Stuck in a Bind: The Internal Contradictions and Conflicts of Our Modern Age

The Internal Contradictions and Conflicts of Our Modern Age

Latoya Abulu

STUCK IN A BIND

THE INTERNAL

CONTRADICTIONS AND

CONFLICTS OF OUR

MODERN AGE

BY

LATOYA ABULU

We’re stuck in the binds of contradictions of deculturalization, and in a bind of whether we want to get out.

Without an openly acknowledged ideological, metaphysical, ontological and axiological base to use as a grounding foundation - the ground - to answer and explain to others an ideal and belief that people can walk on, deliberate upon and convert to (as this would show that it is ‘constructed’ and is then ripe for deculturalization’s ‘deconstruction’), it must therefore push itself from the top and tie people into it in order to believe it. As they are suspended from the ground, they think they are ‘out from culture’ and uninfluenced by bias, but they are rather now blindly caught in the binds of contradictions of their own ideology and its upending social course, without an understanding of where they situate themselves and how to get out.

When the way out is presented, they are stuck in another bind: whether they would want to release themselves from the foundational narrative that creates their ideals and worldviews, and open up the floodgates of fundamental epistemological, cultural and political changes.

ISBN 9781005085438 EAN 2940162901563

Copyright Š 2020 No part of this book may be reproduced or sold in any form and by any means without the prior permission of the author.

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Some of the words to describe the state of social life and the world in the beginning of the 21st century are conflict, confusion, instability and contradictions. Increasingly, these words have made headlines and become the main subjects of discussion by social, cultural and political commentators. Among these many analyses have been critics pointing to liberalism and modernism as the root of the problem through their upending and disintegrating social and cultural processes, and offering tentative solutions of the way out. However, it seems that the problem may go deeper than this. On the other side of our trial to remove cultural processes as they are seen to chain individual liberty, is the operation of a wider cultural and ideological process we are bound into that masks and is blind to itself due our very relationship and perspective of culture and biased ideological and metaphysical perspectives.

Calling this phenomenon ‘deculturalization’ (or de-culturalization), a term coined by Ton Groeneweg, it is now putting societies and its social functions in deep and fundamental binds (Annex 2) as time runs its course through its webs of contradictions that transcends all spheres; reaping social unsustainability, breakdown of relations, economic turmoil and crises of knowledge and. However, though being able to point out what is behind our tangled web of contradictions produces a way out of it, it creates another bind. This is because it would mean a fundamental change in the way we currently relate to the world, and the insecurity of those, perspectives and institutions, that have been legitimized by deculturalization’s existence.

What is Deculturalization?

At the source of the problem is the inherent contradictions of ‘deculturalization’ that exist under the fabric of modernism, secularism and liberalism. Normally used as a word to describe the removal of cultural customs, norms, values, relations etc., typically by an outside dominant group, here it refers to the wider phenomenon ‘to deculturalize’ (‘de-culturalize). This means the process of removing and undressing cultural processes and biased ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, theological and axiological perspectives from a society, and being blind to and masking its own which it uses (Annex 1). It is a process that simultaneously disclaims and uses cultural and ideological processes.

Note: The word ‘deculturalization’ specializes the discourse and makes it more precise to bind together and explain the shared phenomena and logic occurring under and developing liberalism, modernism, secularism, post-modernism, Marxism and other realms of Western thought and institutions.

In societies, movements and perspectives, deculturalization operates as a narrative that is against the operations of culture, ideological views, metaphysical perspectives, religion and belief systems, epistemological particularities, ontological inclinations or axiological positions – in other words, anything that shows an inclination of a biased and influenced thought (of being a ‘particularity’ and ‘constructed’) - as this thus demonstrates falsity and is an aspect chaining, submitting or outcasting the individual through power dynamics and hierarchies (conformity, the mainstream, the status quo etc.). However, as everything uses a cultural, ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological or axiological conceptualization, new or old – (such as morals, values, beliefs, symbols etc.) including its own influenced and created in a strand of Enlightenment theory, an ideology based in particular Christian, Protestant beliefs and worldviews and drawing from European cultural beliefs and particular historical developments deculturalization is based and utilizes past ideologies itself within its conceptualizations of the world.

When mixed with biased cultural and ideological perspectives and a particular Western ontological belief of individualism, it further forms its own new biased ideals, conceptualizations, or perspectives which cannot last as they ‘become beliefs’ and are normalized like those of the past it rejected. An example of its own ideological bias in its ideals is seen even the oppositional position it takes to certain past perspectives it disagrees with and tries to overturn or replace in society. This opposition shows its own biased positioning which is a position it is blind to and masks from itself in order to be true. Like everything, it is a positioning and perspective that requires a sort of thought, a predetermined and used metaphysical, epistemological, ontological or axiological view that has a line demarcating what it believes in or thinks appropriate or true, and what it doesn’t and would thus outcast.

Note: Throughout this piece, the term ‘ideal’ is used not only to mean morals and aspirations, but all general beliefs, such as perspectives, conceptualizations, positions, principles, viewpoints, norms, values, preferences and phenomena, ranging from philosophy to fashion.

Note: The WEIRD acronym (meaning, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) shows how particular minds (especially those that see themselves as un-particular, unbiased and unmoored - thus making them true) are informed by precise contexts and beliefs.

It is especially when comparing our thoughts, behaviours, ideals, beliefs, interpretations, perceptions, actions and reactions with other cultures around the world - past and present - that we get a deep sense of the way we are currently formed and influenced by our beliefs. We get a sense of our difference - of our own particularities - of the hidden beliefs and ideologies that form the way we think, see the world, interpret it and act in it. This is particularly true and pervasive when we get a sense of how deeply acculturated and informed even the most simple views we have taken for granted are, such as what constitutes reality or the concept of saying “please”, which are themselves based in ideological, metaphysical, ontological and axiological standpoints.

Thus, a) the wider deculturalization narrative is contradictorily a specific cultural, ideological and epistemological worldview itself that has been formed by a specific strand of thought in Enlightenment theory, an ideology based in Protestant beliefs and specific cultural historical baggage and worldviews, while b) the ideals, conceptualizations and perspectives deployed and created from deculturalization are also biased - as they utilize both the deculturalization narrative and pull from other external cultural, ideological, epistemological, ontological and metaphysical views, that are either pre-existing, newly formed or tied in a web of cultural and symbolic foundations, in order to be able articulate themselves.

At times deculturalization may also view and discard only past cultural and ideological perspectives as properly ideological, while new ones it creates are initially perceived not to be so as they haven’t had the chance to properly form themselves in society and push themselves into power for individuals to conform to. They are not yet seen as ‘learnt behaviour’, making them true (‘learnt behaviour’ signals that it is ideological and not innately human, but imposed, thus untrue according to deculturalization logic, even though denouncing such to mean untruth is shown here to be a ‘learnt’ ideological and ontological view itself). However, every cultural ideal and ideology in the world that is now old and a learnt behavior was once itself a ‘new’ ideal and ideology. As time passes, these new deculturalized ideals and ideological perspectives increasingly cement themselves in society, ‘showing’ their biased and influenced ideological

views, and thus are only now seen as particularities and rooting for power - thus are false - and ready for change. However, it has always been ideological from the start. Such articulation is moreover unstable for society that cannot hold onto particular perspectives that are tied into various social institutions, relations and knowledge because of the logic of what makes something true does not last. It also begs the question on another contradiction: if something in itself is untrue once it becomes ‘old’, wasn’t it also always untrue when it was ‘new’?

Over time, deculturalization constantly unwinds cultural and ideological aspects and norms, even its own previously established ones, in order to find truth as norms reveal a cultural and ideological force. As such, it’s logical terminus in society leads it to always tumble out to the latest one (or to what is seen as another extreme in the same field) that has been formed; it doesn’t have any defences against this process as it cannot hold on to an ideal principally or noncontradictorily. However, according to its internal logical terminus and coherence, ideals can simultaneously never ‘stick’ in the first place in order to tumble out to the next one. This is because everything is in fact ‘biased’ and doing so would require levels of social conformity and a policing conservative implementation and maintenance in order to even have the concept of change it always pushes for. Thus, the constant wheel of deculturalization’s change is absurd in itself as the wheel shouldn’t even touch the ground in the first place when each ideal ‘sticks’ in society and is then changed for another that ‘sticks’ - nothing is suppose to ‘stick’ and be normalized in the first place. It logically can’t and shouldn’t move for another. However, it does, and changes for another more quickly as time goes on, disintegrating social structures and ways of knowing along with it. This is a prime feature of modernization which has been developed and articulated under deculturalization, where modern social life is referred to as ‘Liquid Modernity’ as by Zygmunt Bauman, and has also been the subject of discussion in Marshall Berman’s book ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air’.

Moreover, pre-decturalized and deculturalized ideals and conceptualizations used, installed or blindly overlooked as also cultural and ideological through masking them, are on shifting sand to fall in a sinkhole at any time as they are rooted in specific ideological foundations that are unstable and may be removed at any time by seeing their stagnant normalization, the observation of cross-cultural differences and/or realizing their own socialization. As ideals, ideologies and conceptualizations are tied to various other ones and aspects in society like a web and run through multiple facets, social institutions and forms of knowledge and relations in life, when the roots and ground at one area are removed through deculturalization, it creates a domino affect in other spheres of social life, institutions and knowledge. Eroding the foundations of a cultural ideal and ideology in one sphere, goes and shakes the ground of others that use it as well including that of deculturalized ideas - being held or implemented.

Note: Ideals and conceptualizations use pre-existing or other cultural and ideological perspectives to deduce their logic that it simultaneously and contradictorily shouldn’t and are ready to be removed in the future - thus making a socially implemented ideal actually false when one looks back at it from the future as the ground that it stood on to articulate itself collapses and was always untrue.

Moreover, when the meaning of an ideal used (whether a deculturalized ideal or not) has been sufficiently undone either by disrupting its cultural and ideological foundations (directly or indirectly), by overuse, or by not following the necessity of social conformity to keep its meaning, it can no longer be used. It is now switched to another, or what is seen as a further extreme, in order to find a semblance of meaning to use - which is itself will again be undone by continuing this process or will be contradictorily protected in order to prevent this from happening to it also (see The Bind at Home, Point 7).

As such, for logical consistency, according to deculturalization’s own process, nothing can actually ‘exist' or be true, including itself. It reveals itself to actually be the highest form of ‘false consciousness’ and the most ‘deluded’ - just as it paints others which are ‘culturalized’ and influenced. It paints itself and its truth based on being ‘out from culture’ and neutral (‘neutral’ here meaning not informed by, part of and creating cultural and ideological beliefs), but is itself highly culturally and ideologically influenced and constructed, but is blind to this process.

Through being a narrative that cancels itself and the truth of its ideals and conceptualizations by being particularities themselves, by itself using socialization, and by cherry-picking what cultural and ideological formation it undresses and masks (while others are temporarily ignored), it contradictorily continues to churn out new ideals and processes that shift to the next and are on increasingly on unstable and shifting ground. This process creates social unsustainability, the disintegration of societal relations, foundations and knowledge, as well as post-modern confusion over truth when more and more ideals and conceptualizations are revealed to have biased cultural or ideological foundations. Deculturalization’s contradictions suspend it from the ground of its own ideological base, as it ignores it, and is blindly and tightly wound in the tangled web of its social and ideological beliefs and contradictions, due its contradictory conceptualization of truth.

In conclusion, coming from a strand of Enlightenment theory that analyzed truth through the prism of being ‘out from culture’, not culturally influenced, non-ideological and not part of a metaphysical narrative, deculturalization is not simply the removal and masking of cultural artifacts, beliefs or ideological biases seen ‘outside’ itself in society, but the undressing and masking of its own beliefs and processes it uses as cultural and formed in order to be true. It thus both removes and masks cultural processes that, a) are seen in society, b) itself is born from, and c) it uses to form its ideals. Thus, paradoxically it is a cultural particularity and its own normalized state (it is especially normalized when it becomes the status-quo through wide societal or state adoption in the West - though more concentrated within certain social, political and cultural perspectives, such as in the cultural ‘Left’, Liberalism and sections of the ‘Right’) that is against cultural narratives and norms.

Note: Deculturalization is thus an ideology and social program that is against ideologies and the functions societies require.

This duplicity is popularly seen in the West that developed this narrative, when it is referred to both as ‘a culture’, in its cultural artifacts and practices, and simultaneously, because of its deculturalization mask, as ‘having no culture’, in its self-narrative, successful propagation of its own cultural artifacts as universal, cultural imperialism, and unique renewing and tumbling over process (ironically a cultural feature). This duplicity of being both ‘cultural’ and ‘out from culture’, ‘ideological’ and ‘not ideological’ is seen in wider deculturalization ideals, political parties and beliefs. Both positions are used by the actors and opponents of deculturalized values when it politically suits them, and also by outside forces that try to analyze such ideals and narratives and are unable to pin down in terminology what they exactly are.

Note: This duplicity of being a ‘culture’ and ‘out from culture’ creates the social reality and unique cultural process of being socialized to be against socialization, or to conform to the idea of nonconformity which has gained power as a leading cultural hegemonic stance in the West (and globalizing through the West’s soft power) and one largely followed because of this acculturation. This contradiction helps push the constant turnovers and fragmentation in society, while creating further contradictions in other spheres through its simultaneous use and abandonment of social ideological perspectives and conceptualizations.

Though deculturalization and its constructed ideals’ very biased cultural, ideological and epistemological processes can be seen by others in society (at times even said to function as a religion and have a religious adherence), simultaneously their deculturalization narrative of not being biased and cultural may be used, especially when one sees the unique social and cultural processes and effects this deculturalization narrative creates. This at times leads it to be relegated to a different status, its power dynamics being ignored, or it to be left in an odd ‘limbo’ not like other cultural processes that only permits its processes to continue and exasperate social confusion to the phenomena occurring around us, making it escape scrutiny to its actions, bias and very real power plays. The duplicity of its actions however are revealed and can be seen in the naming of the West’s current conflicts as ‘Culture Wars’, where the side that typically uses deculturalization the most, typically the cultural ‘Left’, is also aptly depicted as its own biased cultural and ideological force vying for social power.

Deculturalization and Capitalism Deculturalization goes hand in hand and works quite harmoniously with capitalism which also distrusts the very existence of culture, morals, ideologies, social attachments and the obligations they create as they constrain and impede the possibilities of profit making and commodification; what can be sold and how. Deculturalization’s removal of these cultural aspects, lets capitalism move in and around quite nicely. Simultaneously, capitalism uses these aspects to find and create different values (such as through hierarchies of meaning) for commodification and continuously turns them over as discarded objects for newer ones in its constant search for capital and profit, just like deculturalization in its act of simultaneously using the cultural artefacts and ideology it should reject, and eventually does, for another. Culture and morals are something that both restrains capitalism, and that it simultaneously can use for commodification, to attract customers or to survive politically depending on what ideology has attained power and the status quo.

Note: Deculturalization removes, and encourages to remove, the barriers of what can be sold and not, or what can be commodified and not. This is as society increasingly no longer has or removes the shared ‘constructed’, ‘limiting’, or ‘illiberal’ cultural and moral ideological barriers standing in capitalism’s way which give certain human relations, activities, actions, institutions, beliefs or materials higher meaning over economic transaction, especially when they are

embedded into society’s social institutions and relations. Without these ideological barriers, capitalism is left to sell, commodify and put a price tag on them, and people are led to believe that because something can generate money, income or profit, and more of it, that this itself is a social and individual good.

Note: Deculturalization also unwinds duties and the truth of cultural and ideological roots that tie people to a locality or state, thus limiting the barriers capital and corporate interests face in social obligations to their home state, states in general and its peoples. It thus creates a form of globalization familiar to us to today, that is unaccountable to state interests (this including the social and economic interests and wellbeing of citizens the state is suppose to protect), and is rather let loose to its own unbridled chase of profit. Deculturalization blindly opens the gates in which capitalism can go through.

This is seen quite well nowadays with large corporation adopting many ideals formed under the rubric of deculturalization and shows the contradictions on both sides of the aisle; that of the deculturalizing ideals that have cemented themselves into positions of power and conformity when they are in fact created by the ethic of being true and their opponents being false by being against such positions, and on the part of corporations that unwind cultural ideals and ways of knowing, and shallowly deploy them in order to rain in profit. This contradictory and inherently socially unstable pathway of both using and undoing is highlighted in Davis Harvey’s ‘Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason’ that shows capitalism’s unbridled chase for capital creating both transformative change and violent disruption.

As collective operations and ideological, metaphysical and axiological values are relied on to bind a society, knowledge, and thus the continuing economy, together, they are as well used to create economic value, rebuked in their fundamental existence and then discarded, no matter their inherent social functional and epistemological purposes. This increases the capitalist economic system’s own unsustainability as it relies on such social institutions and others for the continuity of society it lives within. Moreover, such social institutions are also a cradle to the lower-income class, which maintains their purchasing power and ability to economically participate in society, gives a sense of a wider purpose to life that transcends economic transactions and money, and provides enough individual, social and economic security that it prevents initiatives to tear down the economic system.

Thus here, capitalism in its deculturalization ethic, along with deculturalization existing in wider society, sets the tone for the economic system’s own destruction, not simply by its unsustainable cultural and epistemological contradictions, but by its wider destruction of social institutions it and consumers rely on. This is worsened by the vast harsh economic inequalities currently created and unchecked by moral obligations and beliefs (see Binding Socialism, Point 1), which exacerbates the fact that all aspects of life now valued are increasingly left commodified and objectified, with most of the public increasingly unable to afford nor have access to them in order to participate in their growing materialistic society. However, deculturalization’s social problems and contradictions do not end here.

The Bind at Home and Abroad The Bind At Home Deculturalization poses multiple social consequences and effects. On top of fracturing social bonds that bind society and ideas together on the basis of being cultural, deculturalization tumbles ideas that can’t defend themselves from being undone or exchanged for another. As it criticizes or removes previous or other contended bases as being norms and biased while it is the same itself, deculturalized ideals cannot prevent their own logical undoing (especially when it gets into a position of power it should never be in) without falling into further contradictions by using force, social constraint and normalization to keep people following its specific axiological and metaphysical course, the very base that makes it discredit others oppositional perspectives.

That what supports and creates the narrative of ideals, also undoes them.

The social effects and manner deculturalization plays our in society are: Point 1 - It cannot support social functions and the very fibres that bind people together as it against their management; biased cultural and ideological perspectives put into power that creates and maintains norms for something to exist, people to believe in and follow together. As such, it perpetuates the continual erosion of social bonds, families, communities and ties, ironically through the normalization, socialization and power of a specific ideology and ideals showing the duplicity of deculturalization.

As it is always changing towards a newer or ‘unbound’ perspective (it increasingly encroaches on more cultural ideals it comes into contact with, though its logical terminus would be to upend

all of them), it is bringing social institutions, bonds, meaning and knowledge away with it, causing social disruption and conflicts of ideological fidelities between certain views, groups – even the recent ones created through deculturalization (which cannot be held down and last for long without a contradiction and substantial social enforcement - see The Bind at Home, Point 7) - and prevents a cohesive consequential structure of behaviours and their understanding in a society. When ideals and beliefs are absorbed into the social consciousness, people can relate to them to produce self-identification, action, communication, interpretation and effect.

Point 2 - These turnovers occur faster with time and can be incoherent and sporadic. There is an increasing habit in shirking socialization and incapability for ideals to stick as they did previously, while this increases restlessness and disillusionment towards each new one as simply the latest ideological perspective; hastening the tumbling turnover and splitting society. Multiple contrasting and contradictory ideals and conceptualizations are created and pushed out into society as they are not held together by a coherent or cohesive epistemological and ideological narrative to rationalize them. Rather, they are now the result of continuously newly formed ideals that can fall away quickly, views arisen from individual subjectivities, and conceptualizations that are simultaneously undermined as their foundations have been removed elsewhere (see What is Deculturalization).

Some ideals are masked of being seen as ideological more than others, and some stick more than others, depending on which particular cultural, ideological and axiological foundations they are anchored to in society that makes them be taken for granted and escape scrutiny. This depends on how old they are, their context of formation and their level of integration into the cultural fabric and web of symbols and epistemology. However these, through deculturalization’s logical consistency and with time, are also increasingly targeted to be removed as the deculturalization process moves forward when their bias, normalization and power in society is demonstrated and delegitimized.

Point 3 - As this occurs, more and more people, a) increasingly turn to reactionary beliefs as a rebellion against this deculturalization process and when they are socially outcasted when they are said to now hold ‘conservative’ perspectives on certain topics, or b) reject this turnover process in order to keep their own previously deculturalized views that were once seen as ‘progressive’ - causing internal conflicts within proponents of deculturalization and a conflict in wider society that held and enforced the previous view. As it was a deculturalization narrative that made much of these very ideals ‘progressive’ and influences the contemporary Western sense of what is counted as ‘progressive’ and not (‘unbiased’ views and a mix of particular Christian ethics and interpretations), it has now moved away from them when these ideals’

cultural and ideological foundations were revealed, uprooted, stayed too long or contradicted and stood in the way of newer ‘progressive’ ideals being implemented.

Thus, for those who held what was previously deemed ‘progressive’ ideals, the move towards different and the latest ‘progressive’ ideals are sometimes said to be ‘regressive’, however it is in fact simply the logical and continuous turnover to the latest seemingly unbiased perspective that isn’t yet a social norm requiring conformity and power which it itself used to replace previous ideals and worldviews. The new ‘progressive’ ideals are part of, and doing the same thing previous ‘progressive’ views have done under the logic of deculturalization to be formed and come to power when it replaced others: its own bias and/or social conformity has been demonstrated. Seeing this it cannot logically defend itself without being contradictory or hypocritical (see The Bind at Home, Point 7.a and Back on the Playing Field, for how the same phenomenon is currently happening to the current concept of liberalism as the deculturalization narrative it develops itself through moves away from it, while liberalism itself wants to be conserved and struggles with the cultural ‘Left’).

However, the tumbling process to renew does not always occur smoothly, as it has to reckon with the social or political processes that can slow it down or halt it, friction with social institutions that may be against certain conceptualizations and ideas, or even ironically because of internal interests of wanting to protect or being attached to previously deculturalized perspectives.

Note: Currently held deculturalized ideals in society have been adapted and conformed to, as they have remained and been normalized for some time. Meanwhile, other new deculturalized ideals can be initially rejected (even by those who follow the same deculturalization pretext to create their own ideals they want to conserve) either because they stray too far from the current familiar ideological, metaphysical and ontological beliefs, delegitimize a previous deculturalized ideal that has now become a social norm with political interests, or all of these at the same time.

Point 4 - Society, groups, movements and institutions tied to it cannot honestly and explicitly point to and have a relationship with shared cultural views and particularities (without being deemed conservative), as this shows specific culturalization, thus falsity. This affects concepts and ideals of justice, rights, dignity, laws, best practices, sacred objects and figures (meaning not simply obviously religious sacrilegious figures, but those historical and contemporary that attain such social status which are beyond reproach and tarnishing - such figures also exist within

deculturalized rhetoric, especially within political discourse) etc. As such, no obvious moral standards can be explicitly emphasized and protected for long or stably without falling into a contradiction - as they are formed by specific metaphysical perspectives and worldviews that are normalized upon the individual - and are thus waiting to be undone, are on shifting sand or are being hypocritically and contradictorily protected.

This is seen starkly when such entities are caught in the trouble of having to both acknowledge and ignore their concepts, ideals, values and culture at any given time – as seen in ‘secular’ states which use the conceptualization of deculturalization where their ‘secularism’ and states are informed by biased cultural ideals, ideological foundations rooted in Christianity (especially those in the West), set by particular historical contexts and is informed by a specific worldview, which it shrouds from itself. Such state bodies may openly acknowledge and underline their ideals, values and culture in order to protect against their erosion, but this also shows itself as a biased cultural ideal, ideology and norm wanting to be preserved - thus is simultaneously undermining it and showing itself to be ‘conservative'. When one ignores it or it is masked in order to fit within the deculturalization narrative that makes itself true, this can weaken its social weight and allure to emphasize its needed protection, still doesn’t protect it from being changed to another and lets deculturalization’s social effects continue on in society. An adaptation to secularism to escape from this contradiction and social anomie would be to not ignore its biased cultural, ideological, metaphysical and axiological foundations and beliefs, but to underline them, and accommodate other ones to operate in society (within wide ideological barriers it permits) and doesn’t directly invoke God and spirituality it actually uses and deduces from.

Point 5 - As it continuously moves away from that which is in power, it will thus also find itself moving away against ‘good’ things and personal qualities of behaviours (i.e. specific cultural, ideological, epistemological and axiological ideals, attributes and qualities society has deemed positive and that are founded on specific beliefs of humans, dignity, relations in society and the universe) as they have achieved an arbitrary status of power the individual has to live up to - and is therefore oppressive. Personal qualities of behaviour, mannerly conduct, are increasingly rejected for another ideal, then another, then another (the aspect of having ‘none’ is itself a position that is regulated and informed by ideological perspectives) that are all implemented and then uprooted in society.

Point 6 - This shirking of cultural and ideological bases is also why degrees of difference of morality and meaning are increasingly unable to be understood or used in deculturalized rhetoric, as these are biased cultural, ideological and historically contextual concepts that explain and make one thing worse than another - they utilize hierarchies of meaning. As such, nuance is

increasingly rarely adhered to and things are all thrown into the same pot as if they all mean the same thing; “If this, then why not that?” Fundamental epistemological and axiological questions such as this aren’t able to be explained and matters easily become black or white. In societies with already ongoing political bipolarity, this reductionism and lack of nuance increases the flames of tensions and conflict.

Point 7 - It creates heightened forms of intolerance and social control as it contradictorily seeks to enforce itself in society or deal with the reality of societal dynamics. The irony with deculturalization in action is not simply that its formed ideals are ideological themselves – at times highly moralistic - and are formed by a rubric based on conceptualizations taken for granted. But that deculturalization itself and certain ideals, want to hold fidelity to their own and be conserved - while preserving the wider self-eating narrative of truth that made it remove previous and others - creating new social norms and ideologies for society it wants enforced. At some point, it starts to look like the very society and attitude it wants to destroy: homogenous in thought, quick to censor, enforcer of conformity, highly moralistic or intolerant to deviance.

The contradiction sums itself like so: there shouldn’t be conformity around a specific idea, but the emerging belief that arises from being away from conformity should be conformed to. Ideals that are based off repudiating social and cultural norms and delegitimize social and cultural norms that go against it, desire their own social normalization. It becomes hostile and intolerant to transgressions, deviance, individualism or difference away from it, even though it is created and legitimized by these very aspects.

Why does this happen? a) It realizes, contradictory to its own deculturalization rhetoric, that certain social cohesion and conformity is necessary for society, and for its own claims to be maintained. It has used a deculturalization narrative under free speech and liberalism to achieve its current status in society of truth, where it wants to now renounce those foundations in order to maintain its position and not be easily dissolved into the next course or unfollowed. If there are any political interests involved, if certain ideals have been favoured and accustomed to, or if one or multiple past normalized deculturalized ideals want to maintain their legitimacy and the narrative used to gain its current power status in society and not be changed or removed (see The Bind at Home, Point 4 for conflicts among individuals who hold ideals no longer considered ‘progressive’), they must be maintained in society in some way or another - including enforced social conformity (see The Bind at Home, Point 7.e).

Note: Free speech and persuasion in discourse themselves are positioned in a wider social framework that determines truth, right and wrong. When society and individuals are exposed to multiple views, though this indeed arises contrasting views from the status quo, this is largely based on pulling from existing cultural, ideological, metaphorical and axiological concepts of truth to inform that one position makes more sense than another (including prevailing socio-economic interests) - be it the dominant social stance or not.

A winning argument under free speech isn’t as unbiased as it is always advocated to be meaning that what is chosen and popular is informed by favoured existing cultural and ideological beliefs and rationalization (for example; discourse around female equality looks very different in 2020 with social conformity around the subject, compared to the 1910s). These underlying factors change with time and are subject to power dynamics like all others, which are not always in a deculturalized ideal’s favour when it just surmounts to power (depending on which ideological strings its attached to it is created by). This is known, which is why free speech and thought can be recurrently controlled under deculturalization when new ideals want to maintain their status and see they lack ideological popularity (though at times, more than necessary. See The Bind at Home, Points 7.a - h).

Though, this is not to say that free speech doesn’t help arrive at truth - it is to say that whatever is arrived at as truth is ideological and axiological itself and can be persuaded by underlying social factors and beliefs in its favour that make an idea make sense or not.

b) This new positioning of its ideals in power and manifestation of a Successor Ideology (coined

by Wesley Yang), is part of the phenomenon of the wider deculturalization narrative and ideals actually being the most conservative of all. This is as it fundamentally cannot see any other way but itself, as seeing itself as one among many beliefs makes itself and everything it holds to be untrue - even more so than others as it was sustained by a contradiction. Such is why ideals under deculturalization rhetoric can be moreover intolerant, puritan or cannot understand different beliefs, as it is not dealing with a simple disagreement, but further, the fearful demonstration of itself as another particularity and bias, making itself therefore untrue.

Tolerance itself can even be rebuked for political purposes as it doesn’t mean full social power towards the ideal that is trying to climb away from being a social outliner, but cohabitation with another that is ‘cultural’. The deculturalization narrative has become the dominant cultural norm

and has a goal to eradicate all that is ‘cultural’ and informed by biased ideological perspectives.

When tolerance is then called for and contradictorily valued, it is now the act of holding a different opinion that is itself articulated as intolerance, even though the root of tolerance requires and begins with the principle of disagreeing different perspectives that cohabitate and do not physically or verbally harm others who hold contrasting views. Though contradictory practices around tolerance are used, what remains the same is the desire to enforce a deculturalized ideal. c) Its blindness to the fact that it itself is ideological and formed, makes its push to its conversion and outcasting of others in the domestic sphere more unbridled and hubristic, as it is blind to the very power plays and intolerance it is performing - it thus shirks awareness, scrutiny and accountability. When the power plays that it is performing and cultural power status it has achieved are observed, it is quite often rejected. This is because maintaining such a position fundamentally delegitimizes itself and its truth claims as this is the exact basis of what makes it reject the previous ideal in power, makes itself biased, and thus, in the deculturalization narrative, untrue. As such, its power plays and status are ignored as it climbs for more power in society and over individuals.

This shows the tensions many of these ideals may have (especially among different internal perspectives on the political front) once they achieve states of social normalization and cultural hegemony. Some may seek to constantly renew themselves or demonstrate themselves as lacking power even when holding control of public (and increasingly private) influence, media, corporate and state power - as this was the very narrative that makes their entire ideology true and worth following. Without it, it is a particularity like all others vying for power and normalization on the individual, which is exactly what made that which it disagreed with and seeks to replace, incorrect. There are tendencies to not want to admit that it is the new ‘conservative’, as this delegitimizes the road which it paved in society in order to achieve its position. As it takes part in the very power plays it denounces, at times, some of its moves and the meaning of words that demonstrate this may be obfuscated or selectively applied to hide this fact.

Note: As what is in power is wrong, and what is not is right, this conceptualization of power and cultural hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci and within cultural Marxism is itself wrong once it achieves power (just as the narrative and contradiction of deculturalization it develops itself through). Thus, it must thus always remain in an inferior and ostracized state to continuously state what is true or not. Society cannot follow this course, as this would mean that

this conceptualization has attained power and cultural hegemony, thus logically, simultaneously cancelling its concept of truth and various ideals, in which society can thus never have. Its ideals can therefore not ever be socially true. It thus always must be in a fighting position towards implementing what is true, and when it does achieve a power status either renews and changes to another inferior ideal, or ignores it, climbs higher for more power and lives under the contradictions.

In this context of being in an inferior position of power in order to be true, moral righteousness tends to be given out and defended to the inferior position to do anything (even violence) as it achieves to implement itself in society, whereas violence from those in power is incorrect and reinforces the belief in power being wrong on the basis of being in power themselves. It should always be noted that this concept of moral righteousness is ideological in itself. In this thought, violence is right from those not in power (even if they actually do increasingly hold public power, and this is ignored), while violence is wrong by those in power. Violence towards others is not wrong in and of itself, as the specific ideal, principle and moral of equal human dignity towards all is increasingly eroded as its current ideological, ontological and axiological roots disintegrate and are no longer followed, like many others. Instead, power increasingly informs righteousness and what is moral. As it cannot ever be in power and admit it, multiple means from censorship to enforced conformity (even violence) are used, excused or defended - as it is in an ‘inferior’ position of power.

d) It is not driven by explanation or answering questions that reach its ideological and metaphysical grounds for people to understand and decide to believe, agree and convert to.

People are rather made to simply accept it without question, as it cannot touch and show its cultural and ideological roots as this demonstrates its biased formation and foundation that may moreover have already been removed or delegitimized by deculturalization.

Increasingly, this lack of capacity to question or need to explain the ideology being used can lead to a lack in the ability to actually explain or build a rhetoric for ideals rooted for or being implemented in society. This is due to an increasing unfamiliarity with how to argue, discuss or defend ideals, and a lack of consistent intellectual accountability to ideals that let’s them go off the rails of internal coherence as they follow political power interests, continuous turnovers in ideologies and ideals, or when their foundational ideological ground keeps crumbling due to deculturalization itself. The result is more enforcement of ideals without questioning and explanation as they are actually not able to, not without being explicitly incoherent and

contradictory - which tends to be felt and drives further zealous enforcement of group think to cover it. e) As the concepts and categories of manners and grace, as well as what constitutes human dignity and humanism, are increasingly eroded by their possession of biased ideological and ontological foundations that are no longer followed or conformed to, ideals on tolerance, discussion, mercy and the way humans should treat one another in disagreements or confrontations also disintegrate. As such, there is increasingly less to regulate humane treatment and temper social backlash against people who do not conform certain deculturalized ideals.

Mixed with this, the lack of capability to adhere to nuance in interpreting individual deviance, actions and their social effects - as this itself is built upon and supported by moral hierarchies and explanations that are disintegrating - leads to a lack in capability to have appropriately nuanced reactions and tends to push an uneven and harsh backlash against individual deviance to an ideal.

Note: It is opposed to the creation of moral hierarchies (all morals inherently use hierarchies, such is how one can say what is right, wrong, and have the gradient of contextual nuances in between), but creates its own hierarchies in its pursuit of what is acceptable and not, with outcasting and punishments for deviance. Thus, moral ideals are subjected to being incorrect on the very basis of power relations morals inherently create, though deculturalized ideals do the same.

f) This use of conformity towards its new norms can also be influenced by social settings where meaning feels increasingly lost due to the phenomenon of deculturalization itself. In a swing of the pendulum away from this, people thus become increasingly attached to making certain deculturalized conceptualizations and individual subjectivities into the status-quo as a way to find a sense of shared meaning, morality, truth and structure. As this becomes the sole sense of common and shared social meaning for some, they can become hyper-tribalistic around these ideals and create strictly demarcated in and out groups, especially as deculturalized ideals - due to their inherent hollowness - tend to fail to provide a stable sense of meaning. g) Its way of holding itself and position in power is not only through enforced social conformity, but also can use societal positions of power, i.e. the state, centralized authorities, media, policing and corporations. This occurs as deculturalization weakens the maintenance of biased cultural and ideological views that binds society together in decentralized manners, through internalization of taught social morals, familial and community oversight and social dynamics,

and thus now creates a modern domestic sphere where social power is increasingly centralized to the state in order to maintain social order and keep society strung together.

Note: The use of specific societal and central political positions of power depends on the internal politics of the conceptualizations going through - at times they are ironically rejected because they are explicit figures of power- i.e. some may not use the police or corporations, but rather law and threats of incarceration.

Through decentralized social organization, society uses social institutions, communal and familial relations, morals and values, instead of immediately relying on the police or punitive laws in order to prevent crime and keep people in line. Seen in multiple regions around the world where the role of culture, social mores and social institutions are still strong, the role of the police in every sphere of life tends to be limited. This is one of the ironies of deculturalization in action in a society’s social planning, that as it moves away from social and cultural structures as they are seen as limiting, it tends to recourse to needing the police and centralized power to maintain order, which it may moreover use in order to enforce its latest deculturalized ideals.

This situation can be worsened in capitalist environments by the use of corporations, as they increasingly become holders of authority and influence through the disintegration of social institutions and moral checks and balances (see Deculturalization and Capitalism and Binding Socialism).

When compared to actions within decentralized community relations, the state’s attempts to maintain order, the concept of truth, legitimacy and obfuscate and maintain the contradictions of deculturalized ideals in power with its police, military or financial power - along with the possibilities of contemporary technology’s AI advancement and its surveillance capabilities appear more systematic and intervening, especially as it can now be seen in all spheres of life that now require more state intervention for order. This is especially important when it comes to matters such as speech, where compared to decentralized social dynamics, it further requires and uses law and incarceration as punishment for things said that deters from what is approved.

Rather, social decentralization for order uses the internalization of social morals, familial and community oversight and social dynamics in outcasting. Thus, instead of facing state and centralized punishment, through social decentralization one is more likely to have internal and social checks and balances. This leaves the door more open for open debates and the capability to

join groups and spaces built for free discussion, thought and learning (such as universities), without the threat of state punishment, job loss or jail.

Note: Today in the West, certain deculturalized ideas have achieved heightened influence in the state, media, and corporations, through ‘cancelling’ (facing job loss, de-platforming, censorship etc.) those that deviate from it. This at times extreme form of social outcasting and purging of individuals through ideals, thoughts or behaviours that deviate from an approved norm is not simply ironic when it is done to protect and normalize deculturalized ideals in power. It is when other terms that are heavily baked in moralistic language and thought are used to justify it by those who follow a deculturalization rhetoric, such as “accountability”. ‘Accountability’ requires enforcing conformity on the threat of punishment to an approved cultural and ideological concept that is in power. It is social policing and moralization while simultaneously those embedded in the deculturalization narrative are pushing for ideals and a social ethic that is purposefully against this grain.

This rests on an increasing contradiction the modern state, especially secular state, finds itself on to support its truth and very ideas (previous and deculturalized) as they are from an ideological and metaphysical basis itself it is against for reasons of falsity and use of power. Moreover, the situation becomes increasingly unstable by a populace who see and feel the contradictions, incongruent social planning and heightened existential use of centralized force, especially when they have been socialized under the influence of deculturalization to be averse to socialization or simply disagree with certain ideologies being implemented. They become overrun by the increasing power of the state and ideologies – at times embodied and enforced by corporations.

Thus the run away from cultural and ideological belief and power, creates the irony of its own dogma and harsher centralized use of power, though now in an unstable way, due to the social dynamics of having to maintain society together.

Point 8 - For individuals in society, it creates the situation where they are caught in the aspect of having a culture and being part of specific cultural processes, messages and programming, though are deliberately blind from them and are caught in the increasing tumbling out of multiple ideals and practices that cannot stick. It thus removes them from the structures they are bound with, along with the removal of social bonds that informs basic social relations, knowledge, meaning and community in non-capitalistic transactions. The individual feels increasingly restless, confused, lost, lonely, disembodied and as if they were living a life lacking meaning,

that had an empty core or in which something fundamental was missing. Individuals and their minds upend along the flowing stream of liquid modernity. It thus creates individuals who live in a culture but strive to find authenticity, meaning and the shared structures they create, at times in a romanticized recreation, or even commodification, of past or cross-cultural artifacts.

Contemporarily, individuals part of the deculturalization narrative take part in the break-down of the functionality, reciprocity and duty that creates social relations and meaning due to their biased ideological nature, conformity and social power structures, while simultaneously striving to feel rooted to something and advocating to create communal structures. It creates and sustains the conditions for individual narcissism, self-centredness and lack of accountability. Moreover, they find themselves struggling under the weight of capitalism, the central toll it has taken in society that disintegrates social foundations that stand in the way, insecure employment and a precarious meaningless future, while continuing the deculturalization narrative that permits it, and prevents stable and fairer economic dynamics and social security nets (see Binding Social, Political, Economic and Philosophical Ideologies).

This issue is seen in modern day population movements, with individuals - especially younger generations - moving to urban areas as the popular zones of deculturalization and away from the culturalized and ‘limiting’ rural areas, while then also feeling alienated and lonely in cities and romanticizing the movement back to rural regions as centres of meaning and community. In an irony, through deculturalization, individuals have been socialized to be detached, to use a social structure that undermines the structures needed in a society, and to go against many of the features we need as a social species.

Note: Within deculturalization, a certain concept of the sole importance of the individual being free is advocated as a reason to push forward its goals and actions (its ontology), but not the importance of a life of meaning which necessarily requires the operation of acknowledged cultural and ideological structures to create and maintain such meaning and the meanings of various things in life.

This is thus an illustration of how deculturalization operates: without an openly acknowledged ideological, metaphysical, ontological and axiological base to use as a grounding foundation the ground - to answer and explain to others an ideal and belief that people can walk on, deliberate upon and convert to (as this would show that it is ‘constructed’ and is then ripe for

deculturalization’s ‘deconstruction’), it must therefore push itself from the top and tie people into it in order to believe it. As they are suspended from the ground, they think they are ‘out from culture’ and uninfluenced by bias, but they are rather now blindly caught in the binds of contradictions of their own ideology and its upending social course, without an understanding of where they situate themselves and how to get out.

The Bind Abroad On the international sphere, the deculturalization narrative serves the implementation of its points and self on ‘the Rest’ as the teacher, parent and saviour of others from their cultural particularities by pushing and hailing their own selves as ‘universal’, ‘out from culture’ and ‘nonideological’. The other countries are cultural while the West and its ideals are not. Though it is not only a blindness and hubris to itself that serves these actions, along with the continuing of a particular Christian influence ‘to show others the light’ when it comes to whichever latest conviction of the decade, but a quasi-existential one.

Note: From other countries perspectives, they can very much see that what is being introduced, persuaded or enforced are very much cultural and ideological beliefs from another sphere.

Like deculturalization within a society, it struggles with the maintenance of cultural and ideological diversity and actual treatment of others as peers on the international sphere as this serves to show its own equivalent particularities, thus the falsity of its own narrative, belief in itself and the maintenance of the ideals’ narrative in its domestic sphere. Thus, increasing conversion of others on the international sphere is partly done as a way of demonstrating itself as true by erasing itself of having to be a particularity. Something said to be simply ‘Western’ or a phenomenon of a ‘Western’ nation (along with possible others), is a fearful display of its bias and cultural formation. Ironically, this reveals that the narrative that paints itself as out from social processes and power structures, for its own veracity, blindly – existentially - is part of one on an even greater scale; that of cultural imperialism.

Further, the act of telling another nation what to do presupposes power over them, which requires an underlying justification for what can give one power over others. The capability to tell others what to follow, or of one’s conceptualization of what gives a specific nation the right to be a globally dominant power, falls under types of manifestation stories or ideological perspectives,

such as seen in liberalism’s manifest destiny or American exceptionalism (both ideological and missionary).

As recurrent in the domestic sphere, the rhetoric that paints themselves as non-ideological behaves in the most evangelical of ways. Its lack of seeing itself as a particularity makes it more hubristic and missionary-like abroad. Moreover, by pushing the deculturalization narrative abroad, it not only disintegrates human cultural diversity, but also replicates and expands the same societal instability, conflict and contradictions in other countries.

Binding Social, Political, Economic and Philosophical Ideologies Binding Socialism The problems of deculturalization also reside within political ideologies which cannot materialize their socio-economic aspirations due to its inherent contradictions and averseness to important social processes. This is seen within Marxism, an analysis and interpretation of socialism based within deculturalized modernism, which is itself grounded in a specific ontology and worldview. It is an ideology that is against ideologies (first contradiction) as they are created, rooted in false consciousness and suppress the individual, which holds a specific ideological messianic message of social organization and values (second contradiction). Its modernist visions for a better world are heavily ideological, as modernism is itself.

It thus not only cancels its own message and ideals, but undermines the critical social foundations that can deliver (to a certain extent) its own economic worldview. As Augustus del Noce, an Italian philosopher, entails, Marxism leads to a ‘heterogenesis of ends’; meaning that its ideological and epistemological structure actually opposes the desired economic outcome of socialism, while the economic outcome it desires requires it to oppose its current ideological and epistemological structure. Marxism thus prevents socialism, which existed prior to it, from being played out, as socialism is against the grain of deculturalization.

The deculturalization contradiction of its current epistemological belief prevents a desired socialist - or other various humanist non-capitalist economic structures - in three ways:

Point 1 - It cannot support and maintain the socialization of morals and values socialism aspires and requires (stably and non-contradictorily) as it cannot support their ideological, ontological and axiological basis, as well as repudiates social conformity. As such, it erodes the powerful ideological base and normalization of morals – as its own quite Christian ones – that rationalizes: the criticism of materialism, prevention of increasing commodification (the very ontological and axiological perspectives of what is sacred, part of the human fold, above monetary processes and what can be sold, why and why not?), fundamental axiological framework and beliefs that regulates businesses and labor standards, the beliefs in what constitutes dignified work, the centrality and function of human dignity, the beliefs of what constitutes justice and fairness, what counts as human rights and what makes them true (this is a very ideologically loaded perspective), the duties to the working class and duties of the rich, the reasoning and importance of human charity and values that direct the direction of taxes, the treatment of the poor and virtues in relations, along with all the sticky social webs, relations, beliefs and symbols attached them and enforced throughout spheres in everyday life.

Point 2 - It disintegrates the communal and regulatory structures that can deliver the function of its ideals and economic structure in non-commodified and people-centred relations. First, communal and social structures manage the exchange of goods, distribution, food circulation, services, communal work, housing, childcare, elderly care and social security nets (relying less on state financial micro-management and policies to manage social and economic ills) through the foundations of extended family, neighbourly ties, communal relations, social institutions, roles, duties, manners, customs, festivals, rituals and morals which are frayed as they not only require individual submission under these rubrics, but are all rooted, explained and exist through cultural and ideological conceptualizations.

These are the aspects that meet our ends and become the ends themselves, while also creating a life of meaning and satisfaction. It assures that one does not rely only on financial exchange money - in order to get by and be supported, but direct work towards a matter that goes through a web and gets reciprocal feedback, something very important for those who fall through the cracks as the poor and restores their dignity as vital participants and beneficiaries of society.

Second, regulatory bodies, policies and forces are also needed to assure that the above socioeconomic ideals and values (see Binding Socialism, Point 1) are being met and used to curtail immoral practices done (in all sectors of society) in the name of seeking profit and money.

However, deculturalization prevents their non-contradictory and stable creation and maintenance as they enforce normative structures in a power dynamic over the individual that deculturalization delegitimizes and criticizes.

Note: When things are exchanged and done without the need for financial exchange, it isn’t that they’re being given away for ‘free’, but rather through direct work and reciprocity that exists between relationships. It’s simply not monetized or commodified, but embedded in a culture through different kinds of transactions, both short term and long term. When these relations and duties are melted away through deculturalization, money becomes the primary mode of transaction. In this situation, the lack of monetization, or arguments for it, opens the door for the thought that it would thus be given away for ‘free’, as there is no duties nor financial exchange (that signal work and meaning behind it) related to it.

Point 3 - Encompassing all in society and human life, it undermines the placing of larger shared cultural, ideological, metaphysical and ontological beliefs and perspectives at the heart and end of public interactions above economic transactions that rationalize the end goal of society, human interactions, individual aspirations, duties and responsibilities to society and guide economic behaviour. Having this higher shared values and beliefs places the social sector above the corporate sector, of social values driving and coming first prior to economic values, corporate interests and the pursuit of money that should in fact manage themselves within the rubric, with all the duties, responsibilities and ethics to each other, workers, families, communities, states (See Binding Socialism, Point 1) etc. which are explained and rationalized as true by cultural, ideological and metaphysical conceptualizations being unraveled by deculturalization and capitalist interests. In missing this basis, socialism is unable to be coherent in explaining the ends in which it envisions for society and pushing discernible revolutionary change that is purposeful and believed in.

Without shared cultural and social values, economics, money and property become the ends of society and individual life themselves. This consistent commodification and bending of morals towards each other, society and future generations moreover causes a tension as what informs the value of materials, commodities and desire for accumulation are cultural and ideological beliefs continuously forming hierarchies of meaning being uprooted and rendered absurd, while society, and the means for all to participate in the economy, unravels (See Deculturalization and Capitalism).

Note: Individuals, their psyche and feelings towards the wider reasoning and purpose of life are not cut off from economic activity.

Thus, Marxism’s own epistemological and social message articulated through deculturalization, helps paint the way for the capitalist processes and the atomization it is concerned about. The latter is actually a direct outcome of its roots in individualism by not supporting the necessities to build and maintain social institutions. This is while it simultaneously espouses and requires a strong collective force and conviction to deliver its function and drive it through to revolution.

As such, without this, it then tends to rely on a heavily centralized state power and production line form of social organization to manage its social contradictions, state and maintain society’s morals and truth, and their social function.

The outcome of a ‘heterogenesis of ends’ is also seen in wider social activist movements that use a deculturalization narrative, while also espousing the need for communal structures, localism, fair economic policies, justice or rights. This is a similar issue that plagued much of the 1960s protests in the Western world, which brought up their opposition to capitalist structures and many other social structures and institutions as they were seen as part of wider societal injustice through partaking in power dynamics and hierarchies associated with being inherently unjust in and of themselves, as per the deculturalization narrative they used. However, this false alignment prevented the implementation and maintenance of structures, institutions and beliefs that bind communities together, implement a fair economic system, and put into action some of their own ideological views - as these all require power dynamics, conformity and hierarchies to what is permitted, moral and true.

Ironically, Marxism’s current use of deculturalization prevents socialist ideals to save the individual from unjust social and economic relations, as it requires that which Marxism typically works against. The deculturalization segment of Marxism, which is quite heavy and creates certain perceived social outcomes through the way it analyzes social dynamics, is incorrect and would need to be removed, leaving other elements and class analyses that are distinctly of the Marxist ideology which differentiate it from socialism as a broad category. It is a segment that makes a people forget culture, while replacing it with its own format that is socially unstable - on top of it preventing the realization of certain socio-economic ideals.

As underlined in the morphology of the word ‘socialism’, it requires a social gathering and force that thus needs to be held together with a strong binding framework rationalized by certain

cultural and epistemological views individuals must believe in which are brought towards the ends of the common good and the flourishing of all members of society. It is actually the opposite of ‘deculturalization’ that many try to develop it through. Though deculturalization is not only something that binds Marxism, but that also skews the ‘Left’/‘Right’ consensus, their socio-economic solutions and capability of having stable communal relations in relation to the state, while it also materializes in and forms multiple other bound ideologies, such as postmodernism.

Post-Modernism Note: Here post-modernism doesn’t mean any ideological conceptualizations that appear after modernization, but the specific ideology concerning deconstructionism and the relativity and subjectivity of truth that materialized in the West and has been particularly influenced by Michel Foucault.

Though Marxism, based in modernism, is superficially quite different than post-modernism, there has been accurate observations that the previous tends to go into the latter. Though different ideas, there is a parallel between them as post-modernism, like Marxism and modernism, is also based in deculturalization. When continuing the logical sequence of deculturalization, one can move from Marxism and modernism, also into post-modernism. Post-modernism takes the rhetoric that forms the basis of modernism, as seen in Marxism, and turns it against itself, against the beliefs of the Enlightenment and any forms managing truth, when it discovers it too is hypocritically rooted in cultural, ideological, ontological, metaphysical and historical particularities, thus up for questioning as well.

Note: Post-modernism tends to take an unbalanced and stronger stance specifically against Western conceptualizations as this is the region where post-modernism is born from, while it also tends to be an easy target in critiques of power structures as the the ‘West’ is the latest colonial and imperial power.

There is then no longer even a partially stable base and framework to hold ideas and truth, as what the Enlightenment criticized as untrue and Enlightenment concepts themselves are

uprooted. As such, it is contradictorily still using Enlightenment theory’s message of being against cultural and ideological aspects (for reasons of truth and norms) in order to cancel all of Enlightenment theory’s messages when it sees it is also complicit in the same. It is still continuing to use deculturalization in order to cancel the foundation of deculturalization it uses.

Meanwhile, it is also forming its own conceptualizations that everything is relative (which is thus relative as well), and simultaneously itself holding particular political, ideological and value burdened inclinations and analyses that it may fiercely protect as true.

Everything is relative and can be deconstructed, except itself, while this contributes and is part of its continued Western ideological baggage, individualism and a wider misunderstanding of humans as relational beings. There is a lack of understanding that culture is built by and maintaining the intertangled relationship of individual thought, continual action and social effects in a particular setting. It thus tries to funnel all the cultural diversity across space and time - which individually exist and are maintained through collective processes - into the mind of any and all individuals or in one social sphere (as if they wouldn’t cancel each other out and can be self-sustained), for individuals to somehow wade through and pick with coherent interactions, creating complete atomization and relativity dependent on cultural practices that no longer exist and cannot thus be even used to form subjectivities. It creates a mess of confusion as it is confused itself, due to the binds of contradictions it is formed by, suspended in and sees the world through.

Note: It requires the social normalization and maintenance of dominant ideals conformed to, that can then hold the meaning that is used to construct a subjectivity or that is played with, for it to make sense. However, when subjectivity itself is normalized (especially when it is done for deviance as an the end in itself), the conserved norms used disappear, and thus the subjectivity attached to it loses its original meaning and finds itself lost with nothing to build itself off of and be constructed from. Individual identities and self-identification are constructed and created based on social categories, norms and meanings that are normalized, conformed to and maintained, which others can then recognize and understand. Without these maintained shared meanings and norms, or by repudiating them, the subjectivity and self-identification undoes and cancels itself as it is removing the ground it is actively standing on to articulate its own meaning and let others understand it to whichever extent.

This is also how science and scientific beliefs can be denied by post-modernism when their very real biased cultural, ideological or metaphysical formations are revealed (though this tends to contradictorily selective, as at times only certain scientific studies and knowledge is denied, while others are left to be true - such as scientific knowledge and measurements of human induced climate change or studies to support post-modernist analysis). Many of those that try to defend science against this onslaught are also influenced by Enlightenment theory’s strand of deculturalization. When faced with their ideological bases, it tries to ignore them, project universally or simply cannot deny them without logically showing itself and everything as therefore incorrect or up to subjectivity - as deculturalization would require. With deculturalization at play, only two options are thus presented that are in actuality both false; 1) when something is not informed by a cultural, ideological, metaphysical and ontological view, this is what makes it true (the initial stage of deculturalization), or 2) after discovering ideological particularities and foundations in everything, truth is concluded as subjective or not actually existing as everything is ideologically influenced (the progressing stage of deculturalization which is the contradictory stance of post-modernism).

As such, postmodernist philosophy is one of the consequential progresses of this contradictory strand in Enlightenment theory and modernism denigrating truth in biased ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological and axiological conceptualizations. It is where people find themselves in an era of post-truth confusion as more and more the foundations of truth many took for granted are uprooted or questioned in their biased cultural and ideological formation. It uses Enlightenment theory’s message of being against cultural and ideological aspects in order to cancel all of Enlightenment theory’s messages when it sees its complicity, without seeing how it is continuing on its ideological message and keeping much of its own particular ideals. Seeing the hypocrisy in this strand of Enlightenment theory forming deculturalization, it should be nullified and canceled, not continued to be contradictorily used - now against itself.

Note: To now come to the conclusion that there is no truth after the discovery of every thought’s ideological basis is to actually continue using deculturalization logic now against everything (as it would both logically entail, while deculturalization is also its own ideological premises), thus creating post-modernism.

This piece in fact emphasizes the opposite and tries to save the concept of truth that deculturalization cannot deliver and stably articulate. This piece emphasizes that truth exists, can exist and needs to exist. Whether or not one believes in it, or doubts it as we see the

multitude of cultural and ideological beliefs and feel lost, truth is necessary for the function of society and human thought. It requires an ideological basis to develop and sustain what it is.

Thus the piece not only shows how a dismissive stance against truth is ideological on its own, but that the entire idea that because something is a belief immediately leads to relativity, is untrue: as all are. Future steps are now to determine which one is true.

Moreover, it is important for deculturalization and post-modern rhetoric to differentiate diverse human social, psychological and biological behaviours in different cultures and across time, from concepts of truth - as our social nature creates conformity to diverse cultural and ideological structures, thus diverse behaviours, thoughts and social effects. These shouldn’t be confused together as this would propose there are multiple truths that contrast and contradict one another. This is where many ideologies fall into a trap, as they believe that human reception, in our actions, psychology and biology, in itself shows the truth of a particular ideology or conceptualization - and thus show the innate truth of a conceptualization.

This is the narrative of deculturalization that deduces truth and follows with what is with the human (actions and desires) as it is not influenced by false and created external cultural and ideological values. Thus, that in which human psychology and biology follows along with must be innately true, objective and universal. However, when multiple diverse human receptions and responses are shown in different cultural contexts, this can be surmounted to mean that all these conceptualizations are all simultaneously true, that truth is relative or that it doesn’t really exist.

They continue to use innate human behavior and biology as a sequence to follow, rather than seeing this as being part of a human social, psychological and biological response to surviving in diverse contexts. It continues to use deculturalization to deduce truth, while the basis of deculturalization to follow human objectivity has been undermined.

Other steps towards truth can analyze what the existence of multiple diverse cultural and ideological views humans can believe in reveals about humans themselves, the cultural basis of truth, the importance of society and our place in the universe (which would be the formation of other ideologies and conceptualizations). This can be built on to form social awareness to the importance culture and society have for human life and thought, and how they can be used as functional tools for conceptualizations and the end goal of human advancement, prosperity and social stability.

Releasing from Deculturalization’s Bind The solution to this current fix would be to directly target the heart of the issue; to unwind from deculturalization’s bind and drop down from its tangled suspended web by having a open acknowledgement, relationship and admitting to what it is holding and based off of; beliefs and particularities based on specific cultural, ideological, metaphysical or epistemological understandings and perspectives to rationalize and explain their truth. In a sense, it is to deconstruct deculturalization and the ideals themselves, to show and acknowledge where they come from, in which would cancel the deculturalization narrative itself under its own contradiction, while then being able to continue using the ideals themselves under their acknowledged particular cultural, ideological, epistemological and metaphysical framework.

Note: The turnover to another or further extreme can’t be stopped unless deculturalized ideals acknowledge their own current points as particular beliefs it wants to anchor in society, or else it will live under an unstable contradiction bound to be overturned or held there by contradictory and unstable force.

When we target the heart of the issue that forms the logic of deculturalization that delegitimizes truth in the biased and cultural as they are ‘invented’, releasing from the bind reframes that humans can indeed think and create - form ideologies or have ideological ‘constructions’ - that find, come to and touch truth, that can last, influence and form other realms of thought as well which can then also be true (such as scientific knowledge and truth claims that are not relegated as false simply on the basis that they hail from specific ideological, metaphysical and ontological foundations - which they indeed do) - or else truth can never be found. Things are not false because they’ve been through culture and ideology, but are true despite them. All human thought exists by being based on particular ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological and axiological conceptualizations of the world.

Note: In other words, when it comes to concepts of truth and using one of the definitions of ‘subjective’ that means being informed by a particular worldview, and one of the definitions of ‘objective’ that means being true, their opposition to one another falls away. In fact, in this skewed positioning of their different definitions ‘subjectivity’ can touch ‘objectivity’. Meaning, that it is

through ‘subjectivity’ (a biased conceptualization or worldview) that ‘objectivity’ (the truth) can be touched in the first place. It is not that all subjectivities are true, but discerning which one(s) (which belief based on ideological conceptualizations) is/are true.

This is separate from the fact that socialized ‘subjectivities’ will still psychologically influence and even at times biologically (level of stress, release of hormones, reception of the senses, heart rate, the brain etc.) - individuals in society regardless of whether they are true or not. Human social nature creates conformity to diverse cultural and ideological structures, thus diverse behaviours, thoughts and effects that are managed and released from our internal physical biology. We must differentiate diverse human social behaviours from concepts of truth, as human social responses don’t demonstrate multiple actual truths (that are contrasting and contradict one another), but our biological and social reality.

As can be seen through the way the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are currently used in philosophy, politics and debate, they become quite cumbersome in their use towards truth as they employ multiple meanings where some are heavily influenced by the contradictions of deculturalization: subjectivity is false as it is a biased particularity, while objectivity is true because it is not (on top of this conceptualization of objectivity being able to reach truth through being unbiased, being ideological on its own). What should be meant by ‘objectivity’ is rather impartiality, critical distance, analysis of multiple perspectives and worldviews, and dispassionate evaluation of facts and evidence.

Moreover, the beliefs recently created and manifested which people have adopted through deculturalization and are now currently socialized to believe in, should have another metaphysical reasoning or base - or re-root themselves to their past ones in the cases this applies to -, to reason, anchor and prevent its own contradictory undoing.

This also solves a major issue that has caught many in a bind when they are confronted with the fundamental epistemological contradictions and problems of the current status quo of deculturalization, whether it be through liberalism, modernism, secularism or others. As many have been socialized into the current ideals and morals, they feel averse to an inclination of then having to return to a previous state, or turn to other ideologies and ideals that successfully do not use the deculturalization contradiction, which they do not agree with, as the solution. This is far from the truth, as one can still hold the ideals themselves, but they need a renewed or new acknowledged ideological, metaphysical and epistemological basis to rationalize it as true.

Note: This shows how past beliefs, traditions and structures of thought that now re-emerge and present themselves as the only option to stop and reverse the disintegrating and crippling social and economic effects of deculturalization are not so, but are actually one among many. What they do, like others can, is not use deculturalization and thus possess a cohesive and selfacknowledged cultural, ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological and axiological structure for society, social relations and knowledge. Deculturalized ideals can also replicate this and release themselves from deculturalization, and present themselves as new ideals, ideologies and conceptualizations for society to use.

Seen throughout human history, new ideas and ideologies are always formed, inspired from past ones and implanted. What differentiates them from today’s deculturalized ideals is that they relate to what they actually are and aspire from. Certain currently held deculturalized beliefs are not particularly unique in their disjointed and individual selves when looking across historical and cross-cultural contexts. Many are coincidently and randomly shared across history or in different regions, but arise from different acknowledged epistemologies and rationalizations, and thus create different social effects, meanings and manners in which they are linked with other ideals. This shows that certain contemporary deculturalized ideas can still exist and be held, but simply need a different reasoning away from deculturalization to hold them.

Like the manner in which the same ideal can be held and explained by different cultural and ideological perspectives, and thus be positioned and linked differently with other ideals in each society or context, the same can happen to deculturalized ideals once they build and mount up their acknowledged ideologies. Diverse ideals currently held together as part of one group due to all using or being aligned with the deculturalization social narrative (such as the conglomeration of beliefs seen as part of Western cultural ‘Left’) can be separated from another and become distinct and even opposing political and cultural views if they employ and come from different epistemological and ideological perspectives. This is a reality still and long in action, such as ideals of racial equality in civil rights and abolitionist movements not being particularly linked to other deculturalization ethics and politics on the Western cultural ‘Left’, but rather a Christian and Islamic ethic and knowledge all humans as equal children of a God (a view forming the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which itself can form, be a part of or be aligned with associated cultural ‘Right-wing’ or ‘conservative’ ideals, such as on sex and gender.

This is particularly seen in the manner many people of colour or immigrants in the West arriving from countries where deculturalization rhetoric is not as ingrained, tend to be socially and

culturally ‘conservative’, especially compared to a ‘whiter’ and more Western-raised or influenced population who have been socialized into deculturalization and its ideals.

This process of having a relation with the particular ideological and epistemological structure actually solidifies the beliefs being held and thus strengthens them. This even includes Enlightenment ideals themselves (such as civil discourse for human advancement - it should not be forgotten that much Ancient Greek ideals around discourse in forums are based in particular epistemological and ontological views influenced by their culture and religion), and the character of what constitutes human rights and equality (the cultural, ideological and metaphysical beliefs that answers what they are, why they are true, which ones are true, what realm they apply to and how), into stably materializing and being maintained. It prevents the undoing process into a continual extreme or the constant upending of social institutions, relations, values and knowledge with it, by allowing its open protection, social normalization and capability for ideas to explain themselves with a clear base in relationship to itself - thus boundaries and where it can say ‘stop’ and have a ideological defence against turnovers without being contradictory and hypocritical in its own bias and setting of norms. It allows it to set and maintain its principles.

‘Un-binding’ Morals By removing deculturalization, it takes morals out of a shadow and highlights them, what people - and leaders, the media, icons and other figures of importance and responsibility - should follow: how they should relate to one another, the morals of treatment, community harmony, preservation of the environment etc. One is able to underline and articulate what is bad, and precisely why, in a manner that is not contradictory, but actually stable. Something desperately called for and needed within a world feeling like it is falling into chaos and that lacks coherent and sustainable accountability in various spheres, while other strenuous forms of ‘accountability’ (termed ‘cancel culture’) are trying to use more deculturalized ideals, deculturalization, and its contradiction to bring social order to a society undone by deculturalization (see The Bind at Home, Point 7.f). Releasing from the bind gives society an understood social contract of what people together and individually believe in, and how to understand and relate to the actions of others.

Strengthening a decentralized order For a society or community, it can assure that relations can be managed in a decentralized manner through acknowledged morals and human social relationships and institutions that do not have to rely on so much power of the state, police or other centralized forms of force to micro-

manage social order. This is especially important when it comes to matters such as speech, that doesn’t require law and incarceration as punishment for things said that deters from what is approved, but rather the internalization of social morals, familial and community oversight and social dynamics in outcasting (see The Bind at Home, Point 7.g). It can help prevent the coming inflow of authoritarian governments – or extremist epistemologies disagreed with – which are presented as the only alternative to deal with the disorder and disintegration brought by deculturalization, by presenting additional stable decentralized formats.

A place for the individual Releasing from deculturalization’s bind allows people to have a relationship with what they are actually holding, flourishing symbols and filling up what seemed like an empty space with a world bridled with meaning. It deals with atomization, narcissism and anomie by letting individuals become part of the stringing web of the holistic binding structures of society, reestablishing acknowledged community ties, anchoring people, renders imperative the sustainability of society and thus the mechanisms it depends on (family, duties, environmental protection etc.). It keeps people rooted, where the tumbling turnover process slows down and the flow of change and adaptation occurs in a more stable and acknowledged format, with more checks and balances and through conversions of thought in whichever format holds the legitimate social power.

‘Un-binding’ Truth In other words, a cultural ideal or ideology cannot be undone simply on the basis of being of a biased perspective, a particularity or by being cultural or ideological (at times said with the word ‘social construct’ that is erroneously thought to imply untruth, rather than a culturalization and belief that may be true and that has actual live social, material and psychological ripple effects) as, a) it is such itself, and b) these are the tangled webs required to maintain society and the concepts of truth. As such, cultural and ideological ideals are rather undone between each other or discarded based on losing debates using a common-enough metaphysical ground to be able to do discourse, disbelief in one due to holding a different cultural and ideological viewpoint, falling under their own internal contradictions, being unable to account or function within basic human societal dynamics and causation, or changes in power and hegemony in society.

All societies and beliefs engage with their reality through these ‘biased’ conceptualizations and norms, with each in conviction of their version and disagreement with another (this is the very nature of diversity; disagreement), understanding others through their own lenses. One may be

the true one, it may be another, it may be a few at varying degrees, or it may be several. From another ideological perspective, this ideological and epistemological diversity to varying degrees may be a survival necessity, a reflection of human intelligence providing multiple pathways of approaching the world due to different geographic climates and biodiversity or part of life’s dynamic equilibrium. All in agreement however is the fundamental importance of acknowledging one’s particular ideological conceptualizations, and the fundamental epistemological contradiction that exists, and the social effects this causes, when they are not acknowledged.

As such, releasing from the bind is not simply an adjustment to an innate contradiction of deculturalization created by an perspective in Enlightenment theory by undoing the technical misstep to put ideas back on the equal playing field to deal with another. But, the way to deal with the cascading social effects it creates of social instability, conflicts, ravaged commodification, contradictory socio-economic processes, post-truth confusion, narcissism, atomization, anomie, and the recourse to extremism to find a semblance of meaning.

Back on the Playing Field Within the domestic sphere, deculturalized ideals releasing from the bind, would mean they would drop down on the playing field - back onto the ground with other conceptualizations and worldviews that were already there. It would mean they would be in discourse and power struggles with other ones for social hegemony, cohabitation or tolerance in a domestic sphere based, of course, in their own convictions they are true. Though they may share certain perspectives and overlap on others with contesting oppositional forces, deculturalized ideals will be on an equal chess field as others in whichever power struggle of the day for the truth of their own beliefs, but with ideas that are much more stable in themselves and that can be maintained in society. They would be part of a larger social cascading awareness with the understanding and capability to knit society and communities together with shared, rooted and sustainable social practices, as cultural and ideological perspectives are understood as the social tools of humanity and source of where we derive reason, knowledge and truth.

Note: Releasing from deculturalization doesn’t mean that an ideal, ideology or worldview is immediately legitimized for stable social application, it is simply the first step. They also need to

be self-coherent, holistic and function within the limits of the reality of human relations, dynamics, reproduction and material relation with the world in order to be socially sustainable and take the mantle of societal power and dominance.

Tolerance, Free Speech, Ideologies and Balance This understanding of how communities are formed and sustained could help cultural or intellectual pluralism arise in a sustainable way within the domestic sphere, as well as a tolerance towards individuals who deviate from established norms. First, this is because an awareness and accountability of one’s own biased positioning can curtail some of the crusading, evangelical and hubristic behaviour under deculturalization that stems from unawareness in one’s own belief positioning, as well as perhaps arise an empathy to not impose onto others as one wouldn’t want to have on oneself (this particularly also depends on which belief is formed and the axiology under it, as some beliefs in relation to themselves are inherently missionary, such as Christian Evangelism).

Second, as a society in relation with its beliefs can be sustainable as its socio-cultural fabric can be maintained, individuals can be able to retain beliefs without the same level of insecurity, and thus do not immediately recourse to reactionary behaviour against pluralism as another cause of cultural disintegration. The framework of a society being in relation to its beliefs and conceptualizations can create the stable possibility of multiple strong communities in a setting all holding onto their beliefs under an understood, acknowledged and shared socio-cultural fabric where individuals don’t need to consistently impose on individual others. Depending on the relations between the beliefs and the structures of relations used in a society, diverse and creative forms of pluralism can be created.

As such, highlighting the existence and bias of beliefs doesn’t necessarily only create a battle field of factions for social hegemony. It can highlight other ideological, metaphysical, epistemological and axiological ideals that underlie the values of tolerance, mercy, public discussion and persuasion and how they function, as underlined in Ancient Greek thought and beliefs. Thus unwinding from the bind can also create heterogeneous social communities that are both stable in their acknowledgement of the hegemonic shared cultural and ideological social fabric that society and the individual uses which manages relations, order and knowledge, and permits tolerance and public discussion for others (either different group or socially deviant individuals, actions and ideals) in a way that won’t recourse society to absurdity and complete subjectivity.

Note: Social ideals will create a hierarchy and power structures as this delineates what is believed in and not, what is followed and not, what is moral and not. This does not necessarily equalize oppression (the concept of what is oppressive itself requires an ideological framework that would need to attain dominant social power to be followed), especially as deculturalization and deculturalized ideals themselves occupy (and/or try to) positions of power in new hierarchies.

The key for balance is how to treat groups, individuals, actions and ideals that outlay the dominant and normative structures, and the nuance of treatment accorded to them, depending on how far and destabilizing they can be - which requires new normalized ideas and values in their own dominant power positions to regulate and answer to this.

It should be underlined that such values around tolerance or free speech themselves are also part of biased ideological and axiological frameworks rooted in particular metaphysical and ontological understandings of each human’s place in the universe. In Western nations, tolerance is developed and is inspired from Christian Protestantism through a belief that all humans are sinners - and thus unable to control the other - but should rather let God be the judge, where it is the sins themselves which are targeted rather than sinners. Ideological concepts, values and analysis of tolerance, mercy, grace, debate or free speech need to gain their own hegemonic power in order to be followed. And just like deculturalized ideals that get released from the bind, these values do not necessarily need to remain conjoined together, but can be preferred or believed in over the other and based in different cultural and ideological structures.

In a society or community that employs such values, societies can achieve a balance by maintaining their shared cultures and norms, while groups, or individuals that deviate - as there always will be - are assured to not simply recourse to being targeted, outcasted, admonished, punished or ‘cancelled’ in tribalistic manners or through the state, but tolerated. It is rather the beliefs they hold that may be targeted. This also depends on a society’s level of tolerance, what belief systems develop the concept of tolerance and which exact ideas and behaviours will be tolerated: as tolerance can be towards individuals and not actions and beliefs, or towards both individuals and most actions and beliefs. From a sociological perspective, tolerance is seen as a win-win, as social stability can be maintained through not having to undermine ideological and cultural structures, while also having those that deviate from the dominant cultural, epistemological or political structure not treated harshly.

Note: To underline moral conduct in discussions, debates, disagreements and confrontations, society needs to reinvigorate the values, beliefs and rationalization of manners, grace, mercy or human dignity and the ontological structures that develop and protect it. Further values and ideals rooted in the ideological, axiological and ontological conceptualizations of human dignity and humanism can be deployed concerning ways to treat those that outline and deviate in society, especially due to the universal fallibility and imperfectness of all human beings. The use of this ethic is one of the reasons Christianity has been so successful in promoting itself in the masses (on top of the obvious imperialistic Roman and European past that expanded it), as it has grabbed the hearts of many of the world’s marginalized through advocating mercy and tolerance towards them and their equal human value.

As such, to reinvigorate and protect the values associated with liberalism of public discourse, free speech and/or tolerance, one needs to acknowledge, emphasize, articulate and develop their ideological bases (much of it religious and stemming from specific Ancient Greek thought) and implement them as the dominant cultural and ideological view in society. These are no longer attached under liberalism’s current deculturalization framework, but that of another - or in many cases emphasizing liberalism’s pre-deculturalization cultural and ideological roots - that can protect its processes. Many of what are past liberal values (the definition and concept of the word ‘liberalism’ has shifted throughout the centuries) can then be conserved. Looking at it from today’s politics, it is an irony that liberalism now seeks to be conserved and is now actually a ‘conservative’ stance, as the deculturalization narrative it developed itself through in the modern age moves away from it.

Note: Thus, either in, a) a situation where there is cultural homogeneity with groups or individuals who deviate, or b) a looser shared cultural fabric with multiple different cultural or ideological groups, there is a dominant general societal cultural belief structure, while the values of public discourse, free speech, mercy and/or tolerance are other hegemonic beliefs that function on top of society as an operational system to regulate and keep in check reactionary tribalistic and aggressively punitive social and state behaviour. These checks and balances of course occur within certain limits and bounds into what exactly can be tolerated or not, what exactly can be said or not, when exactly should we have mercy or not, and why. These themselves are answered

by and based in cultural and ideological beliefs that need to be the dominant beliefs and principles people and society adheres to. Moreover, there requires more ideological, axiological, ontological and metaphysical reflection on when these are regulated by specific interpersonal and familial relationships or by law, and why.

With this new concept if liberalism, society can be ‘socially liberal’ in the sense where there is a general social and/or state tolerance to individual or group deviance and politically and morally incorrect speech, whereas it is ‘culturally conservative’, meaning rooted to its particular ideals and ideology that is continuously taught and maintained. These are new conceptualizations and divisions of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ that can arise without deculturalization, but that are mostly not used in this piece to explain cultural developments, relations and interactions. Rather, current political language is used to identify the political alignments people follow, such as using ‘social conservative’, when actually meaning ‘cultural conservative’.

Thus, contemporary liberalism’s pushback against the cultural ‘Left’ (that is pushing against contemporary liberalism and liberal values) is hypocritical and largely blind to how it has been part of the very system it is rejecting and that is currently undermining it; how the deculturalization it has used and that formed many of its contemporary beliefs, led to the cultural ‘Left’ and it’s ideals it now opposes. It and its proponents continue to push a deculturalization stance while holding onto a set of the past or latest appropriate cultural and ideological perspectives and ideals - in all intents, taking a conservative stance to them -, and do not see how deculturalization is now running away from them, just as they have tried to detach and run away from those of the past.

Note: Liberalism used to ‘work’ because the pre-liberal ideals and conceptualizations were maintained and conserved for society and for itself to use, while it permitted social tolerance for individuals and groups who deviate. However, this position was temporary as the deculturalization logic it used in this form of tolerance disintegrated the pre-liberal structures that society, institutions, relations, individuals, knowledge and liberalism itself needed. Eventually, in deculturalization’s continuous turnovers, it will move away from liberalism as it does not necessarily have fidelity to it and the social conditions it needs, but is rather loyal to its own narrative.

Thus the current confusion around the way forward when assessing the contradictions, failures and benefits of liberalism is due to the deculturalization it currently develops itself through that runs away from the fixed pre-determined values, concepts and ideologies liberalism took for granted and contradictorily used and created - even overriding the values of free speech and individualism - while offering limited possibilities for society as it unravels the shared beliefs and duties that knit communities and knowledge together. In order to release liberalism from the bind, and present onto society its benefits and the ideals many want to preserve - while setting aside its failures in social arrangement, stability, community, knowledge and meaning - one needs to release it from deculturalization itself and anchor in the specific liberal benefits as the dominant cultural and ideological norms. Just as in modernism and secularism without the deculturalization ideology they developed themselves through, without deculturalization the concept and definition of liberalism changes too.

Note: As can be seen here, it is useful to have the word ‘deculturalization’ to distinguish it from liberalism and specify what exactly is happening in social relations, cultural developments and ideological thought. This is especially as social and cultural commentators and the public highlight that events and conflicts occurring around us are both due to liberalism (when talking about social disintegration and ‘cultural liberalism’) and lack of liberalism (when talking about rising forced conformity, cancel culture and the uprising of new ‘progressive’ ideals traditional liberalism is unfamiliar with).

On the other hand, the word ‘deculturalization’ can, a) explain this social fragmentation and constant turnovers, and b) take into account the zealous social enforcement of deculturalization’s own ideals the term ‘liberalism’ wouldn’t permit, and its continuous turnovers that can even move away from and replace certain liberal ideals taken for granted as unbiased and towards the latest ‘progressive’ stance.

Moreover, the word ‘deculturalization’ specializes the discourse and makes it more precise to bind together and explain the shared phenomena and logic occurring under and developing liberalism, modernism, secularism, post-modernism, Marxism and other realms of Western thought. Current events and social developments may also be titled as ‘Marxism’ or ‘cultural Marxism’, when in fact they may lack loyalty, representation, analysis or care for the working class, class dynamics, fair economic structures or stable beliefs on materialism. Rather, ‘deculturalization’ predates Marxism and is used within Marxist analysis (and currently within

liberalism and modernism), as it is used, affects and moves within multiple ideological structures throughout time.

Releasing the World from Deculturalization’s Bind Relating with one’s own ideals and beliefs in the Western domestic sphere could permit a maintenance of international, inter-civilizational or inter-communal diversity by opening the door for the capacity to respect and treat others on the international sphere as peers, not as students nor children, without the insecurity of undoing one’s beliefs at home. As seeing one’s culture and beliefs as a particularity does not curb nor render them relative and untrue (there is simply disagreement - at times quite strong - in each other’s stances), it can create more of a permission of international diversity as there is no longer such an existential call for or blindness to particular Western ideological beliefs behind it. It can call on a humility and understanding of differences, that as one holds strong and wants to protect one’s beliefs, so do others. As such, releasing from deculturalization may create more self-awareness, reflections and understanding in international relations, whether it be in cultural imperialism, cultural exchanges, conversions, hegemony, influence, foreign internal dynamics etc.

Note: Being out of culture and un-ideological is currently baked into Western self-identity and security towards the truth of its beliefs. The removal of such mask could pose deep existential troubles and self-questioning, and can make many reluctant to continue to endorse its global hegemonic status. Presently, when the bias of its beliefs are openly revealed and acknowledged when it wants to hold onto globalizing its ideals (see The Bind at Home, Point 4), it poses troubles to those accustomed to having the West’s deculturalization mask on, as it both blatantly shows its own particularity and imperialistic power plays.

This does not mean though that the removal of deculturalization necessarily itself halts imperialism by the West or by that other cultural and ideological spheres. Nor is this to say that deculturalization is the sole reason for Western cultural imperialism and globalization, as there are military, economic, territorial and political interests that feed this - as there has always been through human history. Releasing from deculturalization is rather an acknowledgement of a region’s cultural particularity and biased nature - but not necessarily lack of truth - before its

application in another international sphere. The difference between the use and lack of use of deculturalization vis-a-vis international relations, is that when deculturalization is used, it makes a dominant state more blind to its cultural imperialism, strengthens it and poses similar socially destructive consequences of deculturalization in other regions when it is also enforced, applied or accepted.

Note: Western deculturalization has been increasingly engrained around the world. Though marking itself as a neutral arbiter, it is rather replacing domestic cultures and ideologies in other regions with its own and brings its contradictions, social disintegrating effects, conflicts, economic onslaughts and limiting possibilities for the future with it. Removing from Western deculturalization gives a chance to use or revive other cultural and ideological structures, produce more diversity, creativity and opportunities for new ways of thinking, living and solving social issues, as well as a have more critical distance on which Western cultural and ideological features to accept, agree on and take, and which to not - just as the West can look onto others to see what it accepts, agrees on and takes for its own spheres, and which it does not. As other countries or social communities are released from deculturalization, this also opens the possibility or opportunity to follow an emerging global trend of creating ‘civilizational states’ by now being able to have an acknowledgement and relationship with their particular cultures and beliefs.

Without deculturalization, the way cultural exchanges and changes play out (as it does in the past without deculturalization) is either, a) due to a belief in the truth of a culture’s global hegemonic status and thus the necessary international application of all, most or some of its ideals, b) the imposition of the truth of certain cultural ideals that are decimated through multiple global channels through power plays and influence, or c) the agreed and democratic establishment of all, most, some or one of a culture’s ideals as a universal or international norm in most regions.

In all the above cases, it comes from an acknowledgement of using a biased cultural ideal that is believed in as truth, that can take part in cultural imperialism, international conversions or the establishment of international norms.

Like the case of removing the bind domestically, the removal of deculturalization, and thus open relationship with an ideal’s cultural, ideological, metaphysical, epistemological and ontological base, fortifies and stabilizes these ideals when applied in the international sphere (and agreed with by the domestic populace, or imposed by a strong enough social power). This is an

important manifestation for the establishment of concepts such as human dignity and more stable international laws, manners and morals that can now have a stronger and more stable foundation and following, without being contradictory, hypocritical, nor disintegrated.

This also applies for the concept of self-determination, where the removal of deculturalization can also accelerate the re-diversification of the world and the creation, and reassertion, of ‘civilization states’, with more intact social communities and a multi-polar world. It opens the door for all to have an open relationship and acknowledgement of their cultures, ways of life and the particularities and bias of their ideologies (that may be drawn from their past, as well as create new ones) that underpin their societies and bind their communities together. As all utilize different structures, removing deculturalization can lead to the preservation and appreciation of the diversity of human cultural pathways and deep structures of thought. And as all cultures change over time through cultural exchanges, exposure and domestic power changes, this diversity can also bring opportunities for learning, adapting and innovating from one another.

Note: In a richly diverse multipolar world with more stable domestic states and ‘civilization states’ that have a relationship with their cultures and worldviews, there can be the emergence of a more stable international sphere where states interact with one another under principles of harmony and balance. This is especially important in order to gear up international cooperation to manage our environmental and climate crisis, achieve climate goals, and live in harmony with nature. Through rooting states and civilizations in their stable cultures, beliefs and traditions that can bring about environmentalism (see Re-rooting Towards Environmentalism), a more harmonious and balanced world can be achieved. Read the book ‘Harmony and Balance in the World: Using Biological and Cultural Diversity to Create Ecological Civilizations and Live in Harmony with Nature’ for how a new paradigm of international relations to culture, to nature and each other can come about, in which releasing from deculturalization is necessary in order to permit.

Creating Social Ideals Removing the Bind in the Economic System

When on more stable and certain ground, releasing from deculturalization can help goals to create non-capitalist economic systems. This is achieved by coherently forming and normalizing morals and values on human relations, weaving a knitted web of communal interactions that assure distribution and care in people-centered manners, and putting a cultural force within public interactions that transcends economic transactions and regulates the movements for chasing capital. It cuts neoliberalism and capitalism at the heart by removing the force of deculturalization.

Note: There are more than a few options of economic systems, as seen throughout human history and across the planet. It is not simply capitalism on one side with socialism and communism on another. This especially as socialism and communism are not necessarily alike and are varied around the world depending on culture, time, and thinker, with socialism coming in multiple forms, such as a socialist market economy. Capitalism and Marxism, specifically, are modern economic systems and ideologies which grow and fall under the contradictions of deculturalization: capitalism, for its unwinding of social processes in which it, and wider society, uses and depends on, and Marxism’s for its particular moralistic economic ideals and own deculturalization analysis that hinders socialism by its revocation and disintegration of cultural, ideological and social processes that can create, sustain and put it into action.

History demonstrates a diversity of economic systems, that while some align more with socialist economic ideals than others – depending on their underlying worldviews and morals - definitely are not capitalist. This is as they partake in a strong relationship with their culture and beliefs that staunchly govern and transcend economic processes and are conservative towards their cultural ideals that work towards whichever the ends are of society - such as a focus on or preservation of the family. Economic development comes after and is controlled by social and cultural values (without them, economic development comes first and becomes the end goal of society. See Binding Socialism, Point 3). This largely does not create an opportunity for and is against unbridled profit-making or commodification of various sectors and aspects of life. This is especially as there tends to exist traditional values and morals against what is seen as money’s ‘sullied’ and socially and morally corrupt processes, which is one of the reason’s why merchants tended to be of lower classes that you find them in today.

Increasingly today, a more accountable and controlled form of the market economy is called for which looks similar to a socialist market economy (as seen in China) or a ‘common good’ capitalism (as called for by Marco Rubio and other Republicans and Democrats in the United

States). No matter how contradictory the latter term may be by posing social, moral and collective barriers to capitalism’s chase for continuous profit, both terms signal a move to a similar middle common ground desiring stable and moral social processes, and economic development. Chinese socialism is increasingly informed by acknowledging and having a relationship with its cultural and ideological foundations to underline the “social values” that come prior to “economic values”, while the United States is trying to revive and contest which social values and cultural beliefs it has to bind and structure what makes the common good the economic system works within. This moves away from the strict juxtaposition of socialism on one side and free market capitalism on the other. They remove their own excesses and alleviate the mistakes and social consequences of particular social and economic systems and structures, while trying to use the benefits and gains of others.

Deculturalization also effects and skews the contemporary social and economic consensus, and solutions of the Western cultural ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, which has been increasingly globalized. The ‘Left’s' socio-cultural means and underlining ontology which uses deculturalization prevents and cannot attach to its economic ideals. The ‘Right’ (depending on locality and extent of reactionary embrace of capitalism and free markets) may partake in the capitalist economic ideal that unwinds and fragments its social and cultural ones by disrupting its human social, familial, communal, national and spiritual ties, morals and duties that stand in its way (see The Bind at Home, Point 1 and Binding Socialism, Point 1). The ‘Left’ is pitting one type of economic conservatism (meaning based on underlined particular morals and duties that must be conserved and restrain capitalism) with social liberalism, while the ‘Right’ is pitting economic liberalism (based on releasing the moral and social barriers that stand in the way of capitalism) with social conservatism. Both are unsustainable and internally cancel each other.

Note: The mixed and contradictory ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ consensus is not only influenced by deculturalization, but also by multiple factors such as a post-World War 2 and Cold War historical context that formed positions around liberalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Both Western soft and hard power helped deploy this socio-economic consensus internationally, which have been localized in certain countries with different cultural characteristics, historical contexts and political power plays.

However, emerging global populist movements, actors or general public dissatisfied with the current status quo, rebuke this consensus and alignment. Living under its contradictions, and social effects, their new alignment, fidelity or beliefs tends to stress more stringent economic obligations, duties and protection towards the working class and populace, that can be articulated under cultural morals and duties rooted to a communally understood place and people, and gives a higher sense of human purpose and meaning (see Binding Socialism). In today’s terms, such positioning is thus on the ‘Left’ on economics, and on the ‘Right’ on society and culture, with various individual differences on views of nationalism, immigration, and specific cultural mores.

The emphasis on the people, in its communal sense, and the ideological ideals that bind them, brings the possibility of solving much popular discontent towards socio-cultural erosion and economic onslaughts, while developing populist movements away from rash, reactionary and hazy decisions, into something formed, anchored and capable of fixing much of the social, cultural, capitalist and environmental woes the public is falling under.

However, this socio-cultural and economic alignment is not actually new, it is the modern one in our political consensus that is, as it is informed by deculturalization. The emerging alignment is something that can be seen in human history as a natural formation, and is the ethic of the multiple peasant revolts, demands and guilds of the past, that advocated economic mandates dignified for the lower and working class along with socio-cultural ‘conservative’ values.

Deculturalization split up this juncture, and can neither support the socio-cultural side, nor the economic side. It’s socio-cultural movements away from social and cultural ‘conservative’ values undermine the moral epistemology rationalizing a fair economic system, disintegrates the social relationships to structure it and can’t deliver a united social and cultural goal for society and the individual to aspire to. Within these movements, or generally held within this economic class, social and cultural ‘conservative’ values and ideals are used to advocate and rationalize the truth of dignified economic relations, bind society together with social security nets, as well as cement an importance and meaning to lives of workers and the lower classes that transcend money, the economy and their class.

Note: Here, it is worth taking a step back and understanding what ‘conservative’ is and how this is seen in society, in order to properly understand this relationship and socio-economic alignment.

Contemporarily, so-called social and cultural ‘conservative’ values are named to be so because they are values or ideals that have an open relationship and acknowledgement of their cultural, ideological and metaphysical bases, and thus don’t turnover away from themselves, but desire

their preservation. This open relationship is in fact their capability to have a defence against turnovers from it and its own undoing. Moreover, their emphasis on cultural, ideological and metaphysical structures tends to support - and exist to support - society and social relations. As such, they tend to be part of a framework that supports the family, community, collectivity, state, particular duties, or others (what these institutions and behaviours actually look like and how they function vary quite widely depending on different ‘conservative’ beliefs and culture). As such, socially ‘conservative’ ideals, will tend to have to grapple with the reality of social relations, human reproductive continuity, and the maintenance of their ideals themselves through attaching themselves to various social institutions and behaviours for stable intergenerational continuity - when deculturalized ideals will drop from the bind and be put into play in society, they too will have to grapple with this reality in order to be socially sustainable. These ‘sociocultural’ ideals are thus ‘openly conservative’, or more visibly conservative, as this ‘openness’ is part of a dynamic that is not informed by deculturalization that tries to undress and mask its cultural and ideological roots, and in which does not support the above human social institutions as they place ideologies and obligations on the individual to conform to.

However, ‘conservative’ is what deculturalization and its ideals are as well and come to be, as deculturalization itself desires to be implemented, normalized and socially maintained (conserved), along with its ideals - no matter how long they last and how contradictory and unstable this process may be (see The Bind at Home, Point 2, Point 7). Being ‘conservative’ is the act of wanting to conserve an ideal in society. Multiple deculturalized and social ideals will find themselves on this end (such is one of the contradictions deculturalization finds itself in).

Thus, what differentiates these two ‘conservatives’, the socio-cultural ‘open conservative’ and the deculturalization ‘hidden conservative’, is how open they are about their conservation and biased particular foundations, and their interpretation of the individual and society which makes ‘open conservatism’ more likely to support and underline human social and communal institutions for societal perpetuity, while deculturalization ignores such.

Given that ‘open conservatism’s’ social dynamics - rather than the individual beliefs themselves can support a fairer economic system, a stable society and a more meaningful life, it tends to be traditionally more popular among the lower and working class who rely on these aspects and its institutions. However, once deculturalized ideals are released from the bind of deculturalization, they will too become ‘openly conservative’ and attach to social institutions, opening the door for multiple diverse ‘conservative’ perspectives and bringing in other social and cultural ‘conservative’ values people and the lower and working classes can gravitate to (in which they may already have through believing in certain deculturalized ideals which have been stringently

culturally normalized. See Releasing from Deculturalization’s Bind) - especially if they underline humanist economic ideals.

Note: It isn’t to say that the removal of deculturalization in itself automatically creates a fair economic system - it can create the opposite with crippling economic inequality if an ideological belief rationalizes it. It is to say that releasing from deculturalization opens up the possibility for the stable creation and implementation of structures of beliefs that are now able to create a fairer or humanist economic system by: being able to support the moral epistemology rationalizing it, by garnering the social relationships to structure it, and by delivering a united social and epistemological goal for society and the individual to aspire to. Thus, the road towards deculturalization does not present a pathway towards fair and stable economic structures, while the road away from deculturalization presents it as an option.

It is potentially easier for the ‘Right’, than the ‘Left’ (whatever is deemed the ‘Right’ as there is a multitude of diverse ‘conservative’ beliefs and factions) to achieve the golden alignment of being economically ‘Left’ and culturally ‘Right’, as it can embrace economic beliefs benefiting the working class and their dignity without fundamentally shifting from its own cultural, ideological and metaphysical perspectives. In fact, it would alleviate a heavy burdensome contradiction and can be a type of ‘return’ to a previous status quo for certain ‘Right’ or ‘conservative’ parties or groups, as the uncritical embrace of capitalism supports deculturalization which disintegrates important social and moral institutions and behaviours the ‘Right’ tends to advocate. However, consequentially for the ‘Left’, this shift may be harder as it would existentially call itself into question in a manner that may feel entirely delegitimized. The ‘Left’ would need to fundamentally shift away from its current underlying cultural ideological framework in order to achieve this alignment, as it currently heavily utilizes deculturalization (see The Other Bind).

Even its particular economic stance in socialism is interpreted from a certain Marxist deculturalization lens, which is how it naturally and logically grew into its cultural perspectives.

Note: China, a prominent socialist nation, has become quite ‘socially conservative’ and now underlines the importance of its culture and history. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly underlines their socialist and Marxist beliefs as particular ideologies and belief systems (which explicitly have gone through - continues to go through - much reform since the 70s) - thus openly

acknowledging and having a relationship with their particular cultural, ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological and axiological structures.

Traditional Chinese, Marxist and socialist cultural and ideological views are often mixed together to account for the fact that “social values”, and which ones, come before “economic values”. Cultural values, especially Confucianism, are employed to prevent and replace the rampant and increasing consumerism, materialism and individualism particular to capitalism that has emerged in Chinese society, as well as to re-install and rationalize the social barriers and values the socialist economy should work towards. Though it may be a coincidence or a development from experience, this social and economic alignment, pitting a type of social/ cultural ‘conservatism’ with a type of common-good and working-class friendly economic system, correlates with much developments and discourse occurring around the world, as well as analyzed in this section.

“History and reality have proven that a nation which abandons and betrays its own history and culture cannot prosper, and is likely to end in tragedy,” said Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CCP in a November 2016 speech.

This is distinct compared to its past during the Cultural Revolution, which the party and people now see as a great “Leftist” mistake - which was an act and process of deculturalization, and deculturalization’s power analyses, contradictions and function of its social conformity.

In a sense, what would happen to the ‘Right’ is a fragmentation into multiple diverse contentions with each their own different social and cultural ideals they want for conservation and hegemony, and their own economic non-capitalist visions that are in line with their socio-cultural beliefs.

The ‘Left’ would have to take the extra steps of releasing from deculturalization’s binds, then finding the ideological, metaphysical, epistemological and ontological rationalization of their previously deculturalized ideals, that can then vie for political power, cohabitation or tolerance.

This process can further split the ‘Left’ into different camps which may now use different ideological structures supporting their beliefs and different juxtapositions and alliances of believed ideals.

Note: This doesn’t mean that any previously deculturalized ideals that account for stable social relations and can meet the ‘golden spot’ will be readily accepted and popular by the populace, as

there may exist a bias and favour for particular current and previous ideals, rather than any new or different ones that may be seen as strange, incomprehensible or simply too far away from the current epistemological, metaphysical and ontological foundations of society in order to be accepted. As such, though a working framework can be created with social and economic ideals, a potential winning formula is one that also picks up on current or desired socio-cultural beliefs and preferred institutions held in a setting.

By not following this different social/economic melange slowly arising in different regions of the world and within different political parties, leaders of contemporary ‘Left’ or socialist parties are now thus failing primarily among the working class electorate that they represent, as seen in the UK and US. In other words, much of the working class that many socialist parties supposedly represent, currently do not like them. This mostly has to do with current cultural ideals created under a deculturalization narrative not agreed with, as well as the manners in which certain economic goals are analyzed and advocated to be put into effect that may create undesirable social and state dynamics, or be seen to not realistically take into account for how social and state relations play out. Moreover, deculturalization narratives are currently unable to coherently advocate for a communally rooted place as this brings up cultural and ideological processes enclosing the individual, and thus permit and cannot actually articulate a logic against globalization which is currently highly disfavoured among the public. This is especially as contemporary globalization articulates itself in opposition to patriotism, nationalism or the primary concerns of a nation, which many attach themselves to as one of the vestiges that bind a people together - and is increasingly one of the last, making many increasingly zealous towards it.

Note: Our modern type of globalization that doesn’t account for the primary needs of the national or state sphere, and overrides them in the pursuit of capital and being ‘uprooted’ from a place, is developed by deculturalization. Another type of globalization or universalism is able to spring out and gain popularity, however it would need to come from an ideological conceptualization that is able to maintain, sustain and account for the interests of the world’s individual social and cultural communities and states which people are part of, that may interact with one another on principles of shared humanity or interests.

In terms of economic dynamics, corporations and their interests must go below the state and follow the interests of the state and the states that they decide to deal with. Money and profit can

no longer trump all, but must have barriers - here, state or other forms of social community barriers - in its way.

The electorate isn’t necessarily in disagreement with most of the economic activism and the belief of dignity and alleviation for the working class, but rather with the deculturalization package that tends to come along with it among the cultural ‘Left’, that many don’t want to touch. Many in the apparently ‘uneducated’ lower, populist or working class, can see and feel the contradictions and existential inadequacy of the current consensus, and rather prefer another one: a society of complementary roles strung together and rooted in particular morals, duties, values, relations, institutions, culture, people, and place, which advocates a fairer and accountable economic system.

Note: If deculturalization is released from in Western societies, what may tend to happen is a society of socio-culturally ‘conservative’ ideals people still believe in and need to follow in order to have social stability and meaningful communities, mixed with what were previously deculturalized ideals (‘liberal’ or ‘modern’ ideals) that the public have conformed to and become accustomed to, operating within an economic system that is much less (if at all) capitalist, but rather one that operates within and towards the prescribed shared cultural and ideological social values, moral limits and ends of a society.

Unfortunately, many on the ‘Left’ and pundits still seem unaware of this reality, decide to ignore it, or do not actually speak with the people they supposedly represent. In fact, without in depth analysis, engagement and intellectual humility, many insinuate that their social and cultural perspectives are in and of themselves backwards, without analyzing potential merit, or the grievances that they may come from due to current failed social, cultural and economic structures. Such an insult and hubris diminishes the favourability of ‘Leftist’ parties to the working class, as it becomes the equivalent of ivory tower elites speaking over and for them.

This failure is also seen the ‘Left’s’ depiction of its own form of populism, which is rather a underlining its economic ideals and appealing to the wider working class dissatisfied with current economic inequality and stratification, without also focusing on public dissatisfaction with current cultural ideals and emerging cultural intolerance (see The Bind at Home, Point 7), that also feels existential to the populace. Addressing the latter is what makes the ‘Right’s’

‘populism’ and rejection of deculturalization popular. It seems as if the ‘Left’ has overestimated the role of economics as what can solely win the populace over and not the importance of sociocultural beliefs, ideals and institutions that bring meaning and purpose to human life, identity, dynamics and the wider economic system and its protocols.

Thus, the idea that the current socio-cultural and economic conglomeration and consensus can be separated, with the importance of one at times put over the other, is rarely internalized for selfreflection, but rather becomes further proof the people dissatisfied with the political status-quo being confused and contradictory - even if ironically it is the current candidates or party representatives that are. This further pushes important and dignified economic structures away from people that need it most, and with an increasingly culturally puritan, tribalistic and intolerant ‘Left’, and a ‘Right’ that has not yet grappled with a proper economic alternative or popular cultural ideals, pushes them further underground towards extremist, reactionary or other intolerant sectors that are believed to represent them best, even if they do not put their economic interests in action, and create more social division and conflicts.

Re-rooting Towards Environmentalism As stopping deculturalization tackles capitalism and its detrimental effects to the environment, it also re-roots people together towards an earthly consciousness and duties they are trying to escape, and in a sense, be liberated from. Human desire known no bounds, but the world has its limit and deculturalization prevents the cultural and ideological checks, balances and barriers that keep human desire within these environmental limits. Releasing from the bind of deculturalization, puts and maintains into place the binding framework that builds and sustains local communities, tackles narcissism and, especially in cultures strongly intertwined to the natural environment, lets arise social structures, and ideological, epistemological, ontological and metaphysical conceptualizations that rationalize ecological sustainability.

As such, deculturalization prevents ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological and axiological narratives which push environmental protection and harmony with nature, secures human livelihoods, sustains cultures and assures the continuous stable cycling towards our descendants as our attested duties, from being stably implemented and thriving in society. This is especially important, as such biased cultural and ideological views contain some of the basic social tools needed in assuring environmentalism.

As the assertion of one’s culture, people and place increases in popularity, it is necessary to make it a part of the movement pushing the implementation of climate policies and initiatives to assure

they are met. Coming as contemporary challenge to capitalism, globalization and deculturalization, latest public sentiment and trends are pushing against huge multinational corporate dissolution of the local and national sphere, and highlighting their principle loyalty to a place, people and continued resident livelihoods.

This is more so prominent as such voices tend to come from eroding and de-populating rural areas, local communities and family farms that form the backbone of a healthy and sustainable farming system, currently being replaced by corporate industrial agricultural system that causes a large portion of greenhouse gases, deforestation and soil erosion while crippling farmers livelihoods and the state of where they call home. As such trends tend to propose a relationship with culture and their land – or a reactionary element to its disintegration – it is part of a necessary re-rooting of individuals and a society to the environment it depends on, as well as recognizing the link between one’s culture and surrounding environment and ecosystem it grows from. This permits diverse cultures and worldviews - especially diverse political views - to be able to go along the line of environmentalism and harmony with nature, which is reflected in the environmental sustainability across diverse cultures and regions of human history.

Note: Such deemed ‘populist’ movements and rural residents are actually quite more similar to indigenous peoples in their wider social processes away from deculturalization than the indigenous movement’s current allies (largely urbanites of the cultural ‘Left’ who utilize a deculturalization ethic). A working relationship between the two is demonstrated in the book ‘Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands’ by Zoltan Grossman. In it, their joint initiatives to protect the environment from polluting resource exploitation are demonstrated. As indigenous and rural white settlers tend to be both rural and working-class communities that emphasize their tie to their culture, traditions, beliefs, respect of ancestors, identity to a territory, love for the land and one’s people, and criticism of globalization, their working relationship to protecting what they both care about shouldn’t be too unlikely - they are both actually quite similar to one another. It is the ‘nationalistic’ sentiment that exists on both sides that causes the friction in their relationship: for settlers that tend to emphasize patriotism towards a country which is a colonial state built off genocide and taking land away from indigenous peoples, and indigenous tribes that tend to emphasize their territorial sovereignty or spiritual connection to the same land which were nations taken away by settlers from their cherished ancestors.

On the sidelines to this, is that in an irony, indigenous peoples introduce and/or use ‘openly conservative' ideals (meaning that they do not fall under the deculturalization framework) such as; tradition, religion, patriotism/nationalism (revered territorial demarcation, sovereignty and connection), the importance of ancestry, family, gender roles, the assertion of the concept of ‘sacred’, duties, collective mindedness, social and cultural conformity etc. in the fold of the Western cultural ‘Left’. This is done as they represent a marginalized group, and by all means nations that were conquered by another, and thus tend to find no strong voice in the current settler-nation’s framework and its ‘Right-wing’ that currently tends to emphasize a type of patriotism or nationalism that either obfuscates, excuses or ignores the nation’s bloody emergence and indigenous people’s social needs from a belief that they pose an existential threat to it by exposing a hypocrisy it would never allow to itself, or finds it too uncomfortable to address. As such, indigenous peoples tend to find themselves with the cultural ‘Left’ as the only side of the settler-nation they inhabit that may support or emphasize with them, even when many of their points and underlining relationship with their biased cultural ideologies, epistemologies and religious beliefs are what deculturalization and the cultural ‘Left’ is existentially opposing or removing, especially when demonstrated by the ‘Right’ or other realms of society.

Technological Development Moving away from deculturalization also brings under control multiple issues that are currently arising through technological development and artificial intelligence. Having an open and active relationship with culture and axiological perspectives puts technology under their rubric and mandates - under the decisions and as a tool of humans - to work as a reflection, aid and enhancement in the culture's developments, morals, virtues and social vision, calculated in its relationship to values and social structure. Here, it is no longer an unleashed high-speed train without clear direction for humans to follow no matter the social consequences (such as to a labor force or human social interactions) pushed to augment the profitability of morally unhindered corporations.

When social, cultural and ideological values and purposes are underlined and stable, efficiency and immediate human satisfaction no longer become the only basis to assess a technology’s adoption or creation. Instead other values, questions of how it fits in the vision of the community, effect on the working class and its possible socio-cultural effects, also factor in that put it in check. This new mindset can even influence the creation of wildly different innovative technologies and AI towards different purposes as they correlate and are maintained by different values and asserted social needs. When this is extrapolated, diversity in values between cultures

can even create diverse technologies and different responses to technological development, such as what can be seen when Chinese Buddhist and Taoist principles are applied to AI and humanity’s relationship with the technology.

Note: For example, cultural values underlined and taken into account can also include the sense of accomplishment and important life lessons individuals receive from doing work, tasks, research and partaking in face-to-face interactions themselves. Through these, people learn patience, the depth and complexities in human relations, the movements of nature etc. As such are benefits for the development of a mature and self-aware society, as well as for individual advancement, society rooted in its social and cultural values will have to take into account and answer when technology is useful for purposes of a society, and when it is not. When it is more important to make something by hand, or give a letter in person, and when it is not, and why.

Removing the bind of deculturalization can create more accountability towards technology that is being created and a more meaningful, anchored and popular technological development that is actually complementary and born from culture, not opposing it. Technological development is no longer a stereotypical traditional versus modern clash, as what is ‘modern’ is understood as actually composed of particular cultural concepts, values and ideals, just as what is ‘traditional’ is, but that simply reflect ideals held in the present. Technological development is rather the material manifestation of a culture’s needs and values.

Note: Without the logic of deculturalization modernity developed itself through, the concept of ‘modernity’ necessarily changes and is no longer a manifestation of being ‘released’ from the traditional and biased, but of holding a set of acknowledged cultural and ideological perspectives towards ideals of what constitutes human advancement, or that reflect what is contemporarily believed in compared to the past.

This brings us to a unique stage in human history and development where we possess the advanced technology - or capability to create it - to complete most tasks, but actively choose not to use it if it falls off the wider vision a society has for itself. It will be our cultural, moral and social values that determine that simply because we can make and use something, it doesn’t

mean that we should. As can be seen, the enforcement of this ethic also applies to scientific development and multiple other social spheres where it was deculturalization which impeded this accountability and the capability to efficiently curtail detrimental human ambition with moral barriers.

The Other Bind However, releasing from the bind creates another bind for the current status quo and powers attached to the narrative. It not only blatantly demonstrates parties associated to deculturalization as part of power structures themselves, but also shows it to be on the same basis that made it delegitimize contrasting views, as it also vies for a conservative implementation in society recurring even to the state - on top of its unstable social processes. It would mean a great change in the current ideological and epistemological ground familiar with, a re-evaluation and insecurity towards currently held ideals, a reframing of debates in the ‘Left’/‘Right’ consensus with new political calculus, and a major shift in consciousness for the West towards its view of itself vis-a-vis the rest of the world. It presents a new conglomeration of ideals and operations that was previously said to be wrong and opens the floodgates for deep epistemological changes culturally and politically.

Note: There may be uncertainty to pursuing this path of releasing from deculturalization as it may seem dangerous due to the fear of losing certain ideals in hegemonic power plays when it drops back down to the ground, especially among vital topics, such as equal human dignity (though this one in particular is unlikely given how popular it is). However, though uncertain this course may seem, it is the way to pursue in making sure that such views actually become stable, implemented, believed in and followed in society by individuals, on top of it being honest with the power relations and epistemological basis it has always been using.

Moreover, it demonstrates that beating atomization and narcissism for a communal minded focus needed for social, economic and environmental sustainability, means being part of obvious cultural, ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, metaphysical and axiological beliefs and institutions that can knit people together through norms that are directed towards those ends. It also means a new relationship, analysis and acknowledgement of the role and

importance of the state or other forms of territorial social communities, patriotism and nationalism. These can no longer be repudiated on the basis of the ideological and cultural features they impose on the individual, but also now require new analysis on how they arise from and maintain societal, identity and economic dynamics. Thus, not only would it then be averse to releasing from the bind as it would mean cancelling some of its deculturalized ideals that may not be saved in realistic societal application - though many can still be used and are indeed already popular and normalized-, but that it would mean admitting a wrong in a deep epistemological basis it used when it comes to social relations - a political faux-pas.

Politically, even if this is a sustainable solution that fixes contradictions and presents a stable ground for any of its own varied messages and wider society (see Releasing from Deculturalization’s Bind), it could be seen as a death blow for certain ideals and views. This is especially for those that wouldn’t be able to exist or be rationalized without basing themselves in deculturalization. Or if they can, would require a new, creative and unpopular metaphysical rationalization to support it that is too far away from the current cultural, ideological, epistemological, metaphysical and ontological foundations of society in order to be widely accepted. When it is now on an equal playing field with other ideals and conceptualization blatantly vying for power, norms or the mainstream, it may have more calculated chances of losing.

Ideals and conceptualizations that previously used deculturalization will now have to deal with and explain why previous views it replaced to take power were indeed wrong now that the deculturalization reasoning that it used to show them as wrong and remove them, was shown incorrect itself. Particular ideals will have to confront previous ones on a variety of subjects, as well as confront one another which may be fragmented into different camps and alliances with different beliefs, narratives and foundational ideologies for truth and hegemony (see Removing the Bind in the Economic System).

As releasing from the bind presents a new path and creates a great shift in collective conscious, it also questions the current ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ division as worldviews simply become multiple camps of beliefs - with some overlapping in sharing certain beliefs and perspectives, though under different epistemologies - that are fighting for conservation, and social hegemony, influence, cohabitation or tolerance towards themselves. Though this may actually be perceived as a positive that removes a harsh bipartisan divide in some countries that creates more division than any insights into what is going on with working solutions, it is a great leap in the dark for societies and parties deeply entrenched in deculturalization’s political formation.

The logic underpinning what is culturally ‘Left’ of continuous undoing and incapability to hold its own formed beliefs that it wants to conservatively implement, questions what its own underlying epistemology, ontology, axiology and metaphysical belief indeed is, as it is nominally based in supporting none, but of being reactionary against and unwinding a status quo that is in power. This is while the Right, which is also reactionary, (though subsumed to being a bit more anchored as it holds onto particular ideological ideals) simply uses the banner of ‘conservation’, which would logically intel wanting to ‘conserve’ anything. This concept and stance of being distinctly ‘conservative’ is illogical and doesn’t inform a particular worldview wanting to be protected, just as all, such as on the ‘Left’ are ‘conservative’ to their worldviews and ideals. Even views that go against what are said to be the ‘Right’s’ or of particular ‘open conservative’ ideals are ‘conservative’ to themselves. This simply continues on deculturalization’s false selfcharacterization as being ‘out from culture’, when it is in fact a ‘hidden conservative’. This issue in name, definition and political spectrum is ubiquitously seen in modern Western politics. In trying to bring about a counter-culture to society’s current status-quo, the ‘Right’ sees itself acting like the ‘Left’ in its move for change, while the ‘Left’ desires a strong implementation of its points, not allowing transgression through ‘cancelling’, finding itself acting like the ‘Right’ and being very conservative in order to maintain its latest ideals in society.

However, the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ divide can be partially maintained if it is changed to rather become a spectrum that depicts an individual’s reactionary perspective and attachment to any specific ideal or worldview. Now that all ideals are actually seen as the multiple biased formations and worldviews they are which may have interests for their conservative implementation and maintenance (or social cohabitation and tolerance) and cannot fit on a linear scale, the spectrum should rather be a marker or adjective of tolerance to social deviance on particular held ideals. The further to the Left one goes, the more tolerance and openness one has to other’s or society’s deviance on a particular ideal. The further to the Right one goes, the less tolerance one has to another's deviance and the more conservative one is to an ideal’s social maintenance. For example, on the ideal of gender equality, one can be on the Right to push and advocate other’s social conformity, while on the ideal of preserving gender roles, can find oneself on the Left by tolerating and not caring much for individual deviance.

Note: The ‘Left’/‘Right’ consensus can also be changed to emulate the Four Quadrants of Conformity

by Paul Graham. This also uses a spectrum to demonstrate people’s reactionary impulse to social conformity and to particular rules, norms and beliefs. However, instead of focusing more on how an individual desires for others to act, it focuses on how individuals themselves think and

react. The quadrant is a flipped and expanded version of the ‘Left’/‘Right’ consensus explained above.

Illustrated like a Cartesian Coordinate system with a horizontal x and vertical y axis, the horizontal x aris runs from left to right in a spectrum where the left is conventional minded while the right is independent minded. Though this is unintentional, it ironically displays the growing phenomenon in current society’s political consensus where the ‘Left’ highlights societal conformity to its ideals, while the ‘Right’ counters it. The vertical axis runs from top to bottom in a spectrum, where the bottom is passive, while the top is aggressive.

As explained by Paul Graham; “The resulting four quadrants define four types of people.

Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent minded.”

As one can realize, people near the center of the above spectrum and Graham’s diagram, still represent the mild impulse of those at the ‘Center’ of the modern ‘Left’/‘Right’ consensus, or are non-partisan and on the fence of current political divide by preferring compromises and settlements between a variety of perspectives. However, this does not speak for the ‘extreme Center’ seen today, which are presented as a non-ideological position but are actually a class staunchly part of deculturalization’s neoliberal and traditional liberal status quo - acting very much on the ‘Right’ when it comes to social conformity around their social, cultural, economic and political views.

Conclusion Releasing from deculturalization’s bind by having a relationship with our biased cultural and ideological perspectives helps society knit communities back together, strengthen the decentralized order, increase social stability, reduce divisive conflicts, anchor societal and moral values and institutions, increase possibilities for tolerance, bring meaning to individual life, create fairer economic ideals, address post-truth confusion and bring context back to international relations and discussions. Though releasing from the bind produces these possibilities and solves an inherent contradiction that is binding, underpinning, and affixing current social, cultural and political discourse, it is only only part of understanding the crises and conflicts afflicting modern society today.

It is also simply the first step before the tournament begins determining which cultural ideals and ideological conceptualizations win out at the helm of societies - and how -, before they are themselves replaced for another as history and the flow of change and adaptation continuously runs its course. However, this step is necessary and brings about an opportunity. Instead of seeing socialized – biased - aspects as a form of falsity, this knowledge can be used to reveal something about humans themselves, the importance of society and our place in the universe.This can be built on to form social awareness to the importance culture and society have for human life and thought, and how they can be used as functional tools for conceptualizations and the end goal of human advancement, prosperity and social stability. Knowledge of this can also rectify certain belief structures which have crumbled under the cracks of contradictions due to the use of deculturalization, such as liberalism, modernism and secularism, which can rather now have a relationship with the beliefs.

However, having this open acknowledgement and relationship with the beliefs being held poses insecurities and leaves many in a bind: do we want to open up the floodgates of fundamental epistemological, cultural and political changes and walk into a strange new world?

Annex 1. Though deculturalization (or de-culturalization) may not be the most accurate term to use as the word’s morphology doesn’t encompass the desire to also remove ideological, metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, theological and axiological perspectives as explained in this piece, it is still employed as: a) culture functions as an umbrella term feeding all these branches of knowledge, b) the desire to remove them comes from the same desire to remove cultural perspectives in society as they are also seen as a bias (a particularity) and thus also part of power relations, and c) the deculturalization ethic is born from an Enlightenment perspective that viewed almost any bias (particularity) as wrong primarily as it came from a cultural and religious bias - which is one of the manners the tumbling process away from bias and false power structures began and exasperated onto all forms on knowledge. It is an ‘anti-culture’ stance that touches all which culture touches and influences and is against them for the same reason it is against cultural processes.

A better term may be created for this phenomenon, but ‘deculturalization’ here describes the undressing and masking of cultural artifacts or metaphysical biases clearly seen in society (more are clearly seen and become dismantled as time goes on), as well as its own beliefs and processes as being seen as biased cultural, ideological, metaphysical epistemological, ontological or axiological, in order to be true. It thus both removes and masks cultural processes from being seen as the biased ideological processes they are.

2. Wendy Brown in her book ‘Regulating Aversion’ calls the contradiction of liberalism that “simultaneously claims and disclaims culture; culture is part of the greatness of the West and also that which liberal individuals have thrown off in their movement toward maturity and freedom” to be a “deep and fundamental bind”. This use of the term ‘bind’ is employed in this book to demonstrate deculturalization’s similar contradictions, and is extrapolated to also illustrate how those following its social discourse are intellectually tied and suspended in cultural and ideological binds which they ignore. The term ‘un-binding’ refers to releasing from this contradictory bind.