Culture, Integrity And Questioning Authority

If you want to have your strongest and most positive impact on your culture, the way to do it is to live with integrity – meaning that you know your principles and you live by them and speak from them.

There are solitary creatures like pandas and bumblebees and there are social animals like wolves and wildebeests but we are the only living creatures on Earth who have culture. Culture is created when your knowledge, wisdom and innovations can be transmitted and have an impact over time and space, beyond your immediate influence.

With culture, when a problem is solved by one person, it has the possibility of being solved forever, and throughout the entire culture, which means that the culture can change in significant ways over time. While our human nature has not fundamentally changed over the millennia, our human culture has.

A culture contains and expresses the qualities that are common to groups of people living and working together; it is the capacity that we as human beings have to engage one another in creating a more complex and more advantageous way of life.

Our human culture has developed differently in different places, and within different groups of people. (Even the prehistoric culture of the San Bushmen that I wrote about in The San People of the Kalahari have a different culture than they did many years ago, incorporating bits of metal in their toolmaking, for example.)

If a culture values integrity and trust, the people within that culture are supported and encouraged by that culture to behave with integrity and in ways that engender trust. If a culture values violence and irrationality, the people within that culture are supported and encouraged to be violent and irrational.

In America, we often talk about how our culture is going to hell in a handbasket. This is not a new development; I would venture to say this sentiment is one of the defining features of our culture.

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