Genes and the Meme

Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the second of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, picking up where they left off in the book's 18 sub-patterns of being... Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the second of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, picking up where they left off in the book's 18 sub-patterns of being. They discuss selfish genes & memes, Rene Girard's mimetics, the responsibility of replication in the era of electronic media, TikTok's threat to an open society, the sacred as highest organizing principle, culture bildung & the challenge of transfer, training empathy, schismogenesis, coherent pluralism, tolerating & understanding other people's values, culture capitalism, danger of the growth imperative, the possibility of AI arbitrage in virtual currencies, bank debt & money-on-money return, the need for functional post-capitalist operating systems, exponential growth & the possibility of an environmental singularity, limits to growth, whether answers will come from politics, the possibility of phase transition, the AGI timeline & danger scenarios, benefits of liberal democracy, bimodality in democracies, starting a political party, the vertical axis in politics, balancing between the three major political ideologies, and much more. Episode Transcript EP 165 Lene Rachel Andersen Part 1: Libertism Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, by Lene Rachel Andersen Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, by Lene Rachel Andersen JRS EP89 – Lene Rachel Andersen on Metamodernity JRS Currents 043: Lene Rachel Andersen on Bildung JRS EP59 – Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow EP 153 Forrest Landry on Small Group Method Lene Rachel Andersen is an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and Bildung activist. She heads the think tank Nordic Bildung in Copenhagen and is a member of the Club of Rome. After studying business economy for three years, she worked as a temp teacher before studying theology. During her studies, she wrote entertainment for Danish television until she decided to quit theology, become a full-time writer, and focus on technological development, big history, and the future of humanity. Since 2005, she has written 18 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians’ democracy prize (2012). Among her books are The Nordic Secret (2017), co-developed and edited by Club of Rome member Tomas Björkman, Metamodernity (2019), and Bildung (2020).