Culture Effect On Mind
Greetings everyone its my first discussion.
Nowadays i am thinking about the effects of culture on our mind.
Culture is a great glue for social life but in my opinion it's a limiter for free mind.
All modern civilizations of these days lives same, thinks same, searching for same...
But this reality is not our reality. This reality is a created reality. Getting rid of culture effects on mind can be helpfull for thinking revolutionary ideas. I want to talk about this topic. I am wondering your opinions.
Nowadays i am thinking about the effects of culture on our mind.
Culture is a great glue for social life but in my opinion it's a limiter for free mind.
All modern civilizations of these days lives same, thinks same, searching for same...
But this reality is not our reality. This reality is a created reality. Getting rid of culture effects on mind can be helpfull for thinking revolutionary ideas. I want to talk about this topic. I am wondering your opinions.
Comments (12)
I think that aspects of culture could be said to be limitations on freedom of thought. For example, being a member of an academic community may restrict the direction of one's research. But I think it is equally important to recognize that our minds and ideas are the products of culture. Arguably, one of the key features of mind is its reflexivity (self-knowledge). So the comprehension of history and culture becomes a way of the mind thematizing itself.
So what you describe as limitations could equally be conceived as directions.
Quoting handalf
Remove from the individual the residue of culture - language, customs, education, social organisation, and all that would be left is a drooling idiot.
And I am saying it cannot be done because yourself is culture delusion.
The process of looking at the most dull aspects of life (routines) would open up paths to questions never asked before.
Note: the term ‘Culture’ is a very diverse one. We don’t have to agree on what it means, but you may find fruit in expressing as carefully as possible what you mean by ‘Culture’.
It's normally opposed to 'Nature'. Just as 'mind' is normally opposed to 'body' and 'delusion' to 'truth'.
Or 'learned' is opposed to 'innate'.
Quoting handalf
What can possibly be the source of this insight, but the very deluded brain under pressure in question?
One who fully accepted this would be reduced to silence. And perhaps in the silence there would be no pressure and no delusion. Perhaps it is the sense that there is an escape from culture that is the delusion.
Definition of 'socialization' by Durkheim: "the process by which an individual, born with behavioral potentialities of enormously wide range, is led to develop actual behavior which is confined to the narrower range of what is acceptable for him by the group standards."
The keyword is behavioral. We ought not be so easily controlled as we are by operant and classical social conditioning. Whatever culture isn't associated with informal or formal socio-behavioral control could be genuine. Otherwise, it's hard for me to believe anything intelligent, honest, or revolutionary results of culture. Culture repeats itself, selects those in the group who mimic it, rejects those who don't; it is conventional. Imitation is not intelligence. People who think and do things that aren't sanctioned by social control are usually condemned, distrusted, or at least disliked.
Which delusions? What is the process for identifying the delusional parts of a culture? Are you not reasoning with your culturally deluded mind to answer these questions? How would you know, then, that your conclusions are not just remnants of your cultural delusions...shadows of what you're trying to rid yourself of? Or is everything in "culture" a delusion? Is the intent to rid the mind of everything and begin again as a blank slate? How would this work, assuming it could be done? Having removed everything, with what, and on what would one be able to begin rebuilding this hypothetically "free mind"?
Simply trying to get rid of or isolate ourselves from the immersive effects of culture on the mind is not going to be productive, as @unenlightened suggested. Ignorance, isolation or exclusion is not the way to intelligence. Rather, it’s self-destructive.
But increasing awareness of the various effects of culture on the structural development of the mind - both positive and negative - I think is a good start. There’s not much point in simply throwing out elements that may weaken the overall structure - it makes more sense to understand and develop the ideal cultural environment that will enable the mind to best align with reality, and then adjust for it.
Quite. Informal and formal social controls are part of the reason why. Fear of being left out is an example of an informal socially engineered prison of mind. Technologies like internet (most info. coming from online provenances), smartphones, and social media platforms have eroded the average person's ability to think for themselves. Oversocialization is causing mass appeal to popular mind, narrowing social character, causing individual conformity to public opinion, and, alas, social decay. Social synergy occurs when people are different, with more eldritch, weird individuals (outsiders in a tight social structure; normal in a lax structure) than with the group being made up of all like-minded automatons (another area where technic totalitarianism creates filter bubbles, echo chambers, general loss of primeval freedom, etc.); loss of synergy, when public opinion has undue influence and people are thinking the same =social decay. Oversocializaton comes at the cost of individual freedom and peculiar synergies which occur only between primally free individuals.
Much of the virus public opinion was generated by appeal to computer model projections. Yet another example of technology's role in informal social control/engineering. It is cause for concern if people don't learn from this that computer models are often very far afield from the actual territory, for one, and even if they weren't, you are still entitled to a dissenting opinion (such as loss of life is worth shunning totalitarianism).
Formal social controls reside within institutionalized violence (physical force) of militarized police and armed forces; if we took their behavior as an example, violence in society would greatly increase. When you don't want to think in the prescribed way...you will be kicked out of the mental prison into a physical one. Choosing between a mental and physical prison is your choice. Thankfully, the (thought) police, though getting ever closer through technology as an absolute (which renders the ambit of nonphysical idealism closer to an observable multiplex of thingdom, as it were), still have yet to enforce obedience to a infallibly predictable automaton social character.