My beef with mainstream culture

I believe everyone should be free to practice the customs they believe in. If others want to consume vapid media and spend their lives gossiping and working thanklessly for companies who treat them as disposable, that's their thing, I don't need to be bothered by it.

The thing that I find a bit unfair and would like to change is just how dominant the dominant culture is....or a variety of dominant cultures are. In some countries you have more choices than others but everywhere I've been, it isn't very common to find people who treat culture as something which they are actively contributing to. And so culture is spoon fed to them by Hollywood or by their so-called "alternative" sub-culture.

People are disempowered. They practice a culture which they had no say in creating, and assume that it's right to do so. As I said, this is fine by me, but I am looking for others to create a culture with. It's hard when people don't even have the idea that they are creating culture, but they are already doing it.

Every time they turn on the TV and tweet about some hot topic, they are giving energy to that culture which may or may not (often times is not) representative of who they are. They just don't see any viable alternatives.

So once the mainstream culture has an attitude of "join if you want to, but you don't have to", I think I really don't have anything I can say against it. Sadly though, there are people who want to maintain power over others through money or through nationalism or through some kind of idealogy which benefits them (both capitalists and so-called communists, feminists and atheists even the term anarchist is used in different ways by different people in manipulative ways). All isms are convenient tools for someone, and they usually do not have your interest in mind. They may have not started this way, but they are certainly used this way.

I want to live in a community of people who creates culture through the process of consensus. I don't care if we are capitalist or communist or whatever else, so long as we are all trying to work towards answers together. The how will work itself out if we build trust and respect each other.

You can say that I'm a dreamer but I've seen this shit in action. Don't call it impossible just because of your few negative experiences. That's the dominant culture dominating you and trying to keep you under control.

So anywhere I go, I'm an outsider. For now. One day, and it will be soon, there will be many people looking to build culture together, many kinds of culture that will build bridges between each other so we can all find the culture that best suites us, or build it together with others like us.

Check me out at I+Everything

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