With legal systems, laws are freed from the confines of brains that are dependent on gene multiplication, and there is less need for laws to co-opt genes for their purpose. The externalization of law away from brains whose thinking is informed by gene-based imperatives could be conceptualized as teme-based law, where representative government was a form of technology which used human beings to process legal contracts.
The blockchain, crypto-economics and crypto-law (Wood, 2014) are continuations of the externalization of law and development of teme-based legal systems, which are shaped more by meme-based evolution than by genetic imperatives.
Teme-based law is autonomous in the sense that it has its own evolutionary path and imperatives, where it has been theorized that the technological singularity is the end-goal of teme-based evolution.
Representative government could be seen as a hybrid between teme-based law and gene-based law, which explains the dynamics that is politics, byproducts or symptoms of the limitations in representative government, often conceptualized as statism.
Legal systems where laws that are loudest in ordering genes to replicate them have survival advantage lead to prejudice and tradition memes, whose function is solely the preservation of their own dominance, religion being prime examples, and these may come into conflict with the genetic imperative of pleasure, which is the indication of brain’s valuation of gene-oriented well-being.
7.3 Legal-moral systems and mental disorder
Tradition or prejudice memes within religion like statism, when believed in, inhibit or attenuate the brain’s executive (ego) function, thus making it difficult for the individual to absorb, process, and integrate information that contradicts the religion. (Leigh, 2010) The brain can be purged from prejudice memes through dis-obedience, removing the cognitive dissonance that is expressed as mental disorder but at the risk of political repercussions such as ostracization or burning at the stake.
The best possible treatment against trojan memes, to achieve higher regulation of meme inflow and decreased mental illness, is a fight response, which leads to selfish opportunist decision making, self-control, and also applies a force against the coercive entity. This fight response gets rid of the internal component which decreases self-regulation of memes - belief in the system - and the brain is left to deal with the external component, legal coercion, possible ostracization or burning at the stake, and has improved its mental health.