Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/1004 export-culture
r1
no matter how much I talk about _Dragon Ball_, _Journey to the West_, or _Girl from the other side_ and try to explain they are based on Buddhist cosmology and the history of where they came from it will never make anyone actually use that interpretation. as much as every _smart_ person knows "signifier mad libs" are bad and you can't just substitute one ontology with another ontology, you never fully have the power to make someone _not_ revert back to the series of religious, cultural, ideological, or ontological associations they have always had, and strain Buddhist stories through Christianity or whatever on earth they are going to do. this is why it becomes necessary to present theories of revolution in backward civilizations _through_ framings the people in those civilizations would actually understand, even if that means going as far as assuming you have to explain Marxism to people who don't believe in morality, diversity, or tolerance.
r2
as later discussed in "Do we have Free Will", if we imagine two hypothetical individuals such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog, Shadow will not respond to approaches aimed at Sonic and Sonic will probably not respond to approaches aimed at Shadow. Sonic and Shadow are two separate entities with two separate personalities and histories. countries function similarly, as do the tiniest arbitrary cultural groupings that spring up at the scale of cities, towns, and parts of local states at a moment's notice. one cannot properly study ethics, human rights, or the tolerance of one demographic by another demographic with any framework beginning at countable "cultures", because in everyday life, Cultures emerge quite arbitrarily, and bigotry generally emerges inside the content of these countable Cultures. much as nothing is more bigoted against religions than religion, nothing is more bigoted and hateful against Cultures than Cultures. so what are we to do? Existentialism constantly sends us contradictory messages that people cannot be challenged for believing or belonging to the wrong Culture, and yet must be challenged on their "hatred" of other Cultures, in a reality where people almost always have "hatred" precisely because they belong to a Culture. in daily life, especially in the United States, the great majority of countable Cultures exist in the form of arbitrary formations such as "White Southern Baptist Christians of a particular church in Florida who hate transgender people and Communists". a great portion of instances where people become less hateful directly stem from the dissolution of Culture and community into scattered individuals rather than a hateful local culture actually changing into an inclusive one. but, if Cultures were individuals it is baffling why this should happen, because Sonic being Sonic and Shadow being Shadow does not in itself dictate that Sonic is Evil or Shadow is Evil. suppose instead of this process happening the way it actually happens, we wanted to successfully _preserve_ religion and culture and promote each one evolving into something better. how would this actually be accomplished, if we were not committed to Existentialism?
there is no such thing as granting these tiny arbitrary groupings "freedom" or "tolerance" without also literally learning to speak their vernacular and phrase everything according to their local traditions and sets of values. one either learns to coexist with fundamentally hateful Cultures and talk around their absolute hatred of other countries, religious groupings, and demographic identities, or begins taking action to actively obliterate culture and disallow culture in stark violation of the principles of freedom and tolerance. there is no in-between. the more we study culture and the development of countable Cultures, the more it is likely we will find out that ingrained hatred and culture are literally inseparable and to pry out hatred is quite literally to pull apart people-groups and purge them of all their culture forcing them to get entirely new culture. there may be an open question for a long time as to whether such an act is actually morally objectionable, or more like a laudable service to the entire human race. however, one thing is almost certain: the traditional principles of Liberalism and the actual tasks in front of people to create progressive movements are in contradiction, and cannot eternally coexist. freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and several other principles are lies in the context of everyday life. trying to introduce tolerance to religions shatters and buries religions. trying to tell real groups of people to respect multiple ideologies shatters and buries ideologies. trying to get real groups of people to admit and tolerate outsiders shatters and buries the original groups and transforms them into new groups; when these positive outcomes are not successfully achieved, religions, ideologies, and social graphs simply push each other out and refuse to admit in any of the new people who would change them. Difference Existentialism and alterity theories constantly push the myth that regions of local culture are capable of reforming in the manner of a Liberal government without becoming something entirely new, that because every Culture is a Culture, Cultures naturally wish to accommodate every other kind of person and every other way of being. but it should be obvious to anyone that this is blatantly incorrect, because a cultural region of progressives who believe in, for instance, transgender rights, would not want to allow in people who tightly hold transphobia as part of their local culture no matter how many pieces of paper they receive saying that "the people" want transphobia or they are obligated to accept transphobia in order to believe in democracy. a cultural region of progressives would not change their mind at the sight of a great stack of opinion-papers saying women should not have rights, or Black people should go live in Africa, or Muslims should go live in Iraq. culture is not a Liberal democracy and never has been. and yet, most of us live our lives in the midst of culture rather than in the midst of democracy. culture is the substance of everyday life at the tiny scales at which actual people live, while Liberal democracy only meaningfully exists at large nationwide scales as a means of connecting together separate local regions of culture. constitutional "freedoms" only meaningfully regulate the imperative for separate spatial regions of culture to leave each other alone, puttering along in hatred or inclusion quietly, separate but equal. Liberalism cannot meaningfully be fractalized down to the scale of cultural regions and tiny graphs of people joined by local culture.
yet, if Liberalism is fundamentally incapable of doing this, there does exist on the distant horizon something that can: small-scale Marxism. Marxism has always begun itself in the study of connections between individuals, usually in such contexts as the exploitative relationships between one manor lord and many peasants, or one industrial owner and many workers. Marxism has always framed itself around "class", yet in doing this, it has also necessarily given us the tools to reconstruct the inner workings of any population beginning at the scale of any set of separate individuals. if Marxism can explain how individuals arrange into a feudal order, or individuals arrange into capitalism and diffuse out into a sprawling Liberal-capitalist empire, then Marxism can also elaborate itself to explain how individuals arrange themselves into any particular shape at any small or large scale that exists. if it becomes truly necessary, then Marxism can explain the emergence of plural cultural regions, or plural political ideologies. the line between culture and ideology can be fuzzy at times. is politics inherently a form of culture? if wide swaths of people support a workers' movement or a ballot measure related to civil rights, can this be a cultural phenomenon? if two different formulations of Marxism construct two different workers' states and one of them is going on and on about "tradition" and the "real" version of Marxism, is this culture or politics? arguably, to some extent politics is culture and culture is politics; ideology is culture and culture is ideology. looking at things through the framings of Liberalism, this prospect might seem terrifying. _declare that one Culture is better than another? conceptualize Cultures in inherent competition? suggest that Cultures overtake and destroy each other simply by ratifying nationwide constitutional amendments? why, we'd better just throw out these ideas even if they're true! the damage caused by not pretending formal equality would be unthinkable!_ however, looking at all of this through the framings of Marxism, there is no need to panic. to recognize the real-world shapes of ideological or cultural regions and the real-world processes through which they develop is simply to become more capable of understanding each ideological or cultural region and constructing new kinds of political processes through which ideological or cultural regions emerge out of their long dark-age of trying to eliminate each other and come to live in harmony. this would be a true "existentialist" framework of _actually_ respecting "lived experience". it would be able to contend with the fact that cultural and ideological regions are not merely something that struggle across one country and produce universal "good ideas", but instead are international, and global, and beyond that coexist horizontally across time. it should not be controversial to any progressive anthropologist to suggest that Cultures do not become obsolete purely because they vanish into the past. yet, it is all too common to treat ideologies such as Marxism this way. the early Bolshevism of the Soviet Union was, for all intents and purposes, a Culture, inasmuch as the Aztecs were a Culture and the Incas were a Culture. the Aztec empire committed great atrocities against neighboring peoples, and Stalin's government created great achievements, and yet, for some reason, nobody speaks of the two in the same tone — the Aztecs were a "pre-Columbian civilization" that sadly vanished into the noise of industrial civilizations, the Soviet Union was a "totalitarian party-dictatorship" that "improperly totalized" people of non-Marxist ideologies. why not the other way around? why not say that the Soviet Union was a "pre-postmodernist" civilization that sadly vanished into the noise of an emerging global period of Existentialism, or that the Aztec empire had imperialist practices that improperly totalized anyone of other Cultures and pre-Columbian religions that wanted to keep their hearts in their chests? to merely say that a Culture is imperialist is not ultimately an insult if we are willing to conceptualize Cultures as divisible sets of individuals who through historical processes become capable of change. "socialism with Aztec characteristics" may be the stuff of historical fiction novels, and yet at the same time, "socialism with United-States characteristics" arguably is not. if history comes to an era of "socialism with multiple characteristics" in which one Black Marxism, one White-Southern-Baptist-Christian Marxism, one Chinatown Marxism, one Latino Marxism, and several others emerge as a single Marxist workers' state only through their federation and contradictory intermingling, then this should not be a problem, and nobody should be upset. Marxism did not ever declare that the continuing churn of history would not continuously unearth strange and unforeseen new structures. equally, one can also imagine an era in which the different sects of Marxist theory become separate coexisting political entities, or Marxism somehow coexists with Existentialism after Existentialism manages to create new schemes of democracy and renders traditional Liberalism obsolete. the exact form of ideological and cultural regions that we predict or attempt to characterize does not matter. whether the United States begins to actualize itself along lines of racial and ethnic categories, religious categories, ideological categories, or purely factional categories is immaterial to the overall exercise of modeling the correct way ideological and cultural regions will fit together. what is most important is that we become willing to conceptualize the future as one full of new and unusual forms of socialist transition, and to begin our path to that future by modeling countries as based on small interconnected sets of individuals.
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- v5.1 scraps/ tolerant Cultures cannot be exported