The Neutering of Culture and the Side Effects

23rd June 2025

I just had a thought train arrive. i feel like I've had it before and I feel like maybe even talked about it with someone.

the cultural void that we have in western society, I think I realised why and where the culture has gone

i'm listening to some celtic music from my childhood — it turns out that a lot of the stuff my parents played when I was a kid was very celtic-inspired or celtic-celtic.

Not all, but some of it is christian music. Of course, Albion was christianised via the romans, so some parts are and were extremely christian, especially catholic which is (in my perspective) one of the most devout and dogmatic versions, very much a "default mode" version of christianity in which people feel themselves to be as christian as they are their nationality or ethnicity.

there is quite a bit of tribal-ish sounds in this music. I don't know the best word for what I mean. I mean specifically: trancey rhythms, some organic instruments like hand drums (hand not hang), aetherial sounds, nature sounds like water and wind.

the artwork is very celtic-inspired too.

my point is, I think the native cultures got entirely subsumed into christianity, which of course neutered it massively, but then religion got killed off (for better or worse; not the point here) so the culture died with it. We observe and describe this happening to the Americas, as it was in recent history, but I haven't read or seen much about this process happening in Albion.

Many of us separate ourselves from religion nowadays, not because religion is inherently bad (i mean we can use "religion" in a much softer way, more like a spiritual guidance system etc), but because the current overbearing religion construct is patriarchal, monotheistic, and non-accepting of non-believers/non-followers. We can see it has many problems, so we don't want to be a part of it.

As the culture of Albion got consumed by Christianity, when we separate from christianity, we also separate from the culture. Additionally, people who follow a somewhat celtic style life, looking rather pagan, get seen as witchy, superstitious, etc, are generally looked down on socially.

European colonisation of America is another whole layer of that and then some, but for now I'm just considering the peculiar void of culture-y culture in the UK.

There is a well-known practice called EEE, it's an alternative to Divide & Conquer. EEE = Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft is a particular lover of this practice.

1. Embrace: An attacker embraces another entity (be it akin, dominant or weaker), luring them into a false sense of security.

2. Extend: Then the attacker extends the entity, e.g. with features, affordances, improvements, facilities, whatever.

3. Extinguish: When the users of the entity (users of software; subjects of a ruler; customers of a company) have become dependent upon the new features added by the attacker, the attacker can withdraw their features from the weaker entity, and all the users will automatically transfer their loyalty/fealty/custom to the attacker entity. Thereby the attacker extinguishes the weaker entity.

If we look at religion as the main purpose, this process makes sense for acquiring new followers, and indeed that has happened a billion times. Rome actively did this for a long time too.

But in terms of the culture, the extinguishing part doesn't make sense unless we consider religion itself to just be a tool in the arsenal of the ruling class, playing the long game of domination. The form or type or quality of the religion probably isn't too important to them; rather they just need a religious construct that encourages dependence and unquestioning trust in authority.

From the perspective of Christians and perhaps the Pope, Christianity embracing various cultures and pagan religions is/was just for the purpose of spreading the religion. But from the perspective of the ruling class, Christianity embracing the cultures and pagan religions is a way to infiltrate the people with the controllability that religion provides.

Perhaps a side effect, perhaps not, that we (many but not all) now have cut ourselves away from Christianity, a) leaving a void for many people who haven't sought their own spirituality, and b) leaving a cultural void, lacking in communal identity, communal relationship.

This void is excellent for capitalism because i) we want to fill the void with Things and Things and Things all the time; and ii) because, lacking in a communal identity, we identify ourselves with something "larger", except that larger thing is actually pop culture, and pop culture is manufactured and channels all the shit that they want us to do, buy, believe, behave like.

The end

n.b. so my point is i'm going deep into finding the cultural roots that got EEE'd and severed, I think we can do a revival and it might help things a LOT. I think that white/western/colonialites struggle to respect other cultures precisely because we don't really have one of our own — we cannot understand what it means to have a strong culture and to be part of one and to live within one, because we don't have a metric by which to measure, recognise and understand others.