We are Culture

We are Culture

On some deep level almost everyone feels insecure, afraid, separate, isolated, and unsure of his or her own authenticity and value. We rarely openly confess and share these feelings with each other without attributing it to some specific cause or incident. Sometimes our anguish shows up in works of art or drama, or when it has built up to a point of crisis that can no longer be kept hidden. But about this personal suffering as a constant background condition, we generally keep our mouths shut and our gaze elsewhere.

To cover up this raw state, we obtain knowledge and adopt beliefs. From these, we fabricate a particular sense of self from which we deal with life. We might feel more “valuable” in the eyes of our community, but this does nothing to change our base condition. The only difference is that we’ve added yet another layer to our sense of “self.” It’s here that we step into an unending struggle with life. We suffer a nagging sense of fragmentation and dissatisfaction, and we lose our sense of real being – the source of our genuineness and innocence. Seeking relief, and unaware of any alternatives, we obtain new goals and possessions or adopt new character traits to bolster our self-identity. With each new attribute or acquisition, we further lose touch with the source of our own power, creativity, and inner peace – the very qualities we desire most, and also the only means to repair our situation.

How did we end up in such a pickle? The main source of this buried condition is the profound effect that our culture has on our entire frame of mind. Our culture is, in fact, what constructs are frame of mind. We all operate from a set of shared taken-for-granted beliefs – the matrix of our culture. This “consensus reality” may unite us in a shared domain of thought and perception, but many of the inherited assumptions behind it actually foster a sense of uncertainty and isolation. Various perspectives of our culture seem to offer solutions to our individual doubts and insecurities, but since these remedies arise from the same assumptions that cause the difficulty, they do not and cannot resolve our deep sense of personal inauthenticity and disquiet.

Peter Ralston

The Book of Not Knowing