PART 1: CHAPTER 2

THE CULTURAL IMPRINT

6

The Cultural Imprint

Cultural imprinting means that culture shapes man’s character.

“Cultural imprinting” is the process by which a child absorbs, without consent, the entire culture, including its irrational aspects, mainly from parents and teachers.

When you go shopping you can choose, but a baby chooses nothing. It absorbs, like a sponge, the whole culture, both rational and irrational.

The child’s psyche is given by culture. This resembles the sand mold a boy makes at the beach. The child shapes the sand; the mold of culture shapes the child. Culture is the paradigm through which the child interprets all experience. This phenomenon occurs in other animals as well.

On the Internet, you can see Chowder, a funny pig who thinks he is a dog. He plays and wags his tail like the dogs in the pack where he grew up.

Dragonlord is another pig who thinks he is a cat. Adopted by a cat along with his puppies, he jumps impressively and purrs with happiness.

Chowder and Dragonlord have porcine DNA but canine and feline behavior. They need functional self-deception to ignore the contradiction and appear happy. If man is to seek his own happiness, as the US Declaration of Independence points out, he must avoid the error of seeking it in a “Chowder style” or “Dragonlord style.” Man must first discover the deep meaning of the concept “I” before saying, “I want to be happy.”

The term “imprint” was created by Konrad Lorenz, an ethologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973. His most famous image shows him walking in his garden, followed by a group of goslings. When the birds hatched, the first thing they saw was Lorenz, and they adopted him as their mother, beginning the imprinting process. Lorenz noted that imprinting also affects humans. Its scope is enormous.

An orphaned giraffe, whose mother died at birth, first saw a jeep and adopted it as its mother. It followed the jeep everywhere, searching for a breast.

Hang glider pilot Angelo D’Arrigo hatched several birds under his hang glider to make them believe it was their mother. He crossed the Mediterranean flying in a V from the Sahara to Sicily.

Beyond the biological mother, culture is the mother of man. It imprints its children with its premises. Though sociological, this phenomenon can also modify individual biology, even genes.

This is shown by the experiment of Russian scientist Lyudmila Trut. She aimed to create a fox as tame as a dog but as cunning as a Siberian silver fox. Starting with 100 foxes, she selected the tamest ten percent, bred them, and culled the rest. By the fourth generation, the foxes wagged their tails like dogs.

What nature would take thousands of years to achieve, she accomplished in decades. DNA of a species can change in a few generations.

Human society does something similar. Females select males best adapted to their culture, the ones able to transfer their genes. What Trut did directly with foxes, culture and propaganda do indirectly with humans.

7

Vicarious Learning

Vicarious learning is learning by imitation without critical analysis.

Another phenomenon similar to imprinting is vicarious learning, or learning by imitation. This term comes from Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura.

He performed a simple experiment with a doll he called Bobo. He formed three groups of children.

The first group watched a man attack the doll. The second watched a woman do the same. The control group saw no aggression.

When the children played alone with the Bobo doll, those who had seen aggression imitated it. The control group did not.

Vicarious learning is imitation of authority figures without critical analysis. It is closely linked to automatic learning through mirror neurons.

The Bobo experiment shows that humans learn behaviour by watching and imitating examples. This explains why children imitate violence seen on TV and in movies. This learning is neither volitional nor rational.

8

Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons imitate the behaviour of others without critical analysis.

Mirror neurons also participate in learning without critical analysis and explain the phenomenon of psychological contagion, from a yawn to a fit of hysteria or collective laughter. Neurons learn by imitation in an irrational way.

The contagion of opinions and censorship on social networks, and the media, from which stocks and political decisions are made, explain the irrationality of the phenomenon discussed by Gustavo Le Bon, in his book Psychology of Crowds.

9

Conditioned Reflex Learning

Conditioned reflex learning is leaning by repetition and cultural propaganda.

Another factor in mental imprinting is the conditioned reflex. A conditioned reflex is an automatic response to a stimulus that did not produce it before. It develops from repeated coincidence of a neutral stimulus with one that normally triggers the response.

Ivan Pavlov made the famous experiment of pairing a sound with feeding dogs meat. After many repetitions, the dogs salivated at the sound alone, even without meat.

Humans are also conditioned. Cultural dates and repeated events teach ideas without critical thought. Society conditions individuals through education, customs, media, and even more through social networks.

Political and religious propaganda also shapes the mind. Rulers prefer to govern emotional sheep rather than rational lions and have always relied on propaganda experts. Goebbels said, “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”

Advertising works similarly. Edward Bernays, the father of advertising and Freud’s nephew, helped corporations deliver a single message: consume to be happy.

Consumption itself is not harmful. The problem is the premise: luxuries can never deliver true happiness or genuine self-esteem.

10

Cultural Subversion

Cultural subversion demoralizes, destabilizes, produces a crisis and re-normalizes a society.

Cultural subversion is covert propaganda used by one country to dominate the minds of another. Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB informant and propaganda expert, explains it online. He says cultural subversion imprints the psyche in four stages.

The first stage is demoralization. Demoralizing a generation takes 15 to 20 years. The second stage is destabilization, which creates chaos and destroys institutions and legality. The third stage is crisis, taking weeks or months, marked by riots, assassinations, and even civil war. The last stage is renormalization, which stabilizes and institutionalizes a new reality once rejected or unthinkable.

Brainwashing and mind control also shape human minds. They are well-studied techniques used in war, sometimes called PSYOPS. In peace, governments, institutions, and sects use them to manipulate people. The goal is to break the mind of the manipulated, leaving them followers rather than thinkers.

Manipulators trade true self-esteem for social status, often without the person realizing it. These techniques are detailed in Steven Hassan’s book How to Combat the Techniques of Mind Control of Sects.