Culture, in a way, it could be said to be a kind of shared meaning in society.
Begin by noticing that self-deception is very pervasive in society.
If somebody says something—say, “My country above all”—that is like a virus which enters everybody. And unless you have the immune system working, it will spread, right? So when you have got the disease, it’s your disease. Of course, its origin, it’s also the disease of the whole society, right? So that’s to say it’s no use blaming anybody for this or to attribute it to some particular source. You have to say the real problem is this meaning process which has become wrong, right? The process of meaning has gone wrong.
The way the cancer cell’s DNA has gone, it means: don’t yield and just keep on growing. But normally, the body must somehow send signals to the cells to say: stop growing at this point. You know: fit in with the rest of the body. Now, you see, any individual could then function like a cancer, or a whole group could; say, “Our goal must take precedence above all.” And therefore it will never yield, right? Nothing can make it fit, right? And then you have this self-deception, this falseness, going on.
The minute you see something is false, the urge to do it is gone, right? But the trouble is that we have a disposition not to see that.
Our ordinary language has evolved in such a way it deals with certain technical problems by separating the observer from the observed—which is all right up to a point. But it extends that into other areas where this separation is not valid, you see. Even technically, it’s not always valid. And so that is part of what’s going on: that this language is conditioning us, disposing us, to act in certain ways, to think in certain ways. And we don’t notice that it’s so because everybody’s doing it, right? So therefore, the assumption may be that if everybody’s doing it, it must be all right. But, in fact, without noticing it, we get involved in a kind of collusion.