https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/why-culture-is-not-reality-7cb4f0867a4d
Spared by this article and apologies for the paywall, just wanted thoughts on it.
Honestly the first line doesn’t seem to really say anything, and it’s kinda inaccurate. Culture and psychology are very much a part of how we interact with the world.
I will say, I did get a membership to read it (shameful I know) and the whole article is just…nonsense. It’s vague gesturing at what is effectively…nothing.
So that store of knowledge supporting our particular frames, beliefs, maps, models becomes ever more stable and established. As excess information reverts to noise and shed, it is a dynamically centripetal process of sorting. Then as nodes in that larger network, we find ourselves drawn to and condensed into the groups where we find ourselves on the same wavelength, swirling around and defined by the core ideals.
The broad social herding can be either beneficial or detrimental, given the burn rate, depending on the larger context and one’s relationship with the group. There is safety and development in numbers, while the factors that will appeal to and focus groups of people have to be either fairly basic, or specialized.
Decisions are like turns in the road. Best taken as the situation requires. Too soon and it’s impulsive, too late and it’s indecisive. Though in groups, making decisions is a sign of power, so we tend be led by the impulsive.
So culture is like stories for children, hoping the next generations learn the right lessons. While nature is like a super computer, that doesn’t always come up with the answers we want to hear.
There are various organs in society, much as there are organs in the body. Government and politics, education, banking, healthcare, manufacturing, public infrastructure, et cetera, function as interconnected parts of the whole, with individuals as the cells of these structures.
Government, as civil executive and regulatory function, serves as a form of central nervous system, organizing and focusing the community as a unit. Like the mind, it is often just referee of the desires, than deciding factor. Politics is the process of the factions competing.
The bureaucracy of government is a significant faction though, but because its role is presumably only to implement, it will steer others to its benefit, rather than being up front.
Like this passage talking about culture being stories for children. Though since we are part of nature that makes culture part of nature means it does give answers we wanna hear.
There is working class culture and then there is ruling class culture. Shaped by the material living conditions, their labour and where they sit within the socioeconomic model epoch and their relationship to others in that model
Stories are an important part of how we pass on accumulated knowledge. So he’s not wrong but he skims many complex concepts in phrases and then strings them back together. Like,
The broad social herding can be either beneficial or detrimental, given the burn rate, depending on the larger context and one’s relationship with the group.
What context? What’s beneficial? Not much value here if he doesn’t dig into those.
Culture is a multi-meanings word.
The west culture, the African cultures, a cultured man, the general culture
Stories for children are part of our culture.
The word culture encompasses many concepts.
Concepts are ideas, they are not the concrete reality, but behind the concepts, there are realities.
There are chairs, and there is the concept of a chair, four feet, a seat and and a back.
For the concept of culture, it is more complicated, as the same word represents more than a concept.
Sadly…he never actually does. It’s just vague gesturing and surface level knowledge of things.