“But… My Culture Told Me To Do It!”
When society has done all the thinking for you, and you are suffering from the consequences.
Culture is the collective wisdom accumulated by thousands of generations that have come before you. It is a result of the survival strategies that have been invented by our ancestors. It is all those behavioral patterns, ways of thinking, beliefs, values, and assumptions we are making about the world which have been collective generated as society developed.
If you hadn’t grown up in a cultural environment, you would be incapable of doing pretty much anything right now. It is only through the process of socialization and cultural transmission that we learn the behaviors that enable to operate us in today’s society.
Just imagine for a moment that Albert Einstein had grown up in a desert. Would he have become the inventor of the theory of relativity? Certainly not.
While culture is important in making us a person that is capable of operating in society, it also has it’s own “problems”.
Your culture doesn’t care about you.
It doesn’t make any difference for your culture whether you are achieving your personal goals or not. Your culture is in its own mode of survival. All it cares about is sustaining itself. And while an individual is part of it, the individual is simply a small piece in a very large machinery.
To make sense of this statement, we should first go back to the evolution of culture and the reason for its existence. Yes, that’s right…. the evolution of culture. After all, culture hasn’t always existed.
Before humankind came to existence, progress that any creature on earth could possibly make was only through genetic evolution… and that is a very long and slow process.
Of course, animals also have the capability to learn from each other. For example, let’s say you used to have only one dog. Usually, he is very quiet. But then one day you get a second dog, who loves to bark. Suddenly, your first dog starts copying this habit and they collectively bark themselves into a rage every time a little rabbit jumps past your house.
But these abilities to learn from one another are very limited in animals. Well, after all they only have a very limited capability to communicate with one another and “express” their “thoughts”.
So, over a long period of time, the ability to create culture has come into existence. So far, it has been the ultimate invention of evolution. Culture simply makes the survival of a species so much easier, by allowing it to learn from one another and passing the learning that people have generated on to the next generation.
In other words, culture has come into existence to make the evolution of our species significantly faster. It is just that instead of purely happening on a genetic level, evolution now takes place on a cultural level as well. Researchers call this the theory of gene-culture coevolution.
This theory basically argues that our genes, and our culture, go through a process of evolution at the same time. And that the evolution of one has an impact on the evolution of the other.
One of the most prevalent examples is lactose intolerance. Today, most people perceive lactose intolerance as something like a “disease”.
But the truth is, lactose intolerance is actually the “normal” state of human beings. A long time ago, humans were only consuming the milk of their mothers. Once a child became old enough, its body stopped producing the enzyme that is necessary to process milk.
Eventually, however, society shifted from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society. And when that happens, the people of that time started consuming milk more regularly. Over time, then, their bodies started to keep producing the enzyme that is necessary to process milk even as they got older.
This is also the reason why in many cultures around the world, especially in Asia, the majority of people until today do not have the ability to process lactose.
In that sense, the evolution of a cultural behavior (shift towards agriculture) has had a strong impact on the development of our genes (the ability to process milk). Likewise, by developing the capability to process milk, this has also encouraged people to consume milk in much larger quantities.
Both cultural- as well as genetic evolution have a strong impact on one another.
What your culture does care about is its own survival
Remember, both genetic- as well as cultural evolution essentially are tools of survival. It is just that instead of focusing on the survival of genes, cultures focus on the survival of a system of thought and behavior.
As long as the system of thought and behavior which constitutes for a culture keeps existing, the goal of the culture is fulfilled. It doesn’t really matter whether an individual slightly deviates, as long as the system as a whole is capable of maintaining itself.
But what exactly is a cultural system?
A cultural system is a collection of values, assumptions, beliefs and ways of thinking which are interrelated with one another. These different components are shared with the other people of that culture, and they exist for the sake of enable the people to make a life as a community possible.
In that sense, a culture is constantly evolving. People are inventing new things, adjusting their beliefs slightly, and ridding themselves of old beliefs which are no longer viable.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that every person in any given culture is sharing exactly the same belief system. Rather, it means that your own belief system is situated within the wider context of that culture, placing boundaries around your way of thinking as a response to the environmental conditions that you are exposed to on a daily basis.
In other words, those “mental boxes” which we constantly talk about are a result of the culture that we have grown up in. In other words, the environment that we live in determines what we believe in and how we think.
What your culture wants from you is not always good for your own personal growth
First and foremost, your culture wants stability of the system. It doesn’t want a large quantity of outliers, as this would endanger the system as a whole.
Therefore, there are automatic feedback systems built into every culture. People are automatically keeping one another in check. Basically, they will indirectly say something along the lines of:
“If you don’t do what is expected of you, we will no longer provide you with this and that support”
Only a family level, parents will tell their children that they will no longer support them financially if they don’t study what the parents expect of them. On a governmental level, the government will threaten to stop giving you financial support if you have lived overseas for a longer period of time. On a corporate level, management will threaten to fire you if you simply let your beard grow as much as you want.
There is always some degree of societal control built into every culture in order to make sure that an internal consistency of beliefs is maintained and society is able to function.
Your culture shapes you in the direction that it wants you to go
As a simple example, every society depends on hierarchy in one way or another. There will always be a few people on the top, and a much larger group of people in the middle- and low levels of society.
If your family is a middle-class family, they will ingrain middle-class values and beliefs into your mind… whether they want it or not. It’s just that the structure of society is set up in such a way that these processes happen automatically.
For example, my parents were always saying like: “businessmen only want to take money out of your pocket” or “you should not try to reduce the amounts of tax you have to pay, because by paying these taxes you are fulfilling your duties as a citizen”.
If you are giving in to the beliefs that you are exposed to all the time by being part of a specific environment, then you are letting yourself to be shaped by society in general or by a specific group of people in particular.
You are no longer making your own choices as a an individual.
For example, I had a friend who has been sent by his company to Iran for two years. He was expected to become a “regional expert” by learning the local language and learning more about the culture.
In a way, this program was great, because for two years he was not working. All he was expected to do was to study and to learn the language.
At the same time, however, his company forbid him to bring his wife and his kid to Iran. Their argument was that if his family were to come with him, then he would be distracted from his mission.
Can you see how far this societal influence goes? We constantly get threatened with different types of “punishments” that are given to us if we do not comply with the things that our society and our culture have in mind for us.
In the end, although it may seem that we have a lot of choices in life, our culture only opens up a few different pathways out of which we then have to choose. It is very difficult for us to carve our own way which goes in life with our own needs, goals and aspirations. Our culture always has something to say about how we should live our lives.
So what can we do about it then?
1. Expose yourself to different environments regularly
If your environment has a strong influence on who we become, then we should be very selective about the environments that we expose ourselves to.
At the same time, we can also expose ourselves to different environments on a regular basis, so that we get to the the world from the perspective of different groups of people.
Staying in one single environment, whether that is the start-up community, the bricklayers community, the Kung-Fu community or whatever else makes our thinking rigid and makes it hard for us to see any alternative ways of thinking.
2. Choose your battles wisely
The people around you will try to influence your life all the time. Unconsciously, they will try to “bring you on the right path” by telling you that you should do this, or that you should stop doing that.
You can not simply ignore this all the time.
If you were to ignore the “advice” of the people around you all the time (and yes, that includes your boss), then eventually you would become an outcast. People have certain expectations of you, and you need to at least fulfill some of them.
But it is possible to question certain beliefs. It is possible to live a different kind of lifestyle than what the people around you expect. It is possible to carve your own way ahead. It is possible to build your life the way you want.
And still, you will have to make choices. You can’t simply do everything differently. You can’t simply make everybody around you upset with you because you are acting strange and selfish.
3. Become as independent from societal support systems as possible
Your society will try to use the threatening of withdrawing support in one way or another for the sake of making you do what it wants from you.
One example is that the German government decided to no longer pay me support money that it pays to all university students, because I have lived outside of Germany for too long.
Another example is that a lot of people are scared to take a year off from their work even if they desperately need it, because they are scared that they will no longer be able to find a job.
There is only one thing we can do if we want these types of forced influence to have less of an effect on us: we need to stop being independent of them.
Ask yourself which influences have an impact on your own life choices because you depend on some type of third-party support system. For example, one answer to this question could be as simple as this: I can’t travel as much as I want, because my company will fire me if I do so.
In this way, you will become more aware of the ways in which other people influence your own choices in life.
Call to action:
Share your own experiences with us. In what ways has your society/culture impacted the decisions in life? In which ways has your society/culture been restricting your process of becoming he person you want to be? What steps are you taking to break free from its influence?
Let us know in the comments below!
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Tim Rettig is a writer on intercultural communication. You can subscribe to his weekly newsletter at www.timrettig.net.
