Quotes about Culture

So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

Egyptian civilisation was not a 'development', it was a legacy.

Employees, the key is what motivates people. And they are not gonna be motivated about maximizing shareholder value. I can tell you that. You can make them all shareholders, and that will help. But they're—only gonna be motivated about a sense of purpose.

School is indeed training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

Being tatttooed has opened up a whole new way of life for me.  I now have a whole circle of interesting friends.

The more you measure and motivate based on innovation, the less likely you will have a truly innovative culture.

There are many tools available to help write a mission or vision statement, but I think it's often best to keep it simple -- one or two sentences -- and describe why the business exists. What is the core value or the daily purpose? Write it down and share it with everyone! Next, create an employee manual that reflects the culture.

I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation.

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.

It's useful to look at [thought] as a system of reflexes.  A reflex just operates, as we've seen in the case of the knee-jerk.  However, we don't usually think that thought is like the knee-jerk reflex.  We think we are controlling thought and producing thought.  That way of thinking is part of our whole background.  But I'm suggesting that it's not generally so--that a vast part of our thought just comes out from the reflex system.  You only find out what the thought is after it comes out.  Now, this really overturns a great deal of the way we look at the mind or the personality or our entire cultural background.

When people don't understand the principles of government or understand the execution of the process of government, government suffers at the hand of popular misconception.

One of the most remarkable fruits of Hegel's work is his insight into the primal types of powers definitive of the different strata and modes of human subjectivity:  (1) the self-cohesion of immediacy in its basal and passive ineptitude to objectify, define, conceptualize, or criticize anything (Ansichsein or being-in-itself); (2) the objectifying and alienative powers of conscious ego (Fursichsein or being-for-itself); and (3) the extraordinary powers of spirit to reconcile or synthesize modes (1) and (2) into a higher-order union (An-und-Fursichsein).  You can readily see that this is a schema I make repeated use of, for its illuminating division of powers; but it implies of course also that, in circumstances where spirit is not feasible or active to mediate the lower-order modes, then immediacy and alienative consciousness are going to be repeatedly cycling through forms of warfare with one another.  Personalities and cultures in the absence of mediational spirit are wracked by the abysmal and nearly ineffable violent intolerance that immediacy (naivete, faith, the differenceless resolution of all things into a lukewarm bath of unthinking subjective plasm) has for conscious ego (articulation, logic, formulated theories/concepts/ideologies), and vice versa:  this Kulturkampf makes the whole society like a patient suffering from autoimmune conditions, one system in him having reacted biochemically with another (antigens generating antibodies). But all immediacy or soulish psyche is laced with the predisposition to develop into conscious ego regardless of also being liable to react against its fully formed character.

The fallacy of modern atomistic individualism is of course not just our "tabula rasa" self-deception but also our ego-mythical "social contract":  if every member of modern society is supposed autonomously and privately to think through for himself the most vital and fundamental (normative, evaluative, principled) issues of his life -- i.e. to undertake primal self-formation utterly on his own and outside the purview of parents/peers/education/media etc. -- then of course the vast majority will never advance past point A or B, whatever is most obvious, blatant, and simplistic.  Expecting moderns to be radically "self-creative" when their culture systematically strips them of all concrete cultural content that might act as soulish or spiritual alphabets, is expecting fleas to jump when their legs have been cut off.  Ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing is going to get produced:  humans require raw materials, they require means and tools and techniques and instructions as well as a repertory of ends, principles, values, teleological orientations, hierarchies of perspectives, etc..  If anyone wants to know where such an unholy and vast mass of aborted personalities came from in modern society (the modern Many), one virtually has to look no further than the vacuous or abstractivist code that deprives all of them of cultural traction and grit, and encourages their doulic lethargy and their banausic materialism.

"Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind. Individuals, and not masses, form the culture of the race."  

~Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that they way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.

Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life.

If we'd been born where they were born, and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.

The world is a book, and those who do not travel only read a page.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

People can only live fully by helping others to live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

Compassion can be put into practice if one recognizes the fact that every human being is a member of humanity and the human family regardless of differences in religion, culture, color and creed.Deep down there is no difference.

I wrote this quote: "Science and spirituality are synonymous" in response to the national enculturation divisions that exist between science and religious views, and the desire to open peoples' minds to the concept of the possibility of reconciliation between the two ideas as not only synonymous, but ideally logical and consequential to an acceptance of spirituality that makes sense in the real world.

Once a new social stage appears in a culture, it will spread its instructional codes and life-priority messages throughout that culture's surface-level expressions: religion, economic and political arrangements, psychological and anthro-pological theories, and views of human nature, our future destiny, globalization, and even architectural patterns and sports preferences. We all live in flow states; there is always new wine, always old wineskins. We, indeed, find ourselves pursuing a neverending quest.

"Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, 'How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?'"

"Our cultures are knit together by vibrations we cannot see or touch."