The Dark Side of Culture (6): The culturally brainwashed

Source: here

Back in the day, Westerners dreamed of traveling to distant lands to have meaningful encounters with people of different cultures.

How times change!  

Today, a vocal majority of voters in Western societies openly shun people from other cultures. Westerners have become ‘culturally brainwashed’. They practice what I call culturalism, whichh is the cultural equivalent of racism. In fact, the only difference between racism and culturalism is that racists don't like people of other colours, while the culturally brainwashed don't like people of other cultures.

Cultural brainwashing is at least as pervasive today as racism was in, say, the United States in the 1950s prior the Civil Rights movement. Yet, most people don't even recognise they are culturally brainwashed, especially members of majority cultures. They take it as a given that their own culture assumes paramountcy over other cultures due to the fact that they are numerically superior. They do not understand that their insistence on cultural dominance is entirely analogous to Apartheid, meaning systematic discrimination against a group of people on the basis of culture.

Culture is a complex system of social norms designed to encourage – and sometimes enforce - cohesion within a population, typically, at root, for defensive purposes (for more on the origins of culture, see here).

Members of cultures are almost ubiquitously brainwashed from birth, so much so, in fact, that to un-learned cultural indoctrination later in life can involve considerable effort and cost. Most people go through life blissfully unaware that their cultural preferences, like religion, are mostly an accident of geography.

If you were born in Sweden, you would have Swedish cultural values. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you values would be entirely different. Do you really think you had a say in what you believe?

Cultural brainwashing is so intense and comprehensive that members of a culture usually have extremely deep and very personal attachments to their culture. They can recognise members of our own culture at a mere glance, for example.

The ability to quickly and reliably recognise other members of one's own culture used to be a useful skill in the distant past, when human communities were small, isolated, and vulnerable.

Today, however, skills are largely obsolete, because erstwhile disparate human cultures are already mixing so much that it is far more useful to be able to quickly and reliably connect with people of other cultures than to view them with suspicion (see here). Moreover, the ability to connect will become even more valuable in the future, because the mixing of cultures will continue indefinitely due to rising GDP per capita as well as the inexorable trends towards cheaper and more advanced technology, communications, and transportation.

Moreover, culturally diverse communities will be the most successful. London is so successful, because in London people hail from tens or even hundreds of distinct cultures, yet manage to mingle peacefully on a daily basis in shops, on public transport, in the streets, in media and the arts, in bed, at work as well as well as in bars and restaurants. The defensive qualities of culturally brainwashing are not only obsolete in London, they are downright counterproductive. It is clear that those who have grown up to be comfortable with inter-cultural mingling in an increasingly globalised world are best placed to succeed.

Multi-cultural Londoners will succeed (Source: here)

Unfortunately, globalisation has been too rapid for huge numbers of people, who are severely disabled in terms of their ability to connect easily with people from different cultures. Defensive, they cling on to their own culture and view other cultures are threats.

This kind of cultural brainwashing is especially pronounced among rural dwellers, in conservative communities, amid the less educated, and among the elderly and the religious.

Culturally isolated communities have especially high levels of cultural brainwashing. They include Islamic fundamentalist societies in the Middle East and Central Asia as well as their US counterparts, the fundamentalist Christian communities in the US Midwest.

Members of the dominant culture within any society tend to be more prone to being utterly ignorant of other cultures, a bit like how many English people are ignorant of other languages, because non-English native speakers happen to be so good at speaking English.

The inability of the culturally inflexible to understand and get along with people of other cultures is a huge problem. Their excessive attached to their own accidental culture and their gross ignorance of other cultures - in a globalising world - condemns the culturally inflexible to be the big losers of our time.

–––––

You encounter severe cultural brainwashing among lower-skilled segments of white working class populations in many European countries and in the United States. You also find it within elitist communities. The elderly tend to be more culturally brainwashed than the young, while men tend to be worse afflicted than women.

Culturally brainwashed people are ignorant of and deeply suspicious of other cultures. They view ‘the others’ as threats. Their fears make them dangerous, because they easily become useful idiots prone to political manipulation. Usually all it takes is a shallow conspiracy theory - ideally with a few racial stereotypes thrown in for good measure - for the culturally brainwashed to transform into blunt tools in the hands of populists, usually from the Far Right of the political spectrum.

We see this playing our in real time in the United States, where the culturally brainwashed have mobilise an army of 'cultural cleaners' - ICE agents - to root out people with values that clash with the values of the Trump Administration. Trump's travel bans are similarly culture-based.

–––––

Yet, cultural barriers are really bad things, whose effects are not dissimilar to tariffs in open economies. They fragment the world, carve human communities into small isolated enclaves, and render societies more vulnerable (less diversity) and less prosperous (fewer resources) than they would otherwise have been.

The ease with which the culturally brainwashed are manipulated is highly problematic. They are usually poorly educated, badly informed, and deeply prejudiced. They lag behind economically, especially since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008/2009. Their anger was exploited to enable Far-Right politicians, such as Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the United States, to rise to the very top of politics (for more on the downward spiral of economic and politics in Western societies see here).

More than any other issue, Far-Right politicians have floggged groundless notions of incompatibility across cultures and races to their supporters in order to secure their rise to power. This strategy has been so successful that most of the rest of the political spectrum has adopted similar strategies in order not to lose out on the political momentum. Even the European Union recently jumped on the band wagon with the launch of a very hostile Migration and Asylum Pact (see here).

A culturally brainwashed but useful idiot (Source: here)

While the culturally brainwashed may be useful idiots, their capacity to cause danage should not be underestimated. They are an extremely dangerous group of people. Once a clear distinction between “them” and “us” has been established in their minds, they become ready and willing tools of repression and persecution, even perpetrators of violence. Remember that the people who ran the Nazi concentration camps were ordinary people, drawn from the ranks of the culturally brainwashed. The zealous flag wavers, who are the first to sign up to fight for king and country in war time are the culturally brainwashed. You can spot them in lynch mobs by the glistening hatred in their eyes. They attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. They fill the ranks of 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, because they are incapable of thinking for themselves. This is exactly what cultural brainwashing means.

The End

This is part of a series of blog posts about the dark side of culture. Previous instalments include:

1. The Dark Side of Culture (1): Recognising the Dark Side

2. The Dark Side of Culture (2): The Origins of Culture

3. The Dark Side of Culture (3): Politics and Culture

4. The Dark Side of Culture (4): Martyrdom - with specific reference to Gaza

5. The Dark Side of Culture (5): The Catholic Church’s Role in Visigoth Spain (410 CE to 711 CE)