Poison Culture, Poisoned Children
This essay I wrote in 6th Grade shows us how damaging — and powerful — our liberal culture can be, especially for children.
It is easy to underestimate the power of culture. This, in part, is because conservatives conflate “cultural products,” things like clothes, music, and public figures, with what culture actually is: the unspoken air of expectations and acceptability that we all collectively breathe.
This air is why no matter how much conservatives isolate themselves, or how many counter-cultural products they create or engage in, they cannot help but be moderns. The fact that they have to explicitly frame themselves as “counter-cultural,” separated from the world, is proof. We are not islands unto ourselves. We cannot help but live in, and therefore be shaped by, the world and its culture.
This week, I happened to stumble upon a striking piece of evidence which showcases the power of culture, especially on the impressionable: I was clicking through my Google Drive, and found an old essay that I wrote all the way back when I was twelve years old.
The essay seeks to answer a very simple, yet fundamental question: “What is truth?” The bittersweetness of beholding my own past errors aside, I believe that we can learn a lot from my little essay. This is a rare opportunity to reflect on a mind thoroughly and shaped by the erroneous conventional wisdom. I was an unmistakable product of our time.
So, without further ado, 6th grade Luca presents: What is Truth?
Truth is what is right. It is the opposite of a lie. The truth can vary depending on the situation. If something is a blatant fact, like 2+2, the truth is that the answer is four, not five. But if something is an opinion, like “those curtains are ugly,” the truth to one person might be that they are, but the truth to someone else might be they are not. This is how the truth can vary among different people. One of the ways you can know what is true depending on what feels right to you. If you think the new iPhone is garbage, then that might be true to you, and possibly many other people. You can present facts in a debate like setting to prove what is right. You could say that the new iPhone came with a power button on the screen, and that made it good. But you could also say that removing the headphone jack was bad. Another way you know what is true is just using common sense. You could say that blatant racism is okay, but using common sense, and knowing that racism is not okay, you can easily determine what the truth is. Sometimes the truth is impossible to determine, whether it be what religion is correct, or if aliens exist. Nobody really knows the answer. They can believe an answer, but it may be wrong. Also, as I stated before, the truth can just be a fact like 5+5.
This paragraph has it all, no? I will say a couple things that come to mind personally (and I encourage you to contribute your insights in the comments).
First, the relativism present in this paragraph is not absolute. I do say that two plus two certainly equals four, suggesting a belief in some transcendent order that humans cannot mess with. I even display some moral absolutism, too, by saying that racism is not okay. Of course, things start to fall apart when discussing beauty, which I believed to be entirely in the eye of the beholder (per the curtains example), as well as religion.
This confused notion of morality, which permits both the inevitability of some moral standards, while shying away from unfashionable and specific moral stances is perfectly emblematic of the average person in our world. Conservatives often decry liberals as pure “subjectivists,” but not everybody is an across-the-board freak, denying that two plus two equals four or that the sky is green. It is not that nobody knows anything, but rather that “nobody really knows.” The lunacy of subjectivism is inconsistent, with the inconsistencies lurking in the shadows of taboos, allowing cognitive dissonance to go unconfronted.
I also believe that two of my illustrative examples — the mentions of “racism” and “iPhones” — go to show just how impactful media coverage is in shaping our vocabularies and frames of reference. To twelve year old Luca, “racism” came to mind likely because of the emergence of Black Lives Matter and “Trump is racist!” accusations in 2016.
It is also no surprise that over a decade of consistent Apple advertising made the “new iPhone debate” a go-to example. Their product had become (and frankly, remains) a subconscious part of my everyday vocabulary. It is very eerie to think about: “propaganda” is the best word to describe the media’s effect on public thought.
I am very thankful to have been saved from commonplace errors of this sort — I will certainly tell the story of my Christian conversion another time. As a survivor-of-the-age, it can sometimes be difficult to maintain patience with people so wrapped in errors which, as a logical matter, make no sense. However, this is all the more reason to be patient with them! Moderns are up against the air that they breathe — a formidable opponent. It is our job to help them escape it, as we were invariably helped.
The AdamoZone is a column by Luca Adamo, Vice President of Marketing and columnist at The American Postliberal. Published every Friday at 5:00pm EST.
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