomenon, guided by physical laws like the wind currents that carry a falling leaf to its final resting place or is it that cogent worldviews arise through the intentional design of media architects seeking to establish their own agendas? Both approaches seem to hold a kernel of truth about the evolution of culture.

So which is it? Does culture arise naturally with a fitness to local landscapes? Or is it sculpted and built like a grand cathedral according to some preordained plan? Even at a cursory glance it should be clear that the answer is of the both/and variety. Ideas spread by the culmination of both happenstance and intent, bringing alive the opportunity to ask ourselves how shall we guide the direction of our societies?

In these times — when planetary-scale challenges confront us on unprecedented scales — we must cultivate deep knowledge of the evolutionary processes that enable cultures to arise, persist, and adapt over time. It is necessary that we ask the difficult questions about which parts of culture are well suited to our current predicaments and which no longer serve us, even if they were “tried and true” for a previous time.

It is in the spirit of this inquiry that I would like to suggest a helpful framework developed by Jonnie Hughes in On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (And Ourselves), presented graphically below. He offers a way of thinking about the evolution of culture through the dual lenses of Darwinian natural selection — those ideas with adaptive fitness will survive and flourish — and the Lamarckian notion of improvement by learning across one’s lifespan.

(Adapted from Jonnie Hughes book on cultural evolution)

Hughes develops the example of dog breeding to demonstrate the synergistic nature of cultural evolution. The first dogs came into being at the meeting place of human settlements and wild wolf populations. Those wolves that lingered nearby would benefit from gathering food scraps tossed out by ancestral villagers tens of thousands of years ago. Over time, an “artificial” selection process offered advantages to those wolves most inclined to be docile and tame — benefiting them more than their wilder counterparts as they could interact more frequently with human food providers. Gradually, the first domesticated dogs were forged by this mostly natural and unguided selection process.

Later it became desirable for human hunters to selectively breed dogs for helpful traits. In this manner, companion animals were pruned for behavioral features that enabled them to work livestock, participate in hunts, and provide loyal friendships between human and canine. This process was actively directed by people and therefore took place more quickly than the haphazard domestications of prior generations.

Eventually there came a time when breeding took a turn towards the fashionable — producing pedigree animals from a highly selective effort to remove undesirable features and produce the “perfect” cocker spaniel, border collie, bulldog, etc. This process made use of Darwinian evolution ( with natural variation, heredity, and selection taking place) but it was guided by designer minds as people crafted dogs into models of idealized biological traits.

And now — with the advent of synthetic biology through breakthroughs in biochemistry and genetics — it is becoming possible to create new genes (and thus wholly unnatural traits) in the spirit of genetically modified plants and animals to create “super pedigrees” unlike anything nature might have produced on its own.

In the same fashion, we can begin to think about the evolution of culture. As we enter this new era of planetary limits and an exploding population, how shall we build upon the natural proclivities of cultural evolution to “select” for those societal traits that we deem most beneficial for our future prosperity? This is not an academic question. It is of central importance to the health and — dare I say survival — of our species in the 21^st Century.

My partner, Lazlo Karafiath, and I have recently launched a new company called DarwinSF to apply the tools of cultural evolution to the great challenges confronting humanity today. Our first effort is a Climate Meme Project focusing on the discourse surrounding global warming, where we have already initiated a research endeavor to map the meme landscape on this vital topic. Think of it as the cultural correlate to those biological features selected for by dog breeders.

We may not be ready to design a “pedigree culture” that everyone agrees on, but we do ardently believe that the only way to accelerate the adoption of new economic models and political systems that serve us in the new world is to take a mindful approach built upon a robust understanding of cultural evolution.

It is with this much more modest, yet still bold and ambitious, mission that we have begun in earnest. No longer should we be satisfied with haphazard approaches to cultural change — especially with the fierce urgency of planetary crises like global warming pressing down upon us. It is now possible to engage in the mindful design of stories about our relationship with the natural world and the morality of those roles we might choose to play within it.

In times past, it was deemed desirable to mindlessly extract resources in order to accumulate material wealth and power with no eye toward the future. Now that we have more than seven billion people living on this Earth and are reaching or surpassing all planetary boundaries necessary for our future survival, it is imperative that we re-envision our place in this world so that we become stewards of planetary well-being before it’s too late.

And so I call upon you to take seriously the need for mindful design. Let us now set our collective intentions to remain alive and flourishing upon the Earth. This will require deep insights into the principles of cultural evolution. And it will necessitate a critical evaluation of our assumptions and beliefs regarding our relationship with the rest of nature, of which we are but a part.

We are now well beyond the cautious safeguards of planetary balance. Only a mindful approach to cultural evolution will provide the opportunity to save ourselves before it is too late.

How would the world be different?  What would become possible for you personally in your life?  How would nations and corporations invest our newfound wealth differently if we all started from a clean slate?  Problems like global warming and extreme poverty would instantly become financial drops in the bucket—easily tackled with fair contracts and forward-looking investments.  The structural debts of entrenched subsidies, invested capital, tax havens, and trade agreements that keep them from being addressed would simply no longer exist.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Well just such a fantasy used to be standard practice in the Hebrew Tradition throughout the early days of their civilization.  They held a great Jubilee every seven years to erase all debt and end economic slavery.  Accounts kept on stone tablets were broken.  Those stored on papyrus were burned to ash.  Slaves were returned to their families.  Everyone was given a fresh start.  (This tradition is being revived today through the Occupy-inspired project, Rolling Jubilee, that has already abolished more than $9,000,000 in US debt for everyday citizens.)

What you may not know is that debt arose recently on the human stage.  Throughout more than 99% of our history we have not even had a concept for debt.  (The interested reader can pick up David Graeber’s excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years for the full story.)

Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies reveal that there were no barter systems, no currencies to use for money, and — in the absence of these cultural artifacts — there was no debt.  With all the great variation across cultures one might expect from ethnographic research, the anthropologists found that some tribal communities engaged in “gift economies” where status arises from how generous a person after they have acquired wealth, while others have remained egalitarian and non-hierarchical for thousands of years by sharing their food and materials based on the principles of “from each as they are able, to each as they need.”

This belies the great misunderstanding about communism that treats it as a state-centric governing system, when in truth it is the foundational sentiment of any community that builds upon the trust and good will of social relations between people who know and depend upon one another — a condition that has held for all hunter-gatherer societies throughout our long 200,000 year history as a species.

Pick up any economics textbook at random and you will find a classic (and false) “just so” story about the need for barter systems to have money.  They all go something like this:  Steve has potatoes and needs some shoes.  Bob has shoes but does not need any potatoes.  They are unable to directly exchange goods due to this mismatch of need, and so must introduce a money system to preserve the value of currency across multiple exchanges that enable Steve to sell his potatoes to Sue and acquire money that he can then use to pay Bob for a pair of shoes.  What this simple narrative conceals is the broad evidence from ancient cultures studied by anthropologists that no such problem arises in this way.

What really happens is that a warring society has arisen somewhere and is in a mode of conquest — to get a sense of how this happens, read my article about psychopaths and agrarian city states.  When this burgeoning empire conquers new land, the ruler imposes a system of taxation on the local populace to pay for the costs of war.  This imposition of scarcity, by extracting resources from the local population to be hoarded by the warrior chieftain, is what leads to the emergence of barter systems and — in some instances — the introduction of a money system and coinage by the ruler.

In the absence of war and conquest, hunter-gatherer societies do not spontaneously create barter systems.  Instead they share more or less equally within their tribe and only trade with other tribes through highly ritualized and often conflict-ridden exchanges that take place when two tribes come together for a brief interaction.  The pathway that does lead to the emergence of barter systems takes place in agrarian societies where some kind of accounting system has been created to track debts.  And from these accounting systems we do find that debt is present.

So where does debt come from if it isn’t naturally a part of human societies?  Again it is the imposition of scarcity by the ruling class — designed to extract and hoard wealth in the hands of a powerful elite — that creates the notion of debt.  Does this sound familiar in today’s context?  Many countries were “modernized” throughout the 20th Century by introducing market systems that structure debt into the economies of newly founded nations.  These nations now must pay tributes — in the form of interest payments — to external banks that extract wealth from the poor countries and hoard it in the coffers of wealthy countries.

Stated plainly, debt is created when a powerful group of people impose scarcity upon another group of people who have been conquered.  This is the root cause of poverty.  It is the destabilizing force of unequal societies that breeds civil unrest and revolution.  Thus the need for Hebrew kings to introduce Jubilee.  They knew that a revolution might cause the people to rise up and clear their own debts, while also uprooting the monarchy from power.  In order to preserve their power base, they would routinely erase the debt and start again.

The astute reader may already be asking, “What does this story about the creation of debt say about the religious use of moral accounting?”  You may have noticed that all the world religions have at their core a transactional relationship between God and humans — where each person owes a debt to their creator and must pay it either by relinquishing sin from their lives or by returning to their maker upon death.

This economic transaction frame for moral accounting is not present in all human societies.  Those hunter-gatherer tribes practicing the ethic of distribution based on need have no concept for trading an eye-for-an-eye.  Nor do they see a gift as something to be repaid, expressing disgust at the insult of treating their generosity in such a transactional manner.

Instead what anthropologists have found is that debt-based morality is only present in societies that already have accounting systems and also engage routinely in barter and monetary exchange.  In other words, this moral accounting system is a product of war and conquest and not a natural part of human society.  So it may help to keep this in mind the next time you feel a debt to one of your friends, society, or your maker.

We are living in a time when too many of our financial resources are allocated to non-productive activities — principally the accumulation of wealth by “making money with money” and a myopic focus on economic activities that service our massive debts.  This is why people work at jobs they hate.  It is why investments are not being made in renewable energy, public education, the arts, health care, or the eradication of poverty.  We have built a massive financial house of cards on debt — with money itself coming into being when loans are taken out, a pool that grows exponentially due to the interest that accompanies it — and so we are not able to bring consumer culture to an end or focus our creative talents on planetary sustainability.

By the way, this is exactly what my friends at /The Rules are trying to address in their global mobilization effort.

So if we were to erase all debt, the 7 billion people alive today could focus on their passions.  We could all come together to address global threats — be they resource-based like the scarcity of fresh water or peaking of global oil production; or cultural like the loss of spiritual meaning in the secularization of society or the soullessness of employment drudgery that comes from working long hours at a mind-numbing job.

What comes to my mind is the way cities try to implement broad solutions to address economic development, transportation, resource management, social justice, and environmental concerns.  They must operate within constrained budgets that keep draining further without a clear end in sight.  I imagine what would be possible if everyone was able to set out on their own intellectual and experiential journeys without the fear of a debt-collector coming to their door.  How then would the peoples of this world choose to live out their lives?

Perhaps you have your own dreams of a better world for you and your loved ones.  What comes to mind for you?  This is not merely an academic question, by the way, because we each participate in the social realities that are lent our beliefs, our actions, and our obligations.  If we were to collectively decide that our debts are no more, they would cease to exist.

This is because what we take to be real in many respects becomes so as a self-fulfilling prophesy.  We each have the power to be accountants — defining “the real” by choosing what to measure and imbuing it with significance.  In this way, the Gross Domestic Product was claimed as an economic altar for measuring the progress of civilization in the 20th Century.  Perhaps in the 21st we will replace it with Gross National Happiness or some other novel metric for capturing the essence of our values and purpose as a civilization on this Earth.

So I’ll ask you again… imagine if all debt were wiped away when the Mayan Calendar comes to an end this Friday?  Let your thoughts drift and see where they go!

Update:  The interested reader may enjoy this article as well — Beyond Scarcity: Re-Inventing Wealth in a Progressive World.

Pick any of the great challenges confronting humanity today and ask yourself “Is the quality of public discourse good enough to address it?” You’ll find that for every single issue — be it global warming, resource depletion, chronic poverty, or what have you – the conversation is failing us. We simply are not elevating the ideas that we’ll need to save ourselves from collapse and ruin.

Luckily, this is a problem that can readily be solved. At its core, it is an issue of (1) determining which ideas are poised to spread and which are not; together with (2) an understanding of which ideas we will need to spread in order to implement solutions that can scale. If we can figure these two pieces out it will be sufficient to spread vital innovations that can protect us from systemic harm.

Sounds simple enough, right? Then why aren’t we doing it? Partly, the answer is that many people still don’t understand the basics of meme science. We don’t realize that the spread of ideas can be studied in the same way that we research the spread of diseases in a population of people. You are all meme researchers when you watch your friends’ internet memes spreading on Facebook. All you need to do is realize that every one of us is an idea propagator. Herein lies our true power to transform the world. The absence of this realization — and the empowerment it creates –is what has kept past approaches taken by advocates of sustainability, social justice, and shared prosperity from reaching tipping points and all the sweeping changes that follow.

But of course, there’s more going on than the fact that people aren’t aware of the cultural analysis tools that would reveal important insights about the spread of ideas. Until recently there just wasn’t a way to track the dynamics of ideas in society. This shortcoming is now being remedied by the rise of the internet and the practices of crowdsourcing. We are drowning in a flood of data streams from Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, government databases, and other pools of information that can be mined to reveal patterns of thought and behavior.

It is in this new mix of social sharing and data analytics that we can finally begin to track the spread of ideas in a rigorous way. The fields of research that enable us to do so include:

• Network Science :: Studying relationships between and across pieces of information, be it social connections or system feedbacks.
• Complexity Research :: Exploring of the inherent dynamic features of systems that change in a nonlinear fashion.
• Evolutionary Biology :: Discovering of the way information spreads from one generation to the next in biological and social systems.
• Signal Processing :: Revealing patterns in the noise that tell us how changes arise and spread in dynamic systems.
• Cognitive Semantics :: Combining insights from psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics to reveal how ideas “stick” in the mind and arise as patterns of thought/behavior.

As fields such as these continue to mature, we are able to take an integrative approach to the study of culture and reveal the meme landscape that determines which ideas are ecologically “fit” and distinguish them from those ideas that cannot survive. This is like the work of a gardener who prepares the soil with the right mix of water, nutrients, temperature, and sunlight to encourage desired crops to grow. We can now begin to do the same thing for human culture.

So what might it mean to help good ideas grow and spread? First we must figure out what it means to be a “good” idea. In the general parlance of meme theory, an idea is good if it is able to stick and spread. But what is good for an idea may not be good for people. The qualities that enable an idea to spread can have no correlation with harms and benefits to their hosts. This is why our social worlds can be dominated by unhealthy ideas — the notion that what is good for the environment is bad for the economy, as one example; the thought that a finite planet can support infinite growth as another — so we need to apply the rigors of design thinking to the analysis of memes and become enlightened at the cultural level about which ideas are good for us and which are not.

Again we are in luck. It just so happens that concepts for morality have been extensively explored in the field of cognitive semantics (an area of expertise for one of the authors, Joe Brewer). Those ideas that reflect a biologically realistic understanding of health and well-being are what is good for us. It is good to be well fed, to have an ample supply of drinkable water, and to live in safe and supportive communities. We know these things and more about the science of human thriving. And so we can take frameworks like that of human security and the psychology of resilience as foundational building blocks for separating the cultural wheat from chaff.

We are living in a period of great turmoil, as the challenges mentioned above attest, and yet we also find ourselves in the midst of great opportunity. The tools are now available to envision and implement human-appropriate designs for urban planning, market development, resource management, energy production, and much more. All that remains is for us to begin.

This is exactly what we are doing with our Climate Meme Project as as starting point for prototyping and field-testing the solutions that humanity will need to make the global transition to security, prosperity, and sustainability.