A Rant Against Culture Summary

[Juan Cruz Giusto]

Culture = A Big Cult

You have different cultures: gamer culture, biker culture, pickup culture, hippie culture, tattoo culture, American culture, scientific culture, corporate culture, drug culture, Christian culture, geek culture and sports culture (and there a much more of them).

All cultures are fundamentally artificial, limited, arbitrary, biased, moralizing, egoic, inauthentic to individuals, neurotic and stifles consciousness. Culture is the collective ego and our individual ego is full of it. Culture is a construct and doesn’t really exist but influences you big time.

The problem with culture is that it is the water and you are the fish, you cannot recognize that you are influenced by culture. You usually have a blindspot for your culture: you cannot recognize how it influences you and the limitations that it has on you.

What is wrong with culture? All cultures al mechanical and everything that is mechanical prevents consciousness from growing. Culture is the context for everything you do

How much your culture had influenced the following things in you:

-          How you dress

-          Your hair style

-          The entertainment and media you like

-          The food

-          Your attitude towards drugs, alcohol and prescription medicine

-          Your attitude towards work, business and career and how you think businesses have to be run

-          The technology you use or don’t use

-          Education

-          Your ideas about how kids should be raised

-          Ideas about family

-          Your views about sex, relationships and marriage

-          How reality is

-          Your ideas of science and what is valid or not

-          History (it completely depends on the country you learned it from)

-          Morality and ethics

-          Your values and ideals. What do you want for yourself. Your deepest desires and goals

-          How you should be supposed to look, the money you should have, the girlfriend you should have

-          Fears

-          Beliefs

-          Gender roles, ideals and how they should interact

-          Death

-          Language

-          Sports

-          Spirituality

-          Health

-          Hobbies

You are in a cult and you don’t even know it. You feel that reality could not be any other way.

What is the function of culture? You have a collective identity for purposes of survival and reproduction and culture helps achieve these goals.  Culture is mostly concerned with survival and reproduction, outcompeting other rivaling cultures. Culture, even though it is a construction, if many people believe in it, it can gain a reality on its own. Modern man lives in a collective fantasy but nature doesn’t care about any of these things. Your first priorities are to fit into the social matrix:

-          To impress people

-          To earn money

-          To have sex with the right people

-          To play sports

-          To go to the gym and have the right hobbies

-          Etc.

Culture pressures you to fit into the culture but you as a child had natural inclinations to dress how you wanted, or to speak how you wanted and so on.

You need to realize that your raising of your consciousness is a solo activity. Consciousness cannot be raised as a group project. Your ability to self-actualize comes from the inner work that you do alone. If you try to rise consciousness as a group thing you will create a culture and the mechanics of it.

Your goal as a part of your self-actualization journey is to become independent from all culture, not to denounce it. Culture is not evil and bad; you don’t want to react to it, just transcend it. What does this mean? When you are with people that are deeply engrained with cultural norms and beliefs, it doesn’t trigger you and you don’t need to tell them to stop or judge them, you are cool with it but you operate outside of culture.

How do you do it?

-           Firstly, by awareness. Start noticing all the elements of culture that are ingrained in yourself.

-          Also, experience other cultures.

-          Cut any cultural feeds like comedy videos, movies, magazines, news, books. Basically, all the media. The media reinforces you values that you actually don’t really care

-          Be less social and be in solitude

-          Start to question everything

-          Embark on your own journey. Have a life purpose and something you want to create. When you are focus on creating something big you will not have time to engage in all the cultural nonsense.

-          Try psychedelics

-          Meditation

-          Be more with nature

You should live free in reality without all the constrains that culture puts in you. You will have to find a balance but you need to cut a lot of culture out of your life.

 

 

[Frogfucius]

It's a great video, and I agree with it. But removing yourself from culture could be seen as a type of culture. Kind of like how the Buddha said to eliminate suffering, you must eliminate desire. But eliminating desire is a desire itself. Just another one of those paradox things.

Culture is purely an ego thing. If someone attacks any type of culture you're associated with, your brain neurons automatically respond in a way as if your whole physical being is becoming attacked. The ego becomes threatened to the point where it reacts in anger. Beliefs have that much power over everyone, and they're purely unconscious. The only way to gain control over yourself, and loosen the ego's grip, is to increase awareness.

Check this out, it explains it better than I can.

[Zane]

Thank you so much for these summaries! I love how you distill Leo's videos to a simple and easy to read format! After observing the video, I notice how my awareness of my own culture and other cultures is raising and I realize how as a child I didn't fully conform to cultural norms because of my Aspergers and feeling detached from my own culture. I focus heavily on learning heavily about cultures and how they're created. I notice how I've been embracing and learning about subcultures and countercultures and piecing together my inner puzzle and expanding my mind. At my college, I love spending time on my own and I spend time alone at the lake to detach and simply enjoy the moment by focusing just on swinging on the swings and feeling the summer or fall breeze. I've been dedicating time to volunteer as a Conversational English teacher to master cultural competency and to become multicultural. One of my highest aspirations is to dedicate my life to travel so I can embrace new experiences and free myself from cultural dogmatism. 

I'm observing and becoming more aware of cultural dogmatism. 

Some examples of cultural dogmatism

1. People get easily defensive of their political views and rejecting socialism blindly without looking at how broad of an ideology it is. Socialism is just one example! 

2. People getting obsessed with a sport like soccer and just talking about soccer without broadening the conversation about other sports. 

3. People having strong "patriotism" that is really unconscious jingoism. Great example: Make America Great Again!

4. American Exceptionalism without looking at America's deep rooted flaws  

5. Rejecting and denouncing outsiders as "weirdos" "wannabes" "infidels" and "heathens" "savages" or "barbarians" 

 

I love making abstract concept of culture more practical by looking at culture on a microcosm through the lens of a family, a gang, a counterculture, or a subculture or a clique and drawing comparisons to countercultures and their ethos! 

[Juan Cruz Giusto]

Great observations guys! The influence we have from culture is very difficult to pinpoint since, for me at least, I cannot differenciate very well a cultural influence from an authentic behavior... I believe that with time, awareness and PD it is going to be clearer and clearer 

[David1]

Culture is like an operating system. İnstead of running in the 'root' (reality), you are being operated by culture. İt calls on you when it needs you, but you better not make trouble or you're going in the 'virus vault' :D.

 

Edited November 8, 2016 by David1

[AlwaysBeNice]

The true 'evil' of it is I belief fear.

If we wouldn't be afraid we wouldn't care about the suppressive rules and we would just be ourselves regardless. 

[vizual]

9 minutes ago, AlwaysBeNice said:

The true 'evil' of it is I belief fear.

If we wouldn't be afraid we wouldn't care about the suppressive rules and we would just be ourselves regardless. 

That statement is lacking a lot of nuance. You have to see fear for what it truly is, it's just a form of contraction. Without contraction there wouldn't even be such a thing as this manifested universe, without fear there wouldn't be you. Fear is not evil, fear is love, just a matter of realizing it.

[Live Life Liam]

10 hours ago, Zane said:

Thank you so much for these summaries! I love how you distill Leo's videos to a simple and easy to read format! After observing the video, I notice how my awareness of my own culture and other cultures is raising and I realize how as a child I didn't fully conform to cultural norms because of my Aspergers and feeling detached from my own culture. I focus heavily on learning heavily about cultures and how they're created. I notice how I've been embracing and learning about subcultures and countercultures and piecing together my inner puzzle and expanding my mind. At my college, I love spending time on my own and I spend time alone at the lake to detach and simply enjoy the moment by focusing just on swinging on the swings and feeling the summer or fall breeze. I've been dedicating time to volunteer as a Conversational English teacher to master cultural competency and to become multicultural. One of my highest aspirations is to dedicate my life to travel so I can embrace new experiences and free myself from cultural dogmatism. 

I'm observing and becoming more aware of cultural dogmatism. 

Some examples of cultural dogmatism

1. People get easily defensive of their political views and rejecting socialism blindly without looking at how broad of an ideology it is. Socialism is just one example! 

2. People getting obsessed with a sport like soccer and just talking about soccer without broadening the conversation about other sports. 

3. People having strong "patriotism" that is really unconscious jingoism. Great example: Make America Great Again!

4. American Exceptionalism without looking at America's deep rooted flaws  

5. Rejecting and denouncing outsiders as "weirdos" "wannabes" "infidels" and "heathens" "savages" or "barbarians" 

 

I love making abstract concept of culture more practical by looking at culture on a microcosm through the lens of a family, a gang, a counterculture, or a subculture or a clique and drawing comparisons to countercultures and their ethos! 

Thanks for your time writing this

[Key Elements]

Great summary. Actually, this is one of my favourite videos that Leo made. Have you ever went travelling and told someone where you were going? And then, later, they were in shock / or surprised in a funny way because they didn't understand why you were going there? Culture shock. Leo briefly mentioned it in this clip.

[AlwaysBeNice]

22 minutes ago, vizual said:

That statement is lacking a lot of nuance. You have to see fear for what it truly is, it's just a form of contraction. Without contraction there wouldn't even be such a thing as this manifested universe, without fear there wouldn't be you. Fear is not evil, fear is love, just a matter of realizing it.

I don't think just realizing that solves all of it, maybe it does, but I've been aware that it all stems out of love for quite some time yet I still work on my fears, joyfully, everyday and will probably continue at it for at least a number of years.

Even though it's indeed not really evil, it still is there to grow over it so that we may know real expanding peace and joy only, which indeed couldn't have existed without having gone through fear. 

[vizual]

26 minutes ago, AlwaysBeNice said:

I don't think just realizing that solves all of it, maybe it does, but I've been aware that it all stems out of love for quite some time yet I still work on my fears, joyfully, everyday and will probably continue at it for at least a number of years.

Even though it's indeed not really evil, it still is there to grow over it so that we may know real expanding peace and joy only, which indeed couldn't have existed without having gone through fear. 

It's not an intellectual realization. It's integrating the experience of 'fear' within the totality of your experience and seeing that all the 'fearful' experiences aren't fundamentally any different than all the other experiences, even experiences of 'love'. Of course, when you are still operating from a different paradigm these experiences definitely feel different from each other(i.e. Fear = bad, love/joy = good). If you try to get rid of fear it's never going to work since that implies that there are objects/experiences that are not valid within consciousness. But in the eyes of consciousness every experience is holy since it is consciousness itself. Ponder this, how can you ever overcome fear if you secretly fear fear itself? You can't ever truly overcome fear because there isn't anything to overcome, only seeing what it truly is.

[Bizarre]

I don't think culture itself is inherently a bad thing, its just a case of what culture are we involved in?  If its predominant structure is desire and fear based it's not going to feel good or have much going for it on the ego level, or relative level - it's not conducive to happiness, well being, and happiness and well being is conducive to liberation for those that seek liberation out.

But this culture here, what we have now is not great,it needs a lot of evolving mainly for the fact that it is desire and fear based. Very difficult to understand anything with those two energies clouding the mind.

And I see your point there @vizual about fear and hate and all that being part of the manifestation, that is true, but this sounds like a cop out to be honest.  Very difficult to get an understanding of the manifest world if the mind is disturbed with all this distraction.  

When you say every experience from the eyes of consciousness is "holy" is not quite correct, holy implies a duality. Consciousness does not see it as anything, consciousness just illumines the creation (quantum physics can verify this for you).  It's true that love and hate are the same stuff, but consciousness is not existent in a vacum, there is still manifestation on the other side of the street. Consciousness would not be limetless if it did not have the power to create and this is where ignorance or maya comes in.  But maya or God isn't just a random projection, it is a logical, well thought out creation with physical, moral and psychological laws operating, its not just a chaos here.  So the manifestation requires a certain amount of stability.  If you look closely at how reality is structured, all those not observing the creations laws are paying for it karmically in one way or another. 

Consciousness is responsible for fear and desire, but when fear and desire gets out of hand, maya has this built in mechanism to keep it all in perfect balance.  Like I said, karma.

 

Edited November 8, 2016 by GTITurbolover