XV Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2023

The relationship between culture and the individual is and has always been ironically polar. We, being at the same time the creators and creators of our culture, are also its hostages. Without culture and its basic attributes: language, rituals, goals, values, rules and roles, man would not have emerged from the previous evolutionary stages. It is language and culture that cultivate humanity in us.

Man is an incredibly sensible creature, with limitless abilities. But, alas, along with the nobility, rationality and infinity bubbling inside, a person is blinded by pride, the desire for power and control, sometimes completely unaware of himself, blinded by affects, looks like an angry monkey.

The enraged monkey and god, the mad trickster and the transcendent/brilliant thinker — in all these roles, the human unit is a product of language and culture. By influencing his 20 billion neurons of the human biocomputer (brain), man created a language and culture, which then gave us sciences, arts and philosophy for every taste. Man has highly developed his abilities and morals, being at the same time a fanatical, superstitious and dogmatic idolater who commits murders in the name of God, wielding incitement, propaganda and organized lies.

And this, in turn, gave rise to generations of numerous hypnotized/sleeping conformists, victims of power-hungry rulers who are the same victims of the senseless and merciless in their cultural traditions.

Due to the larger number of neurons, the human brain, unlike the animal brain, is able to invent a language, preserve and transmit accumulated experience, create culture.

But, thanks to language and culture, people often behave recklessly and inappropriately. Each of us is born and spends his life within the framework of some tradition. Every human consciousness is separated from the outside world by concepts, models of thinking, feelings. Everyone is a hostage of ancient instincts and conditioned reflexes imposed by culture and politics. The cultural and linguistic environment constantly affects our senses, causing spontaneous reactions of the body. What we react to and perceive is a mixture of direct experience and culturally conditioned symbol, sensory impressions with preconceived ideas about the nature of existence.

And it just so happened that many perceive their culture entirely and uncritically.

Each unique event is instantly imprinted in our nervous systems by a specific illustration of the myth (epoch) hammered into our heads by education.

Of course, we have in our arsenal both reasonable ideas, without which humanity would have died out, and strange thoughts that once did not have or lost their meaning over time. And these irrelevant ideas are harmful because human beings often react simultaneously, where most thoughtlessly rely on the truth of cultural realities, and not derivatives of personal feeling/perception.

Humanity has survived and is progressing, thanks to some ideas of civilization, at the same time, being in trouble from a pernicious craving for nonsense, and fantastically insane tricks that a culture-crazed homosapience puts on itself. And this game will not stop.

How to improve these ironically polar relations with culture? How can we continue to enjoy the benefits of civilization without being insanely intoxicated by its poisons? How to make a unit of society intelligibly cultured?

Such people are not born; they are created. How? All you need is knowledge. Knowledge about past and present cultures, their history, philosophy and art in all their amazing diversity.

The skill of recognizing what is stupid or downright evil in its conditioning, and a determined intention to hold on to what promotes humane and reasonable behavior. Develop the will.

The individual needs to rise above the culture and make his tunnel to where it is important for him to be for his own survival and peace of mind.

This requires a firm understanding of the fact that culture, with its attributes (roles, rules, goals, rituals, language and values) is nothing more than a game sequence. Where "game" refers to strict serious actions in real life.

History knows examples of such people. They were, are and will appear. Those people who were able to make holes in the walls of limiting trivial cliches, who have the ability to look at the world and at themselves in a new, relatively unbiased way.

A person who has the above knowledge will find it difficult to take another game seriously, which will allow him to look at things critically, freeing himself from the influence of boasting and dogmatization. A person who is aware of the relationship between symbols and experience, practicing linguistic self-control, is also freed from a serious attitude to the absurd masquerading as immutable wisdom and political motives.

As a preparation, training at the verbal level should be supplemented with exercises in wordless experience. We must learn to turn off our mind and become mentally silent, thereby cultivating the art of pure receptivity.

Literature:

1. Даниленко И.О. К. Г. Юнг о влиянии культуры на душевное здоровье человека. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/k-g-yung-o-vliyanii-kultury-na-dushevnoe-zdorovie-cheloveka-1/viewer

2. Ионин. Л. Г. Социология культуры [Текст]: учеб. пособие для вузов / Л. Г. Ионин; Гос. ун-т — Высшая школа экономики. —4-е изд., перераб. и доп. — М.: Изд. дом ГУ ВШЭ, 2004. — 427 с.

3. Ницше Ф. По ту сторону добра и зло: / Прелюдия к философии будущего / Пер. с нем. – СПб.: Азбука, Азбука-Аттикус, 2011. – 240 с.