Source: here
Back in the day - before ‘guest workers’, mass cross-border migration and refugees became a big Hoo-Haa - it was common for people in the West to dream about traveling to distant lands to have meaningful encounters with people of different cultures.
How times change!
Today, a large, vocal section of Western society openly shuns people from other cultures. These people are ‘the culturally bainwashed’, practitioners of Culturalism, the cultural equivalent of racism. The only difference between the racists and culturally brainwashed is that racists don't like people of other colours, while the culturally brainwashed don't like people of other cultures.
Cultural brainwashing is as pervasive today, if not more so, as racism was in, say, the United States in the 1950s prior the Civil Rights movement. Most people do not even recognise they are culturally brainwashed, especially members of the majority culture. They take it as given their own culture is paramount to other cultures due to their numerical superiority. They do not understand their insistence on cultural hegemony is akin to apartheid, a systematic kind of discrimination along cultural lines, which they inflict on other human beings.
Culture is a complex system of social norms designed to encourage – and sometimes enforce - cohesion within a population, mainly for defensive purposes (for more on this see here). Since cultural brainwashing is almost ubiquitously instilled in people from birth - and to escape its clutches must be un-learned at considerable cost later in life - most people’s understandings of their own cultures are usually extremely deep and personal. Cultural indoctrination is so intense that most of are able to recognise members of our own culture at a mere glance. Our understanding of our own culture is usually only exceeded by our utter ignorance of other cultures.
The ability to quickly and reliably recognise fellow members of our culture was once a very useful skill, particularly in the more distant past, when human communities were small, isolated, and vulnerable. Today, the benefits of being able to instantly identify fellow members of our own culture are largely gone. Global communities have become so integrated that it is arguably far more advantageous to be able to quickly and reliably connect with people from other cultures than to view them with suspicion (see here).
It is precislely due to cultural diversity that large cities like London are so successful. In London, people hail from tens or even hundreds of distinct cultures, yet 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 the culturally brainwashed within settings like London are not only obsolete; they are downright counterproductive.
Multi-cultural London (Source: here)
Those who have grown comfortable with inter-cultural mingling in an increasingly globalised world are best placed to succeed. However, globalisation has been too rapid for some groups, particularly those with limited exposure to other cultures; it is within these culturally isolated communities we find the most culturally brainwashed. Culturally inflexible, they are big losers of our time. And it will only get worse for them as the human poplulation continues to expand and more and more people from different cultures come into contact with one another.
Cultural brainwashing is especially pronounced among rural dwellers, in conservative communities, amid the less educated, among the elderly, and the religious. Sometimes most, or all, of these characteristics are present in a single population; think Islamic fundamentalist societies in the Middle East and Central Asia or their US counterparts, the fundamentalist Christian communities in the US Midwest.
You encounter serious cultural brainwashing among lower-skilled segments of the 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 are useful idiots highly 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 become blunt albeit tools in the hands of populists, usually from the Far Right of the political spectrum.
Cultural barriers are bad things. Their effects are similar to those of tariffs in open economies. They fragment the world, carve human communities into small isolated enclaves, and render societies both more vulnerable and less prosperous than they would otherwise have been.
The ease with which the culturally brainwashed can be manipulated is highly problematic. Their usefulness to the Far Right has recently put them into the political ascendency. Usually poorly educated, badly informed, and deeply prejudiced, the culturally brainwashed have lagged behind economically since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008/2009. The anger of the culturally brainwashed has been exploited by Far-Right politicians, such as Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the United States, who have used the culturally brainwashed to rise to the very top of politics over the last decade or two (for more on the downward spiral of economic and politics in Western societies see here).
More than any other cause, post-GFC Far-Right politicians have nurtured cultural and racial division in their rise to power. In fact, the rest of the political spectrum has had to adopt similar policies in order not to left behind in the political momentum. Even the European Union recently jumped on the band wagon with the launch of a hostile Migration and Asylum Pact (see here).
A culturally brainwashed but useful idiot (Source: here)
While the culturally brainwashed may be 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. The people who ran the Nazi concentration camps were 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. And they were the ones who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. They draw courage from being members of a group rather than from thinking for themselves, precisely because they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
The End
This is part of a series of blog posts about the dark side of culture. Previous instalments include:
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