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Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle. Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture. It was realizing that I wanted Turkey to be Turkish that helped me realize I want America to be American. (Sadly this is far more complex than the culture war political narrative, and is more technocapital acceleration than just bad policy, but such is life)
I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.
I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.
I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.
The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.
It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.
Yeah, I think one can appreciate Universal Culture in a Landian sense, as part of the technocapital Elder God summoning itself from the future. But a lot is also lost, and, even if we side with the hyperstitional space tentacles, we have a human duty to preserve, remember, and mourn.
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