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How We Create Culture
“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” - Alan W. Watts
It’s an interesting notion that the word “culture” means both the collection of arts and ideas that accumulate to drive a society, as well as the cultivation of bacteria. Many of the cultural concepts we hold as sacrosanct are really nothing more than ideas, yet they have blossomed in such a way that we are generally disinclined to even question them. Yet just as a biological culture is cultivated in artificial conditions to produce specific results, so is societal culture refined by those who propagate the ideas, and if we are to be a conscious species, it is our responsibility to revisit those ideas and refine them as necessary.
As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural…
