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When you aim for world peace and unity without this understanding your efforts homogenize and harm. The only truly global culture is a lawyer/business like one. A purely protocol based form of communication. You unify all cultures only when you destroy them all.

If you desire world peaces because you cannot deal with conflict, then your peace comes at the price of destruction of all culture. Where every interaction between humans is like a dialog between lawyers.

Cultures can mix a bit because of the maturity override mechanism. The fundamental constants of your mental model of reality can be tweaked a bit under the heat of a flood of emotions.

Spartan maturity rituals, fraternity hazing rituals, baptisms, near death experiences, psychedelics, etc... These all allow a reforging of your world to different degrees.

However.. once you have already been through a maturity ritual it no longer works on you. If you can get the young one from other cultures to go through *your* maturity ritual, you can actually add a member to your culture.

This is why warlords want child soldiers and companies want interns. Only fresh blood can commit heart and soul. A mercenary will always be an outsider because they have already matured.

For humans, the attachment differences are individual, not identity based They're different quirks in taste in food, music, other people. They different personalities and different temperaments. They don't affect ability to "belong" to another culture

We don't really care about these differences. We're primary concerned with their path through a ritual. Rituals are diverse. They can be short and brutal, or long and gradual. You can have a culture with rituals around delaying rituals, rituals around maximizing rituals, etc...

If you grab a youngling who is in the middle of a long ritual and subject him or her to your harsher one, you can convert. The opposite is very hard to do. E.g. A response to feeling like your culture is being encroached on is to start becoming more "Spartan" like.

When you make your culture harsher you increase the rate of maturity for our younglings, preventing your culture from slowly being eroded away.

The fundamental underpinning of a culture is what it holds sacred. Sacred ideas are often better than sacred people (since people die) or sacred items (since they can be lost). Cultures based in items or ideas often splinter because the original source can be lost.

One of the greatest divides in our modern times is the gap between those who have their cultures revolving around ideas, and those who have their cultures revolving around nation or race.

Idea cultures like "scientist" or "academic" or "technologist" or "businessmen" are relatively immature and far more different than the cultures around race and nation. (for young nations like the u.s., being american can mean anything culture wise.)

China is an interesting case where its current incarnation as a modern nation is very long, but its culture, rooted in race, is very deep.

While american business culture *used* to be the ultimate pragmatic protocolizer that could unite the world by getting two people who hated each other to work together for riches now that strength is being co-opted by china.

The less sacred things a culture has, the less baggage it has because there's less to hate, only business to be made.

This combination of both youth and old age put china in a very interesting position. The concept of "China" for example is important because it is the very glue that ties together nation and race. Without it, this powerful paradox will fall apart.

American born chinese for example often actively want to dissociate with their chinese heritage. Surface level "asian" interests like boba and matcha are just that, surface level. There's an almost violent desire to escape chinese 'culture'.

This is difficult because there is such strong pressure to keep the racial identity tied with the cultural one. (Like how some religions only could be passed down via blood)

Sacred objects shine. Their visual. When our sense cannot determine what is sacred from what is profane then that sacred object has been destroyed. When a race can have a mix of very different cultures that race as a cultural carrier dies. Race no longer identifies the soul.

Newer more 'fluid' cultures like 'academic' or 'technologist' disrupt and destroy existing cultures because they destabilize coordinating mechanisms. A last name or tone of skin no longer creates a sense of trust and unity.

These older cultures are far from useless however. They may very well be the key to life, descendants from the original sacred flame.

The problem with the king of fluid cultures, protocol-ization, is that it's soulless and cold and hierarchical. It has no boundaries, no sense of "enough". This infinite hunger arises out of lack of stomach, not a big stomach. It creates the culture of "elite".

Within a traditional culture the family unit can stand as the most sacred. Within a culture under the 'elite' tree, family is one of the first things sacrificed for more money.

It holds nothing sacred because it is so deep within its rules and "proper" ways of doing things that it has forgotten reality, the real world. In the VR world, you can always look at the source code. Porn is similarly 'profane' because it strips the sacred bare.

When something is stripped naked and a price placed on it, it just becomes a commodity, the opposite of something sacred.

Cultures, underpinned by their sacred objects are fundamentally held up by the power of faith in the ultimately meaningless. Out of this meaningless mass comes meaningless pride.

Cultures make it possible to be proud of something. Pride is perhaps the ultimate sin, it misses the mark and prescribes meaning to the meaningless. But pride is the only thing that keeps life going. That's why we'll die for our honor.

If you're unwilling to die you gain great power and immortality like a vampire. The price is no longer feeling warmth or fullness ever again.

Enlightenment is the ability to draw energy from the sacredness of existence/consciousness itself rather than another ideology. However, you can't draw power from the void. What you *can* do however is draw energy from *any* sacred idea or object.