Society Vs. Culture

In his famous book, “Future Shock”, Alvin Toffler wrote, “Society is a wave. The wave move onwards, but the water of which it is composed does not”. In other words society is warped; something about it isn’t natural, it isn’t right. Waves cross thousands of miles of open ocean fetch expanse, carrying water from storms on the other side of the globe. That’s what waves do; they carry water. The societal wave does not do that. It is a mutant “wave” of stagnant immobility. It’s a distorted entity that has forgotten its core roots. Society has forgotten it’s heritage.

Society is merely progeny of culture. Culture is infinite, while societal is constructed, man-made, materialized. In short, society is finite. When you think of society you think of restrictions and permissions of what you can do and what you can do based on the amount of prizes you’ve “earned”. Of course you don’t earn the prizes in any way different than a preschooler earns a gold star by coloring in the lines. Culture, carrying myths and stories and history from the end of time, is boundless. Society is a hierarchy with no personal history. Joe Schmoe and Abraham Lincoln carry as much importance in humanity in culture; for they are both humans that lived. In society, however, Joe Schmoe’s life -- his challenges, accomplishments, trials and tribulations -- go unacknowledged. Society, therefore, is the naive child of the grander scripture, culture. Society is various parts and linearly components that myopically function together. The stories, myths, traditions, and heritages compose parts integral to culture, but together, the cultural components create a gestalt. Society blandly constructs parts to complete a whole, while the infinite culture is the grand picture, synergistically larger than the original painting.

By the way, if these words irk you, dear reader, then read on, for these truisms exist for you. They exist not to rile your bile, but to stew you to eschew that vacant grasp on what many call “society”.

An essential component of of all societal citizens is to forget their culture ancestry. People living in society have abandoned their roots for the sake of finite prizes, titles, bureaucratic shenanigans. Society thrives under the veil of false necessity. Citizens become deluded into thinking they need society, when all they need, all their intrinsically interact with is culture. Society is the maya, the illusion, concealing the infinite boundaryless culture. Why has this sham perpetuated? Simple, society awards prizes (titles, honors, prestige, which lead to new finite game titles) to those who perpetuate the veil of society. We’re made to believe that the president of a corporation, or president of a country, or some grand Nobel award is something worthy of a life devotion. In reality, such belief -- devoting your life to a relationship with society -- is about as pragmatic trying to shake hands with a shadow; you’re left with nothing but emptiness.

“Anyone can participate in culture -- at anywhere and at any time.” (Carse 43). The fragile, teetering mesh of immigration paperwork, the visas, the greencards, the documentation, the redtape all prohibit and complicate society. Society, therefore, is an in-egalitarian club -- and a cheesy club at that. Society can exclude and preclude at the drop of a hat, or more precisely, with the flicker of a pen. Culture, on the other hand, has that indelible acceptance intrinsically woven into it’s artistic fabric. The only thing culture prohibits is prohibitions!

“The rules of a finite game may change -- the rules of an infinite game must change.” (Carse) Therefore, we must learn to create certainties with our life, and then assure ourselves that we must not demur, for everything has that mutability. The wise, therefore, only holds one single certainty: that nothing has certainty.

Now Einstein seems to have anti-parrellel contradictions to the deceptive nature of society because he says “Man can find meaning in life only through devoting himself to society.” However, despite his greatness, his expansive and inhumanly creative intellect, and his mathematical genius, I think our dear originator of relativity was in err. He meant to say, ““Man can find meaning in life only through devoting himself to culture.” After all, Einstein did not invent his paradigmatic creations and write his world changing papers for the German Society, for his “fuhrerland”. Nah, he wrote, quite literally, universal theories for the culture of mankind. In fact, when many criticized him for the destruction over Hiroshima, he overtly exclaimed that the Manhattan project was an atrocity. Still, fellow theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, said that blaming Einstein for the atom bomb would be like blaming “Newton for the gravity that causes airplanes to crash. Einstein took no part in the Manhattan Project and was horrified by the explosion.” Being versed in the universal language of mathematics, Einstein was a cultural genius of physics, mathematics, and space-time discovery. He didn’t apply his advanced mind for society; societies bomb and destroy each other in their finite games. Culture is expansive and universal.