David Korten: A Crumbling Cultural Story

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




A Crumbling Cultural Story
David Korten on the unraveling of the myth that underpins our economic behavior.

by David Korten
posted Jul 05, 2011


Professional propagandists and advertisers use mass media and other instruments of cultural reproduction to control our minds and behavior, displacing authentic cultural stories with fabricated stories that support the interests of their clients. Most commonly, the goal is to get us to vote for a particular political candidate or buy a particular product. By recognizing the nature and function of culture in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our world, we can develop substantial immunity to these mind control techniques.

Culture is the system of beliefs, values, perceptions, and social relations that encodes the shared learning of a particular human group essential to individual survival and orderly social function. It serves as the interpretive lens through which the human brain processes the massive flow of data from our senses to distinguish the significant from the inconsequential, assign meaning, and shape our behavior: “This plant will kill you. That one is food.”

The cultural lens reflects both the individual learning of personal experience and the shared learning of the tribe, as communicated through its framing cultural stories. These stories, which the tribe’s storytellers traditionally passed from generation to generation, shape our collective identity and relationships. “This is who we are, what we value, and how we behave.”

The processes by which culture shapes our perceptions and behavior occur mostly at an unconscious level. It rarely occurs to us to ask whether the reality we perceive through the lens of the culture within which we grew up is the “true” reality. We just take for granted that it is. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/a-crumbling-cultural-story

[OneGrassRoot]

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