After a recent spate of introspection, I've taken to considering myself anticulture. I've come to consider the concept of culture to be fundamentally exclusionary, reactionary, and a fancy way of saying "I don't actually have a personality". Id-polers make a giant song-and-dance about respecting foreign cultures and the evils of cultural appropriation, but I'm legitimately rather proud of being a cultural pirate. In fact, I think that total cultural skepticism is the only non-reactionary vehicle for social progress. I think adopting knee-jerk attitudes (positive or negative) to groups of people, like Muslims, is a type of ideological cancer. Frankly, it sort of amuses me. Example: as a half-Finn born in America, I recently traveled to Finland to visit family. I tried, and hated, salmiakki (Finnish salted licorice) and I got a good chuckle out of the mental image of some dyed-in-the-wool patriot who hates it as much as I do but pretends to like salmiakki because "It's the Finnish thing to do". Boiling it down, isn't that all culture is? Western culturalists in particular are some of the heartiest sources of cringe in my opinion. Someone uses the "wrong" bathroom and they're off to the races posting pictures of Roman busts and P U T T I N G S P A C E S B E T W E E N L E T T E R S, as if ancient Roman women and men didn't shit and piss in the fucking open in public next to each other.
I gather that it's a minor Zig Forums tradition to put on a show for Zig Forums lurkers regarding muh identity, but I wanted to have a constructive discussion around this concept currently forming in my head. Does anyone have any reading recommendations about this?
why don't you go live in the zoo then you dumb ape? you can ooga and booga there to your heart's content. no culture to hold you back not even baboon culture. disgusting.(USER WAS SENT BACK TO THE ZOO FOR THIS POST)
Nolan Mitchell
idk, seems like I'd find "baboon culture" in a zoo if I were to find it anywhere.
I dunno OP I figure it's pretty natural for humans to want some shared culture (because we like groups and want to feel at home). I really don't give a shit about the argument that 'a real individual (TM)' should want this or that tbh, I have certain desires and I want to see them realized, and one of those is a wider society where I feel at home in and like to live in.
Jaxson Myers
user with the post above you here, and yeah I agree with your sentiment, as I put it above.
Jayden Jackson
It amazes me that you all are obstensibly concerned about the social fabric, yet at the same time are eager to unravel the things that reliably tie people together. Culture may be arbitrary, spooky, and reactionary but proles everywhere derive value from it.
Regardless, I don’t think destroying culture should be high priority praxis for the left. McMultinationals have that covered pro bono.
deleted and reposted to remove sage namespace
Austin Watson
I apologize that I didn't make my own, precise thoughts on this clear, this is still a growing concept I am working with and I don't exactly have precision thoughts on this as of yet. I am not saying "destroy all culture", but I am saying that society should default to a cultural skepticism. Personally "feeling at home" is a logically inconsistent and vague justification for culture, a social force that is by nature interpersonal. There's a lot of talk about high and low-trust societies among culturalists but I actually think an overemphasis on culture is a low-trust quality. The dream of building a society where behavior is regulated on an interpersonal level is I think something a person with difficulties connecting emotionally with others would endorse. My ideal solution would be a society where cultures are not privileged and allowed to exist (or wither away, as I suspect it would).
Jacob Peterson
"and merely allowed to exist", that should say
Jack Murphy
Definitely a good thought but.. How is muh personality any different from muh identity? How will you even have a personality if you aren't socialized through family, friends, or society as a whole. Humans pick up mannerisms and behaviors they see through reductive symbolism and culture. These things like culture/reductive symbolism have existed since before and will likely exist after, albeit in a different way. Appropriation is necessary for cultural exchange and growth. Its commodification that has reduced cultural to a set of ideological trinkets. Unless we start to transition to a post culture society (which probably won't happen anytime soon) we will still have to put up with both positive and negative mannerisms that are deduced from culture.
Jose Hill
That is a really good question. Actually, it's a little embarrassing, but when I was a reactionary I had fully fleshed out a personal neo-Hegelian philosophy which connected the individual to his antithesis, the community. I was so certain that I had philosophically connected the individual of common sense to society. Philosophically, the epiphany I had that brought me to my current, maturer decadentism was realizing that the individual was the center piece in my whole philosophy. I had seen culture as a pattern of "discovery" in which in an individual "discovers" his social identity by interfacing with others. I was actively describing language as a "discovery process" and was quite proud of my philosophy, which I considered publishing. But I realized that I could always philosophically isolate the self, but never the community, which was always dependent on the self to be defined.
Expanding on that, I know people here are skeptical of ‘muh human nature’ but the existence of distinct cultures is quite literally due to human nature. These practices occur because of more than just geographic isolation. People have a palpable inborn desire to form and partake in communities, conduct rituals, etc. Look around you at this very board with all its dumb inside jokes and signature witticisms.
Are you by chance a burger?
Nathan Sullivan
Okay so the 'feel at home' user here.
You say that 'feeling at home' is logically inconsistent but you hardly back that up.
Yeah and so is a home you make? I don't want to degrade into pol tier argumentation here but just because a society isn't literally your house doesn't mean you don't want to feel at ease around its people and connect with them as easily as possible.
A. that's a lame and ahistorical personal attack. As if all societies pre-1950 were a bunch of autists who needed to regulate people to feel at home.
B. You're establishing the false dichotomy that you're either a controlfreak or a freeeeee individual(TM) who leaves people alone. Just pointing out that homogeneity correlates with higher trust in the whole society (and not just emotional retards) and that therefore it is beneficial doesn't make you emotionally damaged. (I can show you research showing that correlation btw)
I don't want to insult you but at the bottom of your argument there seems to be a kind of moralism that implies that you're a more worthy individual if you don't care about some sameness in a society. I would say that a. research points out it's (on average) normal and not the sign of being emotionally stunted and b. that moralism is usually useless in a discussion about abstract shit.
Adrian Martinez
Same user again, what you say is perfectly true. Culture doesn't wither away, even in a shitty global individualized monoculture all kinds of associations and groups would form.
Lucas Walker
I've seen this silly discussion come up increasingly frequently and i want it to stop. What is culture? The language and literature, poetry, song and music, the cuisine and fashion, the heritage of philosophy, theology and political treatise, architecture, the arts and crafts. Now surely anyone can enjoy these things and they are not in the slightest diminished by it. Whereby architecture and design become the slaves of capital's utility in costs and the exercise of control, devoid of the pursuit of beauty or quality of life. Where does the threat to culture lie then? In the machinations of capital of course. Whereby fine cuisine is made ever more the purview of the wealthy, and even there debases it, all the while reducing the masses to standardised garbage. Whereby the creative genius that has the potential of birthing literature, art and music is chained to the narrow interest of profit and in the vast section of the masses entirely suppressed and given no chance for expression. Whereby education cares not to imbue us in youth with the knowledge and understanding of contemplation of the world but rather seeks to make us competitive by teaching us marketable skills.
Now these things are all certainly despoiled by capital and increasingly our experience of them is a cynical performative one focused more on tradition than on genuine culture. Zizek wrote in an article recently:
The homogeneity and social trust correlation is an oft overlooked factor here. People tend to strawman any EthNat sentiments as nazi-tier ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, even though the idea is far more strongly articulated as a general perscription for harmonious societies. Can you post the research you are familiar with? I have seen some of the scholarship on this topic and would like to see more.
Sebastian Davis
Here we go…
Joseph Gutierrez
I was born and raised in America. I used to feel something approaching a flush of pride in Finland, the country my father emigrated from, but after visiting the country a few times and going on a couple benders, and going to visit Stockholm (which is a very fine city and not the hellhole I was led to believe it was) as is tradition for people in the Finnish city of Turku, I became disillusioned, and realized that everybody is just doing their own thing sort of.
I just can't shake the feeling of the whole culture thing being quite silly. Like pic related, the Golden Dawn leader. Someone once told this fat Greek gorilla that he was part of the master race, and to this day he probably feels guilty for jerking off to those "hentai girls" on the computer. Just silly.
I mean that the logical inconsistency lies in projecting the personal feeling of "at home-ness" to society at large and trying to defend culture as philosophically anything other than a spook. What I meant by low-trust/culturalism connection is that modern culturalism is from my perspective often a reaction to capital. I think capitalism's natural properties of alienation lead to hypercorrection in the form of culturalism. Modern day, post-industrialization nationalism for instance is only about as old as Napoleonic liberalism and in my opinion is not some deep seating instinct. I don't believe correlation = causation in this case.
This board uses spook too much. Stirner never claimed groups don't have different behaviours, which is all a culture is. A set of different group behaviour.
Hunter Cook
Vice did a mini documentary on that guy in the picture. Pretty good peice.
We all have beliefs but we should back them up. I've been wondering about this shit like a retard, just read the shit I posted and see whether it doesn't make you change your mind.
Kevin Howard
Got a link? Always enjoy Vice documentaries.
Angel James
‘Diversity undermines social trust’ is definitely the mainstream opinion in academia, although there is some dissent. You should read up the subject before you come to a conclusion.
Ethan Turner
I will look at your links, as again I am genuinely interested in this subject, but my point I think would stand afterwards. I think that, in low-trust societies socially gutted like a fish by capitalism, the homogeneity = high trust connection (which in my experience is almost purely an Americanism), is a red herring. It's worth noting that, going by crime statistics, the staunchly religious and homogeneous Latin American nations (which generally have higher crime rates than the USA or African nations) are low-trust despite their religiosity and homogeneity. India is also a staunchly racist and exclusionary country, statistically speaking, and yet I would rate their "social trust" as being pretty low. Crime, rape, and petty hatreds run rampant there. China is haunted by scamming, backstabbing, and finagling, too.
Nathan Lewis
Which is why I am an anti-culturalist, and not a multiculturalist. I think culture needs to be allowed to rot away, which I think it would, when it can't act as a smooth-brain's defense mechanism against alienation.
Cooper Evans
I'm working on an effortpost response to this point using data, it will take a while.
This isn't a counterexample. India is incredibly diverse.
Julian Myers
Thanks for not linking the actual studies, i had to do some digging about to find the studies themselves. The first one looks at a number of factors relating to generalised trust of which 'ethnic fragmentation' is one. This one shows a fairly weak negative correlation with trust, one which negligible compared to other correlates of high or low trust such as political corruption, income inequality and recent wars which all far more strongly correlate with low trust and strong institutions of civil government, income equality, economic development and wealth which all correlate far more strongly than religious and cultural homogeneity. Hence a country like Poland despite being extremely ethnically and religiously homogenous ranks as low trust whereas countries with significantly more ethnic diversity such as the Netherlands, Australia or Sweden which have significantly higher trust scores.
The second and third studies concern physical barriers being good at stopping or reducing conflict between people with the research being done on ethnic groups specifically swiss cantons and the yugoslav wars and do not concern causes or even correlates of violence. One might as well produce a study demonstrating that two cats won't fight if they are kept in separate rooms, this tells us nothing about social trust or the impact of ethnic homogeneity on it.
The fourth study actually points out that another study, a meta-analysis of research done regarding the relation between ethnic homogeneity and trust, found that a majority of the research points to no correlation. The study itself also in its conclusion points out
The fifth study from the new york times article does little more than demonstrate that when we are injected with a hormone responsible for our care and affection we exhibit stronger reactions towards things we are familiar with such as names from our language. The article points out that oxycontin doesn't have any notable negative impact on reactions to unfamiliar things, nor does it relate in any way to our natural interaction with things that are new/unfamiliar, certainly not other people.
also a short excerpt from the fourth study again. lol, no surprises there.
Blake King
How do you philosophically isolate the subject without a conception of an other? Surely without an other (or community) to act as a reaffirment of self-consciousnes the subject is lost and uncomprehendable? Also humans literally can't come into existence without some form of social relationship, so isolating the self is just an act of mental gymnastics with no material purpose or value?
Jonathan Myers
This is why I unironically support the destruction of all cultures in the name of creating one monolithic "un-culture" like the Borg from Star Trek.
Joseph Ross
What's cultural Marxism?
David Wood
The definition of "culture" that right and left idpolers use is retarded and useless. That idea of culture as a collection of obvious symbols and practices is useful only for attaching it to an identity.
It doesnt help you talk about or understand how different groups of people socialize differently. What you think of as totally normal, mundane and not worthy of note is more important to understanding your 'culture' than whatever random fucking artifacts you've elevated to the status of holy relics, not to be desecrated.
Dominic Carter
Japan is ethnically homogeneous and it's not as high-trust as most people tend to assume, and it's also highly atomized.
Nicholas Hernandez
Well it's pol-tier to say everything is great if only a country is homogenous. I think that all in all it's beneficial but not magical a d not eve what's most important (like a lack of corruption, welfare state, etc.)
My apologies, I was on the phone and in a rush so I just grabbed the links I could still find on my phone. Then again, you don't have to be so butthurt about investing 3 minutes of your life into going to sci hub.
That's just not true, it factors in as about half as much and is more relevant than for example linguistic fragmentation. Like I said above, I'm not a polyp who thinks that if everyone was huwhite we'd have paradise. I'm saying that it seems beneficial to me. Ofc living in a country where the government isn't corrupt, where people didn't shoot at you, where you don't need to steal, is more important. But on top of that sameness helps a bit.
Their model is about how different groups can compete for the same public space and how this competion can lead to conflict. They think that if minority groups reach a certain critical mass friction and conflict become more likely. They use Jura to point out that Switzerland knew recent conflicts mostly where groups were not certain of their own predominance in a cultural space which led to conflict until these groups were given their own space. This was just to back up the point that homogeneity is beneficial (although I should point out that the authors think extreme diversity may also alleviate conflict).
I def. agree that there is no consensus, but that's why you have to read the science and reach your own conditional conclusions by reading some science and forming your own opinion (to be discarded when the science improves).
The point was to point out that Western societies still divide themselves groupishly (I think this study used Dutch men not burgers) even when this is purely unconscious, as demonstrated with more pc higher educated students. I think that situation can be risky when pairing it to the modeling of Yugoslavia and Switzerlamd those other guys did.
Brayden Flores
How is it highly atomized and how to you define high-trust when compared to other societies? Are you imply the homogeneity has nothing to do with trust?
Aiden Sullivan
Well I am of course happy to agree that burgers are retarded
see attached OC PDF that I spend an hour making and then spent 45 minutes figuring out how to redact my doxx from the its data The data I was using didn't have any 'social trust' metric so I used other variables to approximate it.
Ryder Martin
wew I just realized a mistake, replace homogeneity with heterogeneity on page 4.
Hunter Carter
sorry didn't mean to sage I was up at 4am
That's the thing, we derive concepts like personality or individuality from culture. It depends on the culture where you are socialized that shapes how people view ideological concepts. For example, someone in rural China is going to have a different opinion on personal freedom that a homeowner in say the United States. Culture is influenced by a set of material conditions which effects both the base and the superstructure of society. Even things like Anarchism and Communism will change depending on a set of cultural and material forces that allow these ideologies to take root. Leftism and personal/individual freedom have their root in western philosophies and are a direct descendant of Enlightenment thinking.
One thing about the human nature argument that bothers me is that it is such a cop out. When right wingers use it they are being disingenuous since they think that the totality of human social relations have only exist under capitalism when in reality concepts like mutual aid and culture have predated capitalism society by millennia. Problem I have with leftists is that they tend to ignore natural in-group out-group behavior commonly seen in social animals. Of course this argument gets reduced to muh spooks or at the opposite end it evolves into nationalism/xenophobia/tribalism. Problem is that humans are pretty fucking fragile and we need to rely on each other to survive. If there is anything that does constitute as "human nature" it's the simple biological fact that humans are social creatures. Fucking Kropotkin covers this
I'm that guy who posted the links, just gonna use a flag from now on.
Nice effort posting.
Imo shamelessly asserting that genetics play no role or that culture plays no role are both idiotic. Genetics influence the effects of cultural pressures and cultural pressures influence genetic outcomes. It's just complicated, is my point.
Caleb Wood
I've said it before and I'll say it again, this board uses that word too much. When Stirner talked about 'spooks of the mind' he just criticized an attitude where your eyes get all blurry and you throw away rational self-interest in favour of abstract ideas. Basically a kind of memetic theory I guess. But he never denied culture exists…
Luke Miller
I wasn't going to bring up genetics because related arguments gets rehashed weekly here and this thread is something different for a change.
Aaron Rivera
Your stats seem solid, enough that it's probably not in my interests to chase you around that particular mulberry tree. But you argue that Central America's homogeneity is positively correlated to healthcare spending and lack of corruption, which to me seems like cherry picking. The fact of the matter is that CA countries basically lead the world in murders, which, if that's not a low-trust result then I don't know what is. I'm certain you'd cite Japan's low crime rate as proof that it has earned enough Trust Points (TM) to unlock the Low Crime Stats part of its Tech Tree (even though Japan is notorious for basically ignoring crime epidemics like human trafficking and the Yakuza), so why is this not the case in CA?
Aiden Gonzalez
Jesus Christ people can we not reduce everything that happens in a country to ethnicity, that's literally pol
Isaac Davis
Eh, yeah I'll drop it before that train gets on rolling and the thread devolves into screaming about monkeys and jews
Michael Stewart
Pretty much the point I'm trying to make but said better. Yep, I need to reread Ego and His Own now. It's been over a year since I read it last
Joshua Bailey
Uh, did I? That wasn't really the point of my post.
Owen Hernandez
Yo también, I'm probably gonna try the Landstreicher translation, I'm very curious how it differs from what I read
Noah Nguyen
Haha I was a bit crude. My point was that flinging around this or that part of a specific society (in some relation to ethnicity) will probably not get you anywhere.
I think Demflag just wanted to point out that homogeneous societies invest more in public goods (and are less corrupt) and not much more. If you then bring up the crime rate, well that's another discussion alltogether.
Ryan Phillips
Well, ok, my point was that if we argue that both CA and Japan are homogeneous then I'd like to know why one is sky-high in murder rates and the other is quite low. Actually I think the answer is almost certainly not genetic, considering that there are high-crime nations genetically closer than not to Japan, like Indonesia and Vietnam. I was just trying to make the point that virtually every culturalist would cite low crime as a blessing of homogeneity, but these discrepancies don't really jive with that.
Samuel Lewis
Yeah so I come from a Texas German background and my last name is so ridiculously Germanic that I got teased for it growing up. I'm like a Crusader Kings II character. I'd be a natural candidate for some kind of white ethno-nationalist ideology but the irony is that what remains of this culture would not survive if it weren't being propped up as a tourist industry in some towns like Fredericksburg, New Braunfels and Muenster. It needs to draw in other people, many whom are not white or have German backgrounds, or these towns would decline and then collapse.
I think actual Germans would find a lot of these tourist towns to be cheesy and Burgerfied but an old German lady I know (who grew up in a bomb shelter during the war) mainly criticizes the cooking as being a little off. She immigrated to Texas after meeting a Mexican businessman and marrying him. I dunno, but I prefer to identify with aspects of my cultural background that included people like Edgar von Westphalen who was Karl Marx's brother in law who immigrated to Texas. And a lot of the early German settlers were socialists who resisted the Confederacy, and also made peace with the Comanches. In America, the problem is the "white American" thing I think that wants to colonize and oppress everybody.
Yeah that doc is fascinating. Ex-con who seemed to latch on to the Trump thing as a way of running from his personal problems, only to make them worse. America in microcosm right there.
Are we arguing that CA is homogeneous? Because afaik it's really not. For example Costa Ricans are often racist to Nicaraguans afaik not just because they see them as taking their jobs, but also because they are often darker. And there's a division between white, native, and black.
No, we'd wonder whether there is a general correlation with it all else being equal. This is a strawman.
But that was my point: that's of course a very complex issue. We are saying that homogeneity is probably beneficial taken on the whole, not that it solves your problems.
The variables coverage I have here is kind of splotchy (I have nothing about crime for instance) so I tried to chose 3 things that could stand in for social trust, and 2.5 of them supported my point. If you have an idea for something else to regress, I can try it. I’ll be back at my computer in a bit.
Landon Hall
Marxism*
Damn rightists have low lQ…
Wyatt Mitchell
Its like I'm listening to myself a little bit. It's not like culture can't be good, but I'm definitely skeptical of it. Maybe a Socialist culture would be obviously positive? People should be skeptical of culture. A lot of A non here are trying to dodie what your saying with vague ideas of "a collection of ideas and symbols" or whatever, when that in fact has nothing to do with the issue. How do we value cultures? How do we determine what isn't and is valid culture? The Nazis, for example, undoubtedly have culture, and so do tech fag Capitalists, etc… Yet Zig Forums won't endorse these cultures, and for good reason. I was thinking, perhaps, culture is influenced by the structure of society, so perhaps a more advanced society has more advanced culture, perhaps you could even value this that way. You could deem Nazi culture as a clear reduction (literally muh empire shit), but then what of more modern cultures that are shitty? They are bad in connection to a Socialist culture? What would that be? This stuff confounds me, yet it seems like their is an obvious, objective answer. Not to imply there is a best culture, but I can't help but be certain they can at least be tiered
There really isn't tho. What I might like in a culture you might hate. What I value a lot in a culture you might value little. It's subjective. Everyone likes trust and low suicide rates ofc but when it comes to abstract values… Good luck.
Logan Hall
Culture is the perquisite for communication. Only if you share a frame of reference can you engage in meaningful communication beyond base object identification.
Adam Morgan
This is bullshit and their is no reason to believe that in an objective universe there exists some magic subjectivity that conveniently covers the exact edges of your knowledge.
Nicholas Jones
...
Jacob Ward
This is like trying to be anti-ideology, you just end up making an "anti-ideology" ideology which is in itself a more potent form of ideology because you believe it not to be one. You couldn't really escape or remove "culture" if you tried, its THE social construct of social constructs.
Yeah no one is saying you can't think or wonder user. It's just not an excuse not to come to a critical conclusion instead of assuming a priori that metaphysically there is a 'best' situation (dunno how you would even begin to measure that or come up with a coherent, let alone objective factor of measurement), which you will discover if only you think enough. That's naivity imo.
The only one coming up with that shut here is you. Subjectivity is just used as a useful logical abstraction here meaning as much as 'the priorities felt by one person are not necessarily metaphysically inscribed into 'the objective universe' as being 'good''. If anything, you're the one coming up with magical thinking in that you think that, metaphysically, there is something like goodness 'out there' even though you'll never be able to sense it or get at it in another way besides just feeling this or that is nice and good and extrapolating from that.
Jeremiah Smith
The stronger correlation of real life to being anime, the better the situation.
This is exactly why race mixing should be standard for leftists. Only through blending of all peoples into one single group can there truly be internationalism.
I dunno, read Max Stirner or some shit. I was turned by Debord, so I don't generally factor culture into my usual conception of things. Culture is just the inevitable shit people do in large groups, and I prefer it to be organic and fluid, rather than being rigidly controlled. It seems silly to try and prevent people from doing shit they think is cool from other cultures. It's basically inevitable.
As for profiting on the culture of others, I kinda get that because it can have real world effects on peripheral peoples who don't have adequate means of protecting themselves from economic predation.
Matthew Gray
Theres a difference between culture and capital C Culture as in Cultural Apropriation and European Culture. The former exists by definition wherever humans exist socially but the latter can and should be smashed with a thousand hammers.
Wyatt Cruz
I agree. Let us continue this conversation in a non-European language using non-European technology.
Henry Cox
...
Jacob King
When the fuck did you invent the computer, white boy?
Jonathan Nelson
*angry mouth clicking noises sent via Vodoo doll*
Sebastian Edwards
Elaborating further: the idea you call "culture", where some group or kind of people own certain symbols and can be thought of as having certain achievments, and practices and styles and achievments are some sort of holy icons of who they are, is retarded and must be destroyed. European technology is technology people living in europe use. Its mostly identical to japanese technology. Zig Forumstards and sjws talking about 'white culture' or [minority here] 'culture' is the most obvious example of this kind of idea but its everywhere in only somewhat less pronounced forms.
