Joseph Henrich

But in principle, you could have at least some renewal processes.

So democracy potentially provides a renewal process, although there are things like the institutions that the government builds that are hard to renew.

So like one simple political idea is I think when you create a new department, it should have the same thing that cells have where at a certain time they time out.

And you got to make a new one.

And that's because just the way human bureaucracies institutions work is they kind of corrode from the interior, from the inside, just the way cancer spreads in a cell.

So you just got to kill it and make a new one.

So we could institute that.

But I guess the idea hasn't quite caught on yet.

I mean, there are bits and pieces of it around.

So it's not like it's unused.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, the Roman Empire didn't say, you know, we got to redo everything.

Why not adapt democracy and we could have a – you know, nobody does that.

Right.

Things fall apart.

Can you say any more about what the author has in mind?

I would like an example.

Well, I don't think I have strong feelings on this.

I mean I'm always focused on trying to understand the process of cultural evolution.

And it is true that people often resist cultural change that in retrospect we think is good.