Opinion/Editorial
THE CORE
We live our lives through responding to beliefs we hold to be true. We deal with danger, threats, success, and even love by having developed an understanding of what those things are and how we should respond to them. Genetically, we fear heights and snakes, some of us spiders, but not much more. We need cultural education and support to know other things to fear. We call this process nurture. Nature gives us some, but nurture gives us a whole lot more, or at least so we believe.
We conduct the direction and quality of our lives by assessing core beliefs. For example, a core belief might hold that security from danger is a higher cause than freedom of speech or movement. So, we allow ourselves to be limited, following 9/11, our ability to check into a hotel under another name, flying without taking off our clothes, and opening a bank account under any identity we might want. These things that are surrendered in our belief need more security. This example illustrates a core belief and is a perfect example of a changing one. You cannot, as an anthropologist, see core belief changes as good or bad.
First, as a scientist, you must gauge whether those changes affect a successful survival strategy and the result of the culture being examined. That we are surrendering our freedoms in the belief and hope that we will be more secure is undeniable, but the good of allowing such changes to proceed cannot be so easily or readily gauged.
I have written a lot about the space program. About how the passing of this grand pursuit affects our cultural potential and results in hugely negative ways. But I don’t know that to be the case. To really consider this, one must have a firm understanding of what the core values of the American culture really are in relation to where that culture wants to go. There is nothing intrinsically damaging about a culture wanting to invest all its assets in local survival and improvement.
That another culture could take the place of America in space and totally dominate it is beside the point. In order for America to be damaged in its pursuit of a new success strategy, one would have to believe that it was somehow damaging to be so dominated and controlled. That does not have to be the case. Perspective is vital in looking at such things, especially in the light of advances in communication. Perspective is no longer independently driven, as it is so easily influenced by the media.
To what end, the anthropologist asks? Is this creative force of media pervasiveness leading to less or greater success of the culture, or to what parts of it? Our core values are changing rapidly. We no longer believe in science as an answer to successful strategies for survival. This is obvious simply by watching the funding disappear from important scientific programs. We no longer believe in justice (as perceived earlier), or we would not be processing such a huge portion of our population into prisons or off to deportation. We no longer believe that valid benefits should be given to those who cannot work or qualify for them (note the ever more successful attacks on Social Security and Medicare). Whether these things are good or bad depends upon your perspective and the play out of success for these strategies.
Currently developing belief systems of those in charge of the nation’s health have come to think that vaccines should be abolished. That anthropology, archaeology, and other scientific disciplines have calculated that vaccines have added at least thirty years to normal the homo sapiens lifespan is ignored in favor of a flawed core belief, not that that matters. If core beliefs were not very often flawed, then humanity would be a long way up from where it is. It’s taken a million years or so for humans to get just as far as we are in the development of civilization today. Not sad, but simply the way it is.
When the Internet was invented, cell phones brought up to full smart speeds, and television was improved across the world most humans, particularly those involved with science, social studies and teaching, thought that humanity would increase in wealth and quality enormously, as well as become more blissful, yet none of those things happened as these new systems, as with the mass media, became used more for the transmission of lies rather than truth. It was learned, as with the mass media, that lying to the public could be used to influence and change core beliefs, and so it did.
