George Rebane

It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine

A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture.  More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.

This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide.  In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square.  Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships.  And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.

Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth.  Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.

To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day.  We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer).  The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).

In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods.  They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery).  From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free  will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths.  Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)

In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil.  They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities.  These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.

In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members.  An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years.  There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village.  They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away.  Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.

A similar culture-induced reality was enjoyed by tribes on a neighboring island during the Pacific campaign of WW2.  The island had an airstrip for receiving cargo laden C-47 military transport aircraft.  To the natives these giant aircraft were bringers of never-before-seen wondrous things to enrich and expand their lives.  Not familiar with manufacturing processes, they believed “that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture had been created by spiritual means.”  And no matter how many times it was explained and demonstrated to them, they never saw the airplanes as mechanical things operated by humans – to them they were simply alive as large flying creatures.  When the war moved on and the airstrip was abandoned, the natives were bereft – the wondrous creatures stopped coming.  Their response was simple, they formed what became known as a ‘Cargo Cult’ whose members continued to maintain the landing strip, and built decoys in the shape of airplanes to attract more of these giant flying critters full of presents. The clear and demonstrated reality of the foreigners did nothing to change their culture-rooted alternate reality. (more here)

Today we suffer a similar potpourri of alternate realities fabricated in academia through institutionalized trans-culturation of young people.  As illustrated in these pages and demonstrated daily in the media, culturally differentiated people can indeed have, not only their own opinions, but also their own facts which are diverse and distinct from the facts held in other cultures.  Nowhere is this more true in the developed world than between members of the various collectivist cultures and those ensconced in open-market capitalism who live as neighbors.

The dominant schism continues to be the collectivists’ belief in a horribly skewed model of how individuals and societies respond to imposed controls.  The collectivists (Marxists, socialists, progressives, the woke, etc) believe that a model society that provides the greatest good to the greatest number of people derives from and is best maintained by a central authority of elites/experts with the power to enforce their planning and control policies on the population.  Centuries of recorded failure in such governance have given lie to such practices.  The entire collectivist thesis, from a technical sense, is based on the hubris that a society’s control/response mechanism – its so-called transfer function – is known and sufficiently computable to support the generation of beneficial public policies that define population-wide justice/fairness, regulations, taxing, economic parameters, public education, and so on.

A couple more specific examples illustrate this.  Collectivists don’t believe that increasing taxes, thereby reducing reward, diminishes people's ability and/or propensity to undertake risky ventures to create wealth.  In their ontology if the government needs more revenues, they simply raise taxes with no expectation that the subsequently collected revenues will actually diminish enterprise, or expecting the obverse, that lowering taxes will increase both the level of wealth along with collected tax revenues.  No matter the evidence to the contrary – e.g. impact of President Trump’s recent tax relief – to them the Laffer Curve or principle is anathema.

Similarly in their levy of ever more and comprehensive laws, regulations, and statutes governing every aspect of human activity, they believe all such can be implemented without hindering capital formation, its efficient distribution, enterprise, and entrepreneurship in a society.

Finally, collectivists’ ideologies trump the teachings of science.  The universe, both organic and non-organic, is constructed and operates in a completely distributed manner in which loosely coupled entities function and respond according to their own local input/output rules (laws), and in the process bring about naturally emerging properties of the robust, sustainable, and measurably evolving world we see around us.  The scientifically oriented capitalist has taken note of this and has, whenever possible and not always perfectly, fashioned societies that replicate the teachings of nature.

Today this tension between such cultures creates the ever-widening schism between the collectivists seeking homogeneous-by-diktat autocracies and classical liberals striving for individual freedoms in their public and private lives.  To date no one has found any functioning rapprochement between these two camps of cultures each with their own unique and unassailable realities cum ontologies.  The result is that we live as two distinct ‘countries’ within a single porous border, each working for a diametrically opposite future while seeing the other as an evil obstacle to achieving their desired society.