Comment by kelseyfrog
2 days ago
I'm not sure where you got "malicious cabal" from. Cultural values are the water in which fish swim. They look normal, obvious, trivially true, or just the way things "are". No one is secretly directing cultural truths while believing they are lies. Cultural truths are self-perpetuating ie: socially reproduced.
It's actually quite the opposite. True-believers overwhelmingly disseminate cultural myths. It's the police officer who believes they can positively affect the enforcement of order, educators who base values in the rational order of the mind. It's journalists and pundits who frame news as a tension between order (good, stable) and chaos (bad, dangerous). Where deviance is newsworthy primarily as a threat to order. See news cycles on crime, protests, economic instability, all in terms of order must be "restored."
Look at the modern workplace, for instance, obsessed with order, predictability, and process (think: KPIs, best practices, Six Sigma). And corporate culture manuals and onboarding training reinforcing norms of punctuality, control, and rational planning.
It's present in engineers, scientists, architects, IT managers - professions often celebrated as the apex of rational, orderly progress and as solutions to messy[chaotic] problems. Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value because it more closely aligns with necessary order.
None of these roles form a secret cabal. Still, they enforce and perpetuate the cultural value system whose results are judged on the basis of order.
No one is saying that chaos is good or order is bad. It’s that the binary itself is a function of our cultural mythmaking. When psychedelics make that myth visible, the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
> No one is saying that chaos is good or order is bad. It’s that the binary itself is a function of our cultural mythmaking.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Ask anyone who lived in Libya under Gaddafi and then in the years since, or who lived under any other despotic regime and compare it to the chaos that ensued when the despot is removed.
Civilization’s association with order is not random (or a function of “cultural myth making”); chaos _sucks_.
All myths contain a seed of truth. I can accept that living in Libya sucks while also accepting that our culture mythologizes order. I'm not sure how to see the world in such black and white terms - that acknowledging one invalidates the other.
But your original commentary paints the world's entire cultural backdrop as myth driven. There was no representation of this subtlety you now acknowledge must be addressed.
2 replies →
> I'm not sure where you got "malicious cabal" from.
You didn't literally write that of course. Instead, you said these:
- "the proponents of "Big Reality" really really really fight against its disruption"
- "the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood"
- "Western civilization has a deep myth"
- "[list of values] must either be accepted (...) or face rejection"
- "western civilization values (...) [list of values] in a self-justifying way"
- etc.
All of them painting "Big Reality" as a group that:
- exists
- is just following myths
- unjustly represses the exploration of alternatives
- is western for some reason?
I hope we can agree that this is not a positive or even a neutral characterization, and that it suggests coordination. Hence, malicious cabal.
> It's present in engineers
I mean yeah, hi. Every time I'm able to work with something tangible, something measurable, it's always an intrinsically better experience, both on a personal level as well as socially. And every time I run into the opposite, the end result is confusion and misery. To paint this as just cultural doesn't feel even remotely right. Especially since I really don't see culture having come first, or since there are neurodivergent people who have a particular fascination with exactly these concepts (counting, hard logic, etc), suggesting the existence of biological biases and drivers towards these.
> Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value
Art is incredibly technical, actually, especially the better stuff. And when you engage that technical side, you get incredible richness in return, much more levers you can push on with much more intentionality. These wouldn't be recognized things if people didn't try to see a "method to the madness" and instead just kept on going by vibes.
I cannot know what threads you've been visiting that gave you this impression, and I'm sure that there are people here who do what you describe. But as far as my anecdotal experience goes, I cannot confirm having experienced this (people taking cheapshots at liberal arts here) by the way.
> When psychedelics make that myth visible
But you don't need psychedelics to appreciate that the vast majority of the things we experience and reason about have an excessive serving of manmade components. Even something trivial as chairs or names are just artificial constructs. What this requires is a philosophically intrigued mind, not necessarily a drug-addled one. If your idea is more that "okay, but these are more tangible and readily apparent while on drugs", sure, maybe that's true. That's really not the position you've been portraying though - but that this is some exclusive perspective, that only arises when you let your mind magically throw everything else away temporarily via chemical means.
> the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
Doesn't help if you set up the rhetorical framework that way... Mind you, every belief is like this. It's not just those inherited from culture.