Culture is a field of perception, a mind-state that pre-registers incoming information as belonging to conditioned categories.  It is an inevitable totalitarian aspect of growing up as a social animal.

It is innate to the experience of culture that many aspects of one’s own are not only imperceptible but that they are perceived by other cultures in ways we can never fully understand.

Therefore, when two cultures collide and mix together intimately through the sharing of land or through warfare, it is natural that we experience some disorientation as we struggle to give language to tensions within our range of perception that have only come to consciousness as a result of the penetration of new psychological presentations.  We only become aware of the vastness of the cultural reality when our own culture loses its capacity to deaden our perception of the larger universal problems.

So, as we have entered a new global reality where every culture on the planet is competing openly with every other culture for mind-space, for actual physical neural territory, politically engaged in a struggle to represent reality, each with its own set of motivations and trade-offs, it is natural that humanity now finds itself in a state of perpetual universal paranoia, anxiety and terror, as we accept the grim truth that without a form of interpretive software, known as culture, that we would be unable to function.

This exploration of culture is itself an expression of some process I cannot completely claim authorship to, and it might be arising out of influences that endanger some of my own interests.  This is the danger of our times, the danger of losing our grip, a grip maintained by the way we encode our sensations with meaning.  The philosopher of the 21st Century cannot maintain his/her objectivity, since the objectivity itself is a cultural product, a protective device.  The philosopher of the 21st Century cannot maintain anything, he/she will have to leap into a water whose temperature is unknown.

All that being said, there are aspects of my own culture that have to do with how we regulate historical time that I can’t help but feel optimistic about.  It is useless to participate in this alchemical struggle if we aren’t going to be honest about our own beliefs, if we are not enthusiastic about the compartmentalization of what one believes as distinct from what one is, since those beliefs are artifacts of one’s life and possible clues for ‘the other.’

On the other hand, I believe sanity and rationality will face some very difficult renovations in the coming cacophonous cultural crisis.  It is already happening, and many many people are medicating themselves.  But, that’s just it, medication, when perceived through the rubric of culture is itself an agent, a political device with a voice all its own.  I would be cautious about following this research…it requires a particular kind of strong-heartedness.

We live in an age of profound complexity, and we are about to face reality without the mask of cultural conditions, and in this way we will all see the bushes as both burning and not consumed.   The truth of human progress has rarely been gentle.