Nov 2024: what is culture? There are lots of ways to approach talking about it, but I particularly want to focus on what I think can be meaningfully affected in a way that promotes human flourishing. Culture is… a collection of beliefs, assumptions, ideas, understandings. It’s a frame of reference that can be hard to perceive. (“What the hell is water?”)In our modern times in these 2020s, there’s been a lot of handwringing about avoiding cultural bullying, imperialism, exploitation, etc. And yet… we must be able to discuss culture if we want to improve it. And yes, I think we should dare to believe that culture can be improved. We know this at smaller scales; an office can have an unhealthy work culture, gossip culture, etc.
brooke asked, what are some culture-related bottlenecks to an abundant future? my response:
I’d say a lot of it is the absence of contexts and scenes where people can be openly curious and honest without worrying about being perceived as bad actors or otherwise being shamed, mocked, etc
abundance requires openness, tolerance (of experimentation and transgression), freedom of speculation, etc. the Dutch golden age seems to have happened in part because curious thoughtful people from the rest of Europe were driven there by how stifling the culture was getting
directly: can you speak openly about what you want? can you speak openly about what you’re confused/ignorant about? are there people around who will help and support you? can people question the prevailing social order? how much are cruelty and contempt features of everyday life?
I find myself following up a few months later: why aren’t people able to speak openly? it’s largely because they get pattern-matched with other people who are hostile. so it’s the bad actor problem again…
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after years and years of thinking about it, observing it, analyzing it, questioning it, I’ve come to think of culture as a sort of “aether”. it exists primarily in people’s minds, of course, and it manifests in behavior patterns, architecture, rituals, all sorts of things…
the dominant thing culture does is it regulates. the aether is regulatory. it tells people how to act, how not to act, what they should argue about, what’s rude, inappropriate, taboo, forbidden. the aether is largely hallucinated, and also, it can summon real violence upon you
u could also think of culture as “oceanic”, using a water metaphor. it’s a medium. it has currents. it has waves and crests and whirlpools and typhoons, it hosts life, it can kill, there are ecosystems within ecosystems, you disrespect it at your own peril
I think maybe ~1% of people really *produce* culture, at the cutting edge, at the frontiers. they take risks. they remix and reshape and renew. most people are consumers, critics, enforcers, regulators. I used to be upset about this. Now I think “1% is a lot of people!!!”
people who feel constrained by culture are especially vigorous when it comes to enforcing it. whereas the people who surf the waves of culture confidently, and walk easily through its hallucinated walls, feel little need to enforce anything at all.
one of the many ways of thinking about culture is its a way of conceptualizing reality. unconceptualized reality is too much, too overwhelming, too chaotic for most humans most of the time. you might glimpse it in moments of ecstasy, but the rest of the time u often need a system.
each way of seeing is necessarily and definitionally also a set of blinders. every frame has boundaries, the decision of what to include is simultaneously a decision of what to exclude. euphemistic language about inclusivity etc has clouded lots of ppl’s thinking abt this.
the big tension of my adult life is my confusion at my casual ability to walk thru the walls of hallucinated culture while everywhere around me people say things like “that’s not possible”, “that can’t be done”. it’s made me question my own sanity + talk with thousands of people
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time
it’s difficult to have this conversation in a public plaintext space like twitter and expect/assume good faith, partially bc people tend to be carrying their own private anxieties about related matters…
I do not want to exclude or alienate other people, so you can see I put in a ton of effort into being welcoming, encouraging, helping people feel at home but I draw the line (and this took me a long time!!) at suppressing myself, my abilities, curiosities, etc
and i’ve talked with enough people about this IRL, over zoom calls, etc, to know that there are people who take the time and trouble to consider this stuff seriously, and to see that it’s not just a cry for attention or validation (and what’s so wrong with that, anyway?)
but rather, it’s an interesting and consequential challenge. what do you do with people who are cultural chimaeras, who are meant to operate at the frontier? well – sorta ironically, & definitionally, there isn’t really an answer to that question. you just get used to discomfort
to me, it’s very important – and I think it’s important for everyone – that the people who are at the frontiers of culture are able to do their work unhindered by stupid bullshit, because it’s very consequential work. unfortunately, as a species we are still very bad at this
for the vast majority of human history, human creativity was primarily expended suppressing human creativity. this is weird to think about. but I’m pretty convinced it’s true. read Deutsch’s beginning of infinity for a more comprehensive explanation about how/why this is
we are very new to being ubermensch and we are very bad at it. most of us who are capable of it, or adjacent to being capable of it, are whining and pissing and shidding and farding about it. because it is hard. it is, again, by definition, I think, the hardest thing in the world
because actually it’s the closest thing to living in unconceptualized reality, which is absolute chaos. you have to dip into unhinged madness and yet remain rooted in history, space, time, humanity, it’s an Odyssean task
and the ayy lmao thing is that, to survive with your soul and sanity intact, you have to somehow take on the most serious task in the world AND simultaneously not take yourself seriously. it’s madness! its hilarious! its impossible! “No. It’s necessary.”
anyway I don’t have a specific conclusion that I’m gunning for with this particular sermon, I’m just continually working through my thoughts on this stuff, practicing, woodshedding, developing fingertip feel
furthermore, https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1255767736279392256