Culture: the dark side

In several previous posts (1) (2), I discussed how culture could be altered and manipulated to make it provide more happiness for the people it serves. I explained that culture should serve people, not people serve culture. I also discussed how to separate culture from religion, and why this is the right thing to do.

Today, I would like to talk about the “dark side” of this—culture being manipulated for malicious reasons.

I can think of numerous historical examples of this. The most ancient I can think of is the Chinese emperor who built the Great Wall, whose name I cannot remember. He organized the burning of Confucian texts and banned Confucius’s philosophies from China entirely. It apparently worked, considering the fact that he was able to stay in power long enough to build on of the world’s largest construction projects. Next, Napoleon was a master of cultural manipulation. In Egypt and the Middle East, he used Muslim priests to convince the people that he was in fact a hero, not a conqueror. Furthermore, during WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, propaganda in the US completely changed the face of Americanism. The propaganda made it unacceptable to criticize the government, and those who did were not only punished by the government but also shunned by society. It is almost impossible for the people of those eras to imagine today’s anti-Bush literature—in their time, such books could only have been published surreptitiously.

Even scarier than these historical examples, though, is the thought that this might even be happening right now in the US. I suspect that there might be some validity to this idea, especially because of the influence the media has over the US. Media executives claim that the programming they air is based on view ratings, so they are supposedly not influencing it in any way. Though this makes sense, I doubt this is entirely true. Consider reality television, which is a relatively new invention. Before the first reality show aired, almost no Americans had a desire to see that kind of show because they had never even heard of the idea yet. After the fact, though, Americans were suddenly hooked on this new idea. Thus, the idea to air reality TV couldn’t have come from ratings or statistics. My point is that the media clearly does influence us, even though we do influence it to some extent. And, because the media clearly influences us, there is defiantly some tampering with how we think. Fortunately, this does not worry me too much because the media’s main goal is to make money, not pursue some other political agenda (though for some networks this is clearly not the case).

I would also like to add a parting shot at organized religion that relates to this topic. In history and even today, religions have existed that advocate the destruction or forced conversion of other reasons. This happens for two reasons: a) this is part of the original “draft” of the religion and is inherent in it, or b) because some political or religious figure added this in somewhere down the road. What does this mean? Point “a” means that not all religions are inherently neutral or good, which a naïve few do-gooders and altruists still believe. Point “b” means that religions are also subject to this cultural manipulation, which should have been obvious anyway from the historical examples above. The reason I bring this up is because of how often point “b” occurs, meaning that religion is dangerous because it has such a strong hold on culture, thus making it a far too easy target for negative cultural manipulation.

That’s all I have time for today; you are going to have to wait for me to write more on this subject. Next time, if I am not plagued with the ennui that comes from a flow of mindless work, I will go into more detail. Unless, of course, you think I am garrulously rambling on about nothing, in which case you will have to suffer through a few more posts on this topic.