What is Cultural Inculcation?

First off, let’s begin with a clear definition.  To inculcate is to impress upon the mind of one or many by frequent instruction or repetition; to instill.  In other words, inculcation is brainwashing, a lovely term that is all too illuminating.  Cultural inculcation is that ever present hum of civilization that incessantly offers hints as to how a man should think and act within the bounds of his homeland.  In essence, it becomes the social, ethnic, or national origin of ought.  Culture itself can be thought of as the social glue that holds the people under its sway together as a united community.  As the globe became swollen with humans, a culture’s function transcended from merely modulating man’s natural inclinations to that of repressing many of these same inclinations when they hindered the propagation of the society under its sway.  It accomplishes this by way of cultural inculcation, cryptically instructing man in the art of appropriate behavior and patterns of thought.

The vehicles of cultural inculcation are many, some being almost obtrusive, others secreted in the fabric of society.  The obvious source of cultural inculcation is found in the media.  From news broadcasts, marketing, to the general programming, we hear and literally visualize how we are to be.  Men themselves become vehicles of cultural inculcation, as this Bad Natured quote solidifies:  “The point here is that we ingest, digest, and ultimately radiate the incessant murmur of acceptable cultural norms as appreciated on our television screens.”

One of the more insidious sources of cultural inculcation comes from our leaders in the form of propaganda.  It is through propaganda that our political and business leaders literally brainwash the masses such that they can exact their political and corporate machinations.  “Every angle must be examined, every lead that tends towards the ultimate conclusion must be ostensibly considered, and, most importantly, repeatedly whispered into the ears of the unsuspecting public, for this notion to finally reach the pinnacle of success, which is to mature into an inculcated belief, veritable dogma in the eyes of the public.”  The shady side of propaganda is found in the phenomenon of calumny, which are false statements that maliciously made to damage another’s reputation.  The paradigm example of calumny might be found around election time in the myriad of slanderous ads whose only intents are to damage the reputations of the opposition.  Not all of propaganda is to be rebuked though.  “…the point is not to disparage propaganda or inculcation as they are necessary tools of society, for we must sometimes generate such concepts in order to get people to go along with policies that might not specifically benefit men on an individual basis but that promise to be good for the health of the entire society.”  More so, cultural inculcation is the means by which a country comes to define itself.  “Americans are instilled with the notion that to challenge any endeavor of our government is anti-American by definition.  The citizens of all countries, it is contended, undergo such a process; it is called patriotism.”

Next on our list of sources of cultural inculcation are the results of our legislative bodies, the law of the land.  Laws are merely inculcated codes of conduct that are deemed necessary to keep order within a society and to allow for over-sized societies to exist and to further expand in a disciplined manner.  As well, the education system serves as the other source of cultural inculcation that is literally reified into existence by way of ink and paper.  “The education system is the perfect place for the state to begin its campaign of inculcation on the young mind.  Even the routine of daily life is inculcated into young minds, with the notion of the nine to five workday becoming the norm in kindergarten or even before.”

One of the most contentious sources of cultural inculcation is infused into humanity by way of its predominating spiritual beliefs.  The differences found in the cultures of Muslims and Christians are the result of inculcation of their respective religious doctrines.  The puissance of spiritual inculcation has reverberated across the globe since god knows when in the form of the ineluctable holy wars that incessantly erupt when neighboring peoples cannot get the other to tergiversate their sacrilegious notions of God and worship the one true God, that of the other side.

Cultural inculcation even alters how reality itself is perceived by the members of a society.  “As a culture propagates its ideologies and notions, what it is really doing is reconfiguring the brain’s ability to perceive reality, to see the world, from a social point of view.  This notion of altered perceptions has been readily demonstrated by psychologists through various tests.  In doing so, people will see things differently, in a literal and measurable sense, depending on their cultural beliefs and thus their perceptions.”

As can be seen, cultural inculcation is a requisite and cryptic method by which a bloated society can exist and maybe even flourish.   “It is one of the main contentions of this thesis that culture and civilization use the powers of inculcation as a social leash to constrain human nature such that societies can exist in numbers that would otherwise prove unsustainable.  In fact, one of the main functions of a culture whose population numbers are explosively colossal is to instill man with acceptable codes of conduct such that his society can remain intact if not expansive.”  And while we can speak of cultural inculcation until we are literally blue in the face, what we cannot seem to do is understand that each of us, as individual human beings, have been brainwashed into believing that our notion of reality is but a belief that has been infused into each of us beginning in our toddler years, for it is nigh impossible to convince a fella’ that he has been brainwashed when the whole of his society has been likewise brainwashed.
Genruk

***All quotes were taken from the soon to be published Bad Natured: Why Humans Cannot Behave.