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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.

If you reach this realization halfway you'll waste a lot of time trying to make fire by rubbing two icicles together. However cognitive understanding of being able to switch energy sources doesn't mean ability to do so. It's still a lot of hard work.

It's like learning a new language, or mastering a difficult instrument. Your mother culture is gifted to you for free, but to rebuild your world using another culture is much harder. Your old energy source may be dying, but you still have to put in the work to use the new one

Note here. For something like "musician culture" you can master the piano technically but still not have rebuilt your world through new eyes. Rote memorization plus lack of ability to be creative is indicative of this pure focus on technicality rather than cultural change.

Because of how technology affects cultures our power sources are in flux. I suspect there are precisely zero guru millennials now because it just isn't possible. It's like looking for someone with 5 years of work experience with a 2 year old technology.

A 'guru', or an enlightened individual who can spread sacredness, does so by teaching how to draw energy from the sacred. Usually there is a path from easy to hard before you can draw directly from feeling existence itself is wonderful.

Since our sense of sacred is in flux, it's like our sources of energy are in flux. The enlightened individuals of our time are stuck with old power sources. They're smiling while playing violin on a sinking Titanic. They're only advice to us is "step 2) draw the rest of the owl"