Post: #1

Sometimes the rabbit hole goes much deeper than you first thought.

For the past year or so I've spent a fair amount of effort towards improving mindfulness, and becoming conscious of my own thought processes. As you do this, you begin to question many things about yourself which you may have assumed were "fixed" and discover they were transitory thoughts. Some of them simply recur more often than others because they are habitual. It's a bit like those old CRT monitors, which when displaying the same image for a long time, would experience "burn-in".

One aspect of the way the (I believe) toxic culture in the west affects men is through masculinity shaming. For guys here who are "naturals", they may not be able to identify with this. It's possible that for whatever reason, their brains were just less susceptible to it. For guys like me and others who spent a long time trapped "in the matrix" so-to-speak, it can be a bit unsettling to uncover this.

I'm questioning more and more the concept of the "true self" and whether it exists. It appears to me more and more that our minds simply hold various thought patterns. Therefore the self may exist but it cannot exist within the realm of the mind/thought, as we think of it in the west. (i.e. Descartes.) This leads you to wonder: 1) Where do thoughts come from? We seems to pick them up from our interactions with others, from the culture in which we inhabit, media, etc. They are transmitted from mind-to-mind. And, 2) Whether "free will" really exists if we are so easily "programmed" by the culture in which we live.

Post: #2

The level of brain-washing and cultural programming we have received our whole lives from society, the media, the educational system, and so on, goes very deep. It takes years to free yourself from this, to deprogram yourself. You can speed up the process a lot by living outside of America. There's also specific spiritual paths like shamanism or meditation that can help speed up the process. RunsonMagic wrote a good article about his ayahuasca drug experience a few months ago on RoK.

Post: #3

I believe in Britain there is a real demotivating culture, when you grow up. Even a lot of middle class kids I knew of, were desperate to strive for this rough working class image. Often putting on fake accents and dressing in tatty clothes, smoking roll ups; only ever going to the bad parts of town, even when there was little to do there. I just found it bizarre, it was like the opposite of self improvement, became something to strive for.

There are a lot of distractions in the West, i always appreciated what would compensate for this disadvantage. Brazen individualism and a environment which breed innovative characters. In a weird sense, this led to men pushing boundaries and coming into touch with something that was greater than themselves. Rudyard Kipling touched on this with his writings; the almost tangible higher power you can tap into, after sacrificing yourself in front of the alter of adventure and the unknown.

I suppose the best thing to give a your man, is a mission; otherwise he will just try to find other avenues to display his masculinity. To shake off the cultural programming, I suggest traveling; this is something I always used to roll my eyes at. But going to a place that you really want to see, and having a mission or business to do there, is probably the most rewarding thing a man can do in life.

Post: #4

I had to read Democracy in America for a class last semester, and it touched on some of this. What really hit jumped out at me was how much human nature hasn't changed since he wrote that book in the 1800s. He even talks about the detrimental effects of the media back then.

Another thing he says, is that freedom of thought in America is taboo once society has made up it's mind on something. The only time freedom of thought really exists is when an idea is new and a consensus hasn't been reached.

Once society has made up it's mind about certain things, shaming comes in.

That's how you get people who sit down to watch the game and kill a 24 pack of miller lite shaming a man who is drinking Dom Perignon and reading a book. People have decided that the latter is "manly" and you get shamed for deviating.

We should start a thread of good things that get shamed, like skinny girls, wine, game, etc.

Post: #5

I think you are absolutely right that the culture and media play a deep role in the development of our thoughts which in turn effect our personalities and life experiences.

One thing that I've been thinking about lately, is the mindset of a Westerner (in particular Americans) vs. an 'Easterner' and how switching locations changes a man.

I think that for an Easterner who wants to be successful he spends his whole younger life frustrated with the lack of opportunity, and thinking if only I were in the US, I could be successful. And then when he makes it here, he is more driven to success because now he feels he at last has access to opportunities. But for an American this is just normal so motivation has to come from elsewhere.

Similarly, an American abroad (say Russia, Thailand, Colombia) is very excited about all the sudden access to beautiful women, and can easily form his entire life to chasing skirt, whereas to a local it would make no sense since they are already satisfied with that aspect.

What I wonder is how a person can successfully counter the prevailing consciousness of a culture without changing location, or if it is just too pervasive. I mean obviously, that is what we do here at the RVF, but spending the energy to counter the culture is a waste compared to just entirely ignoring it. But it isn't clear if entirely ignoring a ubiquitous culture is possible.