Culture being the shared customs, beliefs, experiences, and institutions that bind people, anticulture is these things in reverse which polarize and and atomize.
Anticulture leaves us with atomized individuals living in fragmented families and communities. Man is regarded as the autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he considers just. We create our own meaning. Truth is viewed in the context of personal preferences and popular consensus. It’s determined primarily by feelings and sentiment instead of dispassionate reasoning. Good is equated with that which is pleasing. Thus, it is measured by self-satisfaction and personal fulfillment. The greatest good then is simply the greatest good for the greatest number. This conception of good makes it almost impossible to redirect society towards any higher purposes. Beauty becomes frivolous, or, at best, a status symbol. Moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the individual feels is right. Education is characterized by value-neutrality, emphasizing information and knowledge while ignoring wisdom and understanding. Progress is primarily about the manipulation of resources and people for the benefit of those powerful enough to do so and their constituents. Relationships are instrumentalized. People are a means to an end. An online virtual world exists through (anti)social media that fosters latent friendships which are parodies of the real thing. Sexuality exists primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression, and only secondarily for procreation. Sexual desire is then central to human identity and dignity. Paradoxically, in this world ruled by the sovereign self, group identity becomes paramount because power is everything. Loyalty to the group is more important than loyalty to truth. Politics and economics are zero-sum. Religion is strictly a private matter.
Culture has come to mean… anything that happens to catch the fancy of a group: rock concerts, supposedly for the famished of the third world; the drug culture and other subcultures; sects and cults; sexual excess and aberration; blasphemy on stage and screen; frightening and obscene shapes; the plastic wrapping of Pont-Neuf or the California coast; to smashing of the family and other institutions; the display of the queer [that is, bizarre], abject, the sick. These instant products, meant to provide instant gratification to a society itself unmoored from foundation and tradition, accordingly deny the work of mediation and maturation and favor the incoherent, the shapeless and the repulsive.
-Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred
see also: ‘liquid modernity‘
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