Culture Is Not Your Friend

Culture is not your friend if you seek to be a free-thinking, humane, and self-expressing human being. In fact, it is your most deadly enemy if you seek something as abstract as spiritual realization of your true nature.

As it is defined, it is excellence in taste, in fine arts, in humanities.

It is hailed as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior.

It depends on a capacity for symbolic thought and extensive social learning.

It is considered a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution, organization, or group.

Those who conform to its memes are considered praiseworthy and those who rebel or are not integrated into it are denigrated with pejorative terms.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth European philosophy, it was considered as horticultural improvement. By the nineteenth century, it meant refinement of an individual through education and fulfilling national aspirations.

The European aristocrats considered themselves highly cultured. They used this high culture to colonize Africa and Asia, breaking the will of the people to take on an attitude of subservience.

Adolph Hitler considered the Aryan race supreme and the Jewish people as less than human. (The ironic thing, of course, is that his illegitimate father was a Rothschild and his mother was a Jewish maid.) Nazism created a huge flood of contrived historical artifacts and scientific theories to support beliefs about what creates racial superiority.

Today, culture is considered in a more “scientific way” as an anthropological term. It is now considered as the evolved human capacity to manipulate symbols and to act with imagination. It is also considered as the distinct way people in various social groupings interact, ranging from ethnic groups to corporate structures. After World War II, the philosophy of social conditioning became the science of sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology, and management studies.

However, despite its apparent transformation from aristocracy, imperialism, and colonialism to the innocuous study of scientific fields, it remains as pernicious, as deadly to the evolution of personal truth, as mind-numbing.

The purpose of any social organization is to distract you from knowing your true nature, your soul connection, your universal power. Through the elaborate schemes of politics, religion, corporations and academia, it is nothing more than a meme-factory, a way to transmit subliminal ideas to control you.

These memes, thought seeds that spread like viruses from mind to mind, do not have your best interests in mind. They are spread through symbolic memes and trigger words.

Look at any subculture, especially the macrocultures, and you will see that they are all tied together with symbols that are entirely self-serving while pretending to be altruistic.

Societies, whether geographical, ethnic or institutional, are not interested in the dissemination of truth, in creating meaningful human bonds, in liberating the soul from realizing its own power.

Since childhood, all collective groups indoctrinate a central message: introspection is a problem that has to be replaced with extroversion; you are only a name and form, not an infinite being of unimaginable and little explored potentiality.

Conforming to a culture means burying all that is true in you to enjoy the rewards of provincial thinking. While lip service is sometimes paid to the free thinker as a contributor, as a creative evolutionary impulse, the rebel is often cast out, possibly killed, and his or her message is carefully reintegrated into the culture in a self-serving way. For example, the radical teachings of Jesus Christ were reinterpreted so that they could be institutionalized by the Roman Empire to serve the needs of imperialism.

Conformity kills initiative. It promotes propaganda. It champions evanescent earthly gain over eternal spiritual power, shunning wisdom for greed. It supports the least of us, our human form, and disregards the best of us, our soul essence.

Art, in all its forms, is essentially insurrectionary. It forces the viewer or the listener, to question the prevailing norms in a culture. Yet this symbolism, too, has been corrupted in favor of the cultural symbolism. For example, Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, was a true artist, but by absorbing him into academia, his message of radical self-inquiry, like the message of Socrates, has been lost. By exalting the messenger, by relegating his works to fit the boring realms of fulfilling academic requirements for letters on a piece of paper, the message itself has been lost.

The fact that nothing works is a true measure of the destructive quality of culture. Everything is upside down in our world. Science does not promote truth, but is used to satisfy political agendas. Medicine does not promote health, but subverts well-being. Politics does not promote a better humanity, but suppresses it. The list goes on. Look at any culture, and you will see, hidden in plain sight, the secret agenda to control its members.

Civilizations have not liberated humanity; instead they have manipulated it through symbolism. Knowledge, the highest gift of any education, is used to make us more neurotic consumers and more confused advocates of what is highest and best for all beings. A man or woman in any organizational setting lacks self-confidence, self-responsibility, and self-reliance. He or she becomes dependent on the will of the collective to eke out the needs of life. In other words, the ultimate goal of enculturation is to trap your mind, feed off your energy, and make you a slave.

Behind words like, "education, erudition, learning, literacy, scholarship; sophistication, urbanity; breeding, gentility, manners; class, elegance, grace, taste; civility, courtesy, politeness" read "accustom, brainwash, build up, educate, equip, habituate, inure, loosen up, make ready, modify, practice, program, ready, shape up, sharpen, tone up, toughen up, train, warm up, whip into shape, work out, work over"

Culture is not your friend.

Return from Culture to Spiritual Growth