A-Z Challenge: C is for Culture

What is culture? Is culture dead? Or is it just running on autopilot in chaotic traffic on a busy highway immersed in a plethora of signage which no one reads or cares?

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”  ― Alan Wilson Watts

“The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.”  ― George Carlin

“While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine.”- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Culture, cultura, is the cultivation of an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance. It is our ideas, beliefs, our morals and our self-identity as a collection of individuals. It is a collective 'Us.' And a collective 'Them'. It was once the fabric of our civilization. Now it is becoming our collapse. 

Perhaps our redemption lies in the following words:

“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life." 
-  Octavio Paz  (Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, 1914-1998)

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.” - See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dpuf

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
– Terence McKenna - See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dpuf

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
– Terence McKenna

“Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”
– Terence McKenna
- See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dp