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"Curses of Culture"

I am going to write a series of posts on the topic "Curses of our Culture." This will be based on the concepts contained in a brilliant monograph, The Curse of Culture" by anthropologist Paul Bohannon . Bohannon pointed out every cultural development -- set of beliefs, values, or norms, ideology, law, ways of acting and believing -- shapes and limits that which follows. in this sense culture can (and often does) become a curse by limiting our ability to see the current reality and/or the consequences of our thinking or acting in a particular manner. It can result in the downfall of groups, nations, and civilizations.

In the following posts, I will be discussing major curses of culture we face toddy and which we must "exorcise" if we are to advance as we should.. I hope that you will follow these post and become involved in the discussion.

wordywalt 9 Nov 8
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3 comments

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0

Bring 'em on.

0

Sounds interesting, I'll look forward to seeing your posts.

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Will there be an opportunity cost analysis on these? If we consider culture components as memes (in the original sense of being ideas that act like genes, rather than the popular sense of buzzwords) and that the successful ones reproduce faster, doesn't it mean that originally each culture component was originally beneficial? Do culture components have a shelf life?

Among biological organisms, environmental changes causes natural selection for mutations which enable the species to adapt to the environment. Failure to adapt to the environment causes problems for the coping and survival of the organism or species. Similarly, cultural components which interfere with the adaption of the culture to changing conditions cause dysfunction for both individual and culture, and nay lead to cultural decay or collapse. But, in the case of humans and a culture, some cultural developments benefit one group or culture for a time, but with unjustified negative effects for other groups or cultures. And such prejudicial cultural developments may hart the entire civilization and/or species.. Any questions in relation to the curses of culture I present I will gladly entertain.

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