Murdoc's Journal: Making use of what we know to solve society's problems

From http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1224557&cid=27850871:

I agree with a lot of what he says in this post, especially the part about:

"We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival."

From all the research I have seen, we have had the technology to do all these things and more, at least here in North America, for over 70 years. What I don't agree with is his statement:

"The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse."

This part I kind of agree with:

"We've yet to develop a political system adequate to the task of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number without allowing unhealthy power and influence to be amassed by our least deserving fellows."

The rest of that paragraph is quite correct. The reason I say "kind of" however is because while I do think that no existing political system can do what he says, there is an apolitical system that can. I am of course talking about Technocracy.

Now the reason I say that I disagree with his previous statement is because I see human beings as being largely blank-slates when we are born. Sure, we have some basic personality traits that we are born with, such as aggressiveness, sociability, etc., which of course can be modified to some degree by upbringing, but these traits occur in all known cultures, and the sheer diversity of human behaviour across all these cultures, past and present, attest to exactly how modifiable our "software" really is. So this leads me to conclude that is it simply our cultural software, the information and processes in our heads, that needs changing in order to enact such a system as Technocracy.

So the problem then becomes how to do this? If were were to look at the problem memetically, we would need to organize an education campaign whereby people were exposed to the information and thinking processes we need them to have, and encapsulate this in a memetically successful container. How do we do this then? Can we simply say to people: "Look, if you really want an end to war, hunger, poverty, etc. etc., then you are going to have to change the way to you think about things. Here's how." Is that enough? I'm thinking probably not.

Perhaps we can borrow some strategies from successful memes like some social movements, philosophies, or religions. Of course these container memes cannot contradict the content memes, so a lot of those strategies cannot be used without creating self-defeating dichotomies, or worse yet, cognitive dissonance. But still perhaps packaging this idea into the container of a philosophy, like "memeism" or something might work. Without putting more work into it I can't say any more on how to do this, but perhaps if other people are interested in helping out, we can get something going.