Monstrification: Can Be A Part Of Culture?
People walking in the streets, doing their daily business. Hundreds of people passing each other every minute. Streets can be very busy, which is no surprise in our modern days of truly massive cities such as Tokyo, Delhi, and Shanghai. But there is something remarkably unsettling. In my hometown, there is one strange phenomenon: if there is somebody lying on the street, most likely that person will be ignored. The person can be there for hours, and most likely, nobody will bother to figure out if the person is having a heart attack or just being drunk.
I am not saying that I am any better. When everyone is passing by, it just feels wrong to do something about it. It requires crossing some strange psychological barrier to stay and help. It’s a similar feeling to when you are about to do something morally wrong, like stealing or hurting somebody without any reason. It creates a deep moral conflict, wrapped in layers of shame, when considering helping someone. It’s a strange inner question when possibly somebody’s life could be on the line. But why does this happen? What form of irrational insanity is it?
Can culture make us insane? There are societies in Papua New Guinea that eat the deceased person’s brain for ritual reasons. The act leads to the spreading of a terminal disease called Kuru. It is a certain death sentence, and yet people practice it. Is this an example of how far culture can lead us from sensible acts? The tribe of Papua New Guinea was chosen for a simple cause of teaching. We can look at a strange phenomenon that crosses multiple taboo boundaries and truly accept that culture can drive a person insane.
But what about ourselves? Most likely there are many things we accept as usual norms but are, from an objective perspective, completely wrong. Modern society is eating food to the point of suicide — the good old diabetes, obesity, and all related issues. The strangest phenomenon is that we can sustain overeating and malnourishment on the same planet. Just a little bit of sharing could give at least 20 years of longer life to both parties. And yet we prefer to look down on third-world countries as savages who deserve to suffer. But this does not make any sense, and neither do a lot of things we are doing. Which leads us to the biggest question:
Are Nazis truly evil? I mean everything they did — the whole picture. Starting from war, to the Holocaust, and most definitely inhumane experiments towards unfortunate souls. But what if it is a different example of a very bad culture? I am not siding with those terrible things done in their time, but what if those monstrosities were committed by regular Marys and ordinary Joes? What if culture can be so influential that it can reshape what is considered good or evil, forcing us to be ashamed of our natural judgment and giving way to cultural corruption?
It is strange, but from the most bizarre traditions around the world, like getting through painful initiation processes with hundreds of razor cuts or poison bites of bullet ants, to the weirdness of men and women trying to catch syphilis to prove their sex appeal, it makes us question many things around us. How much of what we accept is actually true and objective? Because maybe we are the ones blinded by our culture. Truly, it can overpower a human soul and turn every man or woman into a monster of pure destruction.
With love and care,
Darian
