ENVISION THIS...Changing MEMES instead of enacting PROGRAMS to stop us from devastating the world.

Our guest, Daniel Quinn, author of ISHMAEL and many other books, explains in BEYOND CIVILIZATION: “ Here's how old minds think of stopping us. They think of stopping us the way they stopped poverty, the way they stopped drug abuse, the way they stopped crime: with programs...This is why I can confidently predict that if the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. Programs never stop the things they're launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them. And no program will ever stop us from devastating the world...We can only do it the way it's always done: one meme at a time."

Memes are communal ideas, analogous to genes in that they self-replicate and mutate. Memes spread from person to person and generation to generation within a culture. Through education, each of us receives a complete set of our culture's memes, just as, through reproduction, each of us receives a complete set of our parents' genes.