The Replication of the Stable Form of Power

I'd wager on at least one hundred scholarly and academic definitions of "culture," and ten times as many outside of academia.

Considering "culture," I find mostly a term about which everyone can disagree, a term much used and rarely so well defined as to provide a working model of exosomatic* human beliefs, knowledge and symbols.

And then, we have "culture" as subculture, as an attempt to understand a subset of belief which remains part of the larger or broader culture. For example - the so-called "culture of life" which has emerged within the context of the much larger capitalist consumer culture.

All this in mind, I'll add my own working definition to the background noise, and leave it at that.

The human mind generates symbols. Far from existing as mere abstractions, these symbols in fact represent actual, physical electrochemical processes which occur in the human brain, as response to and creations of stimuli. A symbol, understood as a repeated and repeatable pattern, communicates.

When persons communicate, especially with words, sounds and gestures, they do so symbolically. The brain does not experience phenomena directly, but always through the mediation of the senses. That mediation creates symbols (patterns) which (a) the brain can interpret and (b) the brain can communicate.

But, as means of communication, symbols limit. They alter the scope of the possible, by shaping the means of understanding according to repeating and repeatable patterns.

Symbols reduce chaos to chaos-plus-order.

The use of a symbol literally edits reality, for the brain.

The brain, in attempting to convert stimuli into comprehensible data, edits reality.

In this, we find culture.

Culture, in short: the creation, acceptance, use, manipulation and rejection (vital, this) of the saidsame symbols which the brain generates in order to edit the phenomena of reality into a manageable set of concepts, percepts and precepts. Memory. Memory, which alters and edits realtime stimuli to create a partial picture of an ineffable "whole."

Perhaps, seen this way, the replication of the stable form of power takes on a clarity neglected below. By giving shape to phenomena, by defining events as communicable patterns of meaning, the brain both generates an overlay of concepts (a conceptual map) which provide its fundamental experience of reality and shapes how the human person interacts with it.

Power replicates itself within this set of networks of symbols, within culture. Since the brain cannot directly apprehend phenomena, but must instead translate electrochemical stimuli into electrochemical and relatively stable patterns, the brain imposes order on those same phenomena. Or, it creates it out of perceived chaos.

The brain, in other words, learns to believe that events have a repeatable shape, because it believes its own creation of patterns. The brain generates its world (awareness) by the creation, recognition of and faith in patterns.

But, not willy-nilly.

Milk pup mammal beasts, we.

We don't simply learn and generate ourselves, causa sui.

Other persons, born before us, inheriting their stable patterns of memory, adding their layer of experiences to shared belief and shared symbolism, instruct us.

They do so by persuasion, but also by force, by abuse, by the sheer authority that comes from providing us food we cannot even conceive as such.

These big brains come with a price - we must depend on those who came before us to generate and provide useful enough sets of patterns of recognition, to allow us to live out and survive our own childhoods.

Others shape how we see the world, because we do not come with a ready made version.

And in this exchance of data, one generation to the next (and so on) does the stable form of power replicate. Not only do those who come before teach us how to hold a spoon, how to identify a cloud, and how to name a tree, and how to wipe our asses - they also instruct us in how to obey, often unwillingly.

The stable form of power replicates across generations and place because people instructed in obedience instruct their young in it as well, either to run it, or to submit to it.

The brain learns its worldview, and the most enduring one yet looks a lot like the stable form of power.



* - stored outside the body