The Dark Side of Culture (6): Brainwashing

Source: here

How times change! Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Westerners dreamt of traveling to distant lands to have meaningful encounters with people from different cultures. Today, a vocal majority of voters in the West openly despite people from other cultures. They have become ‘culturally brainwashed’, practicing what I call culturalism, the cultural equivalent of racism. The only difference between racism and culturalism is that racists don't like people of other races, while the culturally brainwashed don't like people of other cultures.

Cultural brainwashing is extremely pervasive, yet most of the afflicted don't even recognise their predicament, especially if they are members of the majority culture. They take it as a given that their own culture must be paramount to other cultures for the simple reasons that they were there first and there are more of them. They do not understand at all that their insistence on cultural hegemony is analogous to racial hegemony, or Apartheid. It is simply systematic discrimination by one group against members of another group on the basis of culture.

Culture is a complex system of social norms designed to encourage – even enforce - cohesion within a population. Culture evolved at first to make sense of the world, but as human communities increasingly came into contact with one another culture gradually assumed a defensive function (for more on the origins of culture, see here).

Being brought up in a culture almost guarantees cultural brainwashing from a very early age. To un-learn the cultural indoctrination later in life can therefore require considerable effort and cost. Most people go through life without being aware of their cultural prejudices and never consider challenging them.

Like religion, your culture is largely an accident of geography. If you were born in Sweden, you will almost certainly have Swedish cultural values. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, your values will be entirely different. Can you even tell where your cultural values end and your own personal values begin?

Cultural indoctrination is usually so intense that members have extremely deep and very personal attachments to their culture. This is why most people can recognise members of their own culture at a mere glance. This ability to quickly and reliably recognise other members of one's own culture was a very useful skill in the distant past, when human communities were small, isolated, and vulnerable.

Today, the ability to recognise members of one's culture at a glance may give rise to amusing encounters during holidays abroad, but otherwise it is largely obsolete. The arrival of democracy, rule of law, and human rights, within the setting of modern nation states, has made culture-based defence superfluous, a bit the same way our instinct to eat whenever we see food has become obsolete since Western societies became food surplus societies.

Besides, human cultures today mixing so thoroughly in daily life that it is arguably far more useful to quickly and reliably connect with people of many different cultures than to view them with suspicion (see here).

Moreover, the ability to connect to people across cultures will become far more valuable in the future due to powerful and irreversible trends, such as rising GDP per capita and improvements in technology, communications, and transportation. Culturally diverse communities will be the world's most successful communities. The people who live and thrive in these communities will be the world's most successful people. London is a case in point. London is successful, because Londoners hail from dozens and dozens of distinct cultures, yet they have found a formula for mingling peacefully and productively on a daily basis. Londoners mingle in shops, on public transport, in the streets, in the media and the arts, and in bed. They mingle at work and in bars and restaurants. The defensive qualities of the culturally brainwashed are downright counterproductive in a setting like London. Those who grow up comfortable with inter-cultural mingling in an increasingly globalised world are best placed to succeed.

Multi-cultural Londoners will succeed (Source: here)

Unfortunately, the integration of the world's many cultures has been too rapid for some. Disabled by their inability to seamlessly communicate with people from other cultures, the culturally brainwashed become intimidated. They cling to their own culture for defensive purposes, viewing other cultures as threats to their way of life. You find them in culturally isolated populations, such as rural villages, conservative communities, and among the less educated and the elderly. They are particularly numerous in religious communities, including Islamic fundamentalist communities in the Middle East and Central Asia and their US counterparts, the fundamentalist Christian communities in the US Midwest. You find more of them in dominant cultures than in minority cultures, because the latter have had to interact with the dominant culture, whereas the former have not had to interact with the latter. It is a bit like the English and other languages. The English are notoriously ignorant of other languages, because so many non-English native speakers speak English really well.

A culturally brainwashed useful idiot (Source: here)

The ease with which the culturally brainwashed are manipulated for political purposes is highly problematic. They are anxious, so they easily fall for shallow conspiracy theories, especially those with a few racial stereotypes thrown in for good measure. The people who ran the Nazi concentration camps were drawn from the ranks of the culturally brainwashed. You find them among the zealous flag wavers, who are first to sign up to fight in wars. You spot them in lynch mobs with glistening hatred in their eyes. They attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Now they fill the ranks of the 'culture cleaners' in ICE as they raid immigrant communities across the United States. They draw courage from being members of a group rather than from thinking for themselves. In fact, it is their very inability to think for themselves that make them culturally brainwashed.

In the long run, the culturally brainwashed will be the big losers of tomorrow. Countries that fail to come to terms with cultural anxiety will have more and more cultural barriers. Such barriers are analogous to tariff barriers in trade; they carve human communities into small isolated enclaves and render societies vulnerable through less diversity. They will be poorer too, because they will have fewer human resources to draw upon.

The End