"Be yourself.""Stand up for what you believe in.""Your life is yours to create.""Write your own destiny."These are but a few of the cultural cliches that are passed around by everyone on a fairly regular basis. Everybody is regurgitating them, be they a presidential candidate, a modernist religious figure, an anarchist revolutionary, a New-Age hippie, an ambitious psychotherapist, an entrepreneurial capitalist, or a socialist left-winger.But take a close look at those people, especially the ones who promote a particular ideology or belief system. How many of them are practicing what they preach? And more importantly, how many are providing you with reasonable means to accomplish these lofty-sounding ambitions? And then, the most important question of all: How is all this affecting your life?It never ceases to amaze me how unsatisfied people are with their lives, and yet how they never seem to be willing to do something about it. So you might socialize with a different group of people, take up new hobbies and activities, or if you're really intrepid and audacious, change your career path. But does this really accomplish anything, other than a temporary, short-lived suppression of your dissatisfaction? Does it have any real impact on yourself, the people around you, or anything else for that matter?If so, congratulations! Either you're a member of a very rarefied group of individuals who truly and openly enjoy being alive, or you're very delusional. Either way, good for you. But if not, then I urge you to read on... perhaps something will strike a chord.What I'm going to share with you are my personal, politically-incorrect views. You are free to agree with them, criticize them, or completely ignore them. It's my hope, however, that you give them some consideration before you throw them into your psychic dustbin.Have you ever played Sim City, or Second Life, or any similar computer game that is basically a simulation of real life? Better yet, are you familiar with Virtual Reality, where you wear a pair of 3D goggles and, if you're wealthy enough to afford it, a body suit that detects your movement and transmits sensory feedback to your body, so that you get to experience a perfectly artificial world in a very similar way to the way you experience your everyday real world?Here's how I see the current situation of the human organization. Culture is a virtual reality.No, I'm not talking about The Matrix or the Thirteenth Floor, although these movies do propose a decent metaphor and a possible future. What I'm discussing here is a very real analogy. Think about it this way...A culture is a localized spatio-temporal continuum, meaning that it exists only in a particular place and over a definite period of time. Otherwise, you'd have one culture that spans the entire planet throughout all of history. This is a preliminary resemblance between culture and VR. But this is trivial, really, so let's move on...A VR world is based on a number of rules, which define its boundaries and restrict the interactions of its virtual characters. These rules are arbitrarily chosen by the programmer who designs the VR world. The programmer chooses these rules to suit the purposes for which he created the program in the first place, and he can change these rules at whim should his purposes change.Contrast that with any culture you want. Arab cultures are primarily governed by tribal values. The Nazi culture was based on the notion of racial superiority. The Muslim cultures put a premium on teleological, after-life eternity, diminishing the integrity of worldly joys and ambitions. Western and Westernized cultures magnify industrial and post-industrial value systems that equate success and fulfillment with material possession. And so forth and so on...Notice what all those cultures have in common? Their rules, laws, values, and belief systems are all arbitrarily chosen, based on no objective set of criteria. The fact that there are so many cultures is enough proof of this statement. If they were adhering to any real, objective principles or even to some eternal, metaphysical archetype, they wouldn't vary to this astronomical extent.But my feud with culture is not because of its arbitrary, artificial rules. If these rules served the people they claim to serve, or even a statistically significant percentage of the population, perhaps I wouldn't be so harsh on them. But the undeniable, self-evident fact is that only a very select class of people reap the benefits of any cultural construct. Incidentally, this is the very same class that is responsible for defining culture in the first place, in much the same way a VR is nothing but a designer-reality.But here's the crux of this analogy. VR environments are made of computer code, be it binary, C, Java, or some other programming language. I'm suggesting that culture is encoded in human language, that it's a virtual reality made of language. You might want to take a look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or read some of Naom Chomsky's numerous papers to get some grounding in this idea.But a computer language is usually very precise, its logic leaving no room for misinterpretation or confusion. Human languages, on the other hand, are inherently ambiguous. A word can have 2 or more meanings, depending on the context in which it occurs. And it's my contention that "Culture-Makers" manipulate us into carrying out their self-serving agendas through the skillful obfuscation of context, leaving us with a hazy, deceptive understanding of the underlying meaning.Take democracy, for example. The spirit of democracy is rather intuitively-grasped by everyone, and it's a notion that I suppose most of us find decent and constructive. But how does it lend itself to actual application? It gives rise to what political philosophers call Tyranny of the Majority. If the majority chooses to persecute a particular minor ethnicity, for better or ill, that's how it shall be.But let's take a less brutal example. If 51% of a population chooses a particular presidential candidate over another, the other half of the population is left with no better option than to bite the dust. That doesn't seem like very smart application to me, and it's made possible only by creating a confusion barrier between people's intuitive understanding of democracy and the way it is linguistically presented to them.And the plot thickens even more when you think about how those 51% made their so-called "decision" in the first place. It's usually the propaganda and the hyperbole they were relentlessly exposed to during months of campaign advertising. How else would loving parents choose a president who would send their children to kill and die in another country? The toxic power of images, now perfected through the superb machinery of mass media, leaves no room for educated decision. The brainwashing is so complete and omnipresent that we can't distinguish between choice and psychological coercion. It's no coincidence that all major news broadcasting channels have professional psychologists on staff.But you already know all this, don't you? You may even agree with my notion of culture being a virtual reality made of language. The real question here is: So what?I was talking with a dear friend of mine recently, who is an intelligent, accomplished person with a professional CV so impressive that it still amazes me every time I read it. She was trying to convince me of the importance of acquiring a prestigious university degree, and that it didn't matter whether you enjoyed what you were studying or whether you didn't find yourself in it. She insisted that abandoning a highly-respected, well-paying profession for the sake of pursuing a self-fulfilling, self-realizing activity or discipline of study is a sign of irresponsibility and immaturity.Now here's the paradox. This woman is a very spiritual person, who can easily spend so much money trying to make other people happy that she wouldn't notice she'd spent all the money she had. This is not an exaggeration -- she mentioned this to me on at least two different occasions, and I'm very inclined to believe her. Even more paradoxical is that this person was arguing with me that enjoyment and fulfillment were not the most important things to pursue in a university program, at the same time she was searching for another job because she didn't feel appreciated or satisfied with the one she then had.This reminded me of the brilliant concept of "Doublethink" that George Orwell articulated in his masterpiece, 1984. It's when you believe that X is, and that X isn't, and you hold both beliefs equally and at the same time. You think that's madness? It's the name of the game in the 20th and the 21st centuries, baby!Which brings me back to how culture is a virtual reality made of language, and how the beneficiaries of culture capitalize on the ambiguity of language to keep us confused, infantilized, unable to reach self-satisfying conclusions, and always (whether consciously or unconsciously) looking for someone else to define for us who and what we are. This someone can be a religious leader, a charismatic politician, or even our close circle of social influences. We lost all touch with what I like to call the felt presence of immediate experience. We don't trust our own experience anymore; we absolutely need to have consensus before we can acknowledge our own selves.I don't assume any moral inferiority in those who need to follow someone else's rules or live within the secure confines of social acceptability. But I don't understand why they're so willing to sacrifice their happiness and abandon the possibility of joy and fulfillment, simply to "go with the flow."People usually criticize me for doing things unorthodoxically and treading culturally frowned-upon paths. They think I do it to fit the image of the heretic or to enjoy a childish heroic thrill. The truth is, I merely follow my heart and do what "feels" right to me. I do believe that someone needs to set an example, with the obvious risk of going down as a martyr, but it's only by coincidence that not many others seem to be up to the task.But, to my mind, exemplars and ideals are meaningless if you can't find yourself in them. If a cultural value doesn't make you happy, then why the hell adhere to it? What's so wrong with being an outcast, if the "cast" isn't doing you any good?Have you ever noticed how similar the word "culture" is to the word "cult." Could this be more than a mere coincidence? Perhaps some subconscious part of our language-making faculties was trying to tell us something, but we weren't paying enough attention.Culture is the ultimate cult. When they tell you to get in touch with your roots and embrace your Egyptian-ness, or your Irish-ness, or your whatever-ish-ness, take a moment to think about what that means. You may find that it's your humanness that has eluded you in all this frenzied ethno-centricity.Think of how many times cultural boundaries ruthlessly crushed your personal aspirations, sexual preferences, artistic expressions, and aesthetic inclinations, then ask yourself whether "fitting in" was really worth it.And don't worry about being an outcast. There are many others like you who got fed up with these artificial systems of control which are manipulated by greed and selfishness and propagated through subservience and indifference. If you make the conscious decision to be a human being, you'll find that you're not alone.Why do I believe this to be true? Well, consider the staggeringly high suicide rates in Western cultures. International media had a field-day when statistics exposed the incredibly growing suicide rate among teenagers in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, which are the epitomes of materialistic achievement. In 2005, official surveys showed that at least one person committed suicide every 40 seconds in the United States.My theory is that these people, forcibly awakened from the proverbial American Dream, suddenly found themselves vis-a-vis a waking reality that they had nothing but a very brief introduction to, and over which they had no control whatsoever. Escaping life altogether was the only solution their fragile, dependent psyches found for an otherwise seemingly insoluble dilemma.But I also would like to suggest that intelligent, more hopeful people faced the same dilemma, but came up with less fatalistic, more creative solutions. And it's one of those solutions that I'm submitting to you here.If you find this all too dreamy, too far-fetched, and too unrealistic, no problem. I'd love for you to challenge it. Criticize it as much as you'd like, then pass it on to other people who would also want to argue with me over it. If I'm wrong, I'd love nothing more than to be corrected.But until then, I'll keep doing what I'm doing because it makes me happy, fulfilled, and alive. I hope you can say the same about what you're doing. But if not, perhaps it's time for you to try something different. I have a few suggestions that I'm going to talk about later on. But whatever that "something" may be, this is ultimately for you to decide.
