Why Is It So Painful for People to Assess Their Own Thinking?
Culture is the sum total of unconscious thoughts and associations carried by a population. It’s how they identify with people they’ve never even met. All they need to know is that they belong to part of the same unconscious group identity. Each party can assume that the others will share at least a base-level understanding of what reality is and how everything ought to work within it. It saves them an awful lot of time and the effort of critical analysis.
Culture is the unstated but assumed shared understanding of identity. It’s defined by unconscious acceptance on a massive scale. The moment you start to think too hard about what you believe, why you believe it, and all the other ways you could possibly think, you are acting anti-culturally. You are slowly replacing the ocean of unconsciousness with firm, conscious land to stand upon and construct new architecture of thought. Consciousness is anti-culture.
The freedom required to use one’s intellect like this is, ironically, not strictly intellectual. There is also a strong emotional component that enables some people to look in places where others do not. You can be a genius and still be extremely limited in the application of your intelligence because there can be certain sacred truths you resist analyzing. Anything you’ve accepted without inquiry (even if it happens to be true) is your enemy because it rules you. It sets the limits of what you can both think and feel.
You can witness this in bright, outgoing, inquisitive, and intelligent people who still shy away from certain topics as soon as they are brought up. Or they investigate them eagerly only up to a specific point. One step beyond that induces offense and terror. However deep they go into some subjects, there will always remain others that the prospect of unpacking causes deep discomfort. The spirit of culture has claimed them there. It has replaced their individuality and discretion with prepackaged comfort. “I think this way because it is the way that makes me most comfortable” becomes the justification for anything, even ideas and practices that are harmful to themselves and civilization.
Anything that goes unexamined too long in any mind is potentially monstrous. So long as it is painful for us to think differently about what we prefer to believe, we are monsters in waiting. Passion and the demand for truth in all things must supersede the comfort of illusion, however innocuous that illusion might seem on the surface. Illusion forces all analysis to awkwardly work its way around it, to contort and disfigure itself to fit a sacred “truth” that will never budge in the face of superior evidence or reason. The ego and identity are too built up in it, so to remove or alter any part of it feels, quite literally, like one is being tortured or dying.
Bear this in mind when people caught up in culture’s illusions criticize you for being critical of their culture, as though assessing mass-accepted unconscious assumptions about life were somehow a bad thing - the worst thing, even, in some people’s eyes. For some, there is no greater crime than to suggest that what they assume to be true and have grown comfortable with could possibly be improved. You might as well just stab them through the heart right now.
Who you are is so much more than what you happen to have accepted as true about how things work until now. It takes a superhuman level of humility to embrace that fact and apply it as a background process in everything you ever consider about your presence in reality. Certainty comes from great humility, because it means being willing to strip away all but the bare essentials of any given line of thought. Eventually, you lose everything you think you are, until what is left is nothing more than a base set of cognitive principles and moral values.
It’s a bit like dying. And, my god, does it hurt.
Perhaps that it why it seems that only those who have already endured great emotional pain are at all willing to undergo this kind of deconstruction. The rest are all still terrified of what they might encounter the moment they tip-toe outside the light of comfort and cultural acceptance.
Image Credit: The Clockmaker by August Allebé