Pop Cultures
Pop cultures are largely parasitic, gaining adherents from the offspring of other cultures through the promise of an easier life, sex, power, acceptance, prestige, wealth, or some other factor. Like heroin, pop cultures deliver on their promises at much lower rates than their advertising would suggest.
As pop cultures are designed to sell themselves, they almost always concentrate in commercial sectors, such as the entertainment, music, and MLM industries. However, pop cultures can also be found within many large bureaucracies that impose a uniform worldview on members.
Pop cultures often promote the concept of safety nets but rarely provide them themselves. Instead, they typically try to force external organizations (like local governments) to create them (whereas hard cultures almost always provide safety nets themselves). They push for safety nets because should one exist outside of those provided by hard cultures, it becomes easier to convert people into a pop culture that does not make the sacrifices necessary to provide one.
These cultures actively promote an external locus of control, sometimes going so far as to work in features that shift people’s loci of control from internal to external, typically by presenting a compelling narrative explaining how purely external forces have driven things and people to be as they are. In extreme cases, pop cultures will go so far as to punish members who promote an internal locus of control (e.g., they may shame an individual for even daring to suggest a person might be responsible for their own failures).
Pop cultures are basically the all-sugar diet of culture. They hijack the lowest-order parts of our brains to put us in a state we know will feel bad later but feels spectacular in the moment.
Examples of Pop Cultures
- American pop culture
- “Goop” culture
- Academia
- New ageism
- Occupy Wall Street
- Mental health culture (more explanation of this later)
Characteristics of Pop Cultures
While living within a pop cultural framework can be exciting for the first few years, they make adherents uniquely susceptible to any vice exacerbated by a lack of self-discipline and isolation from social support structures. As such, pop culture adherents suffer from much higher rates of mental health issues.[[82]](#_ftn82)
While most pop cultures in wealthy societies are associated with very low birth rates, when a pop culture is adopted by an impoverished group with low female educational attainment, birth rates begin to shoot up. This has more to do with limited access to family planning tools and a breakdown of community support than it has to do with any specific desire to have a large family. When a community provides support, it is incentivized to ensure women don’t have more kids than they can handle, as care for those kids will burden the community. This partly explains why hard cultures have often evolved to be so antagonistic toward premarital sex.
Pop cultures manifest in one of two primary forms: Top-down and Bottom-up.
Top-down cultures typically feature a uniform set of beliefs and enforce this set of beliefs dictatorially downward through mechanisms like shunning members who break from orthodoxy. Unlike hard cultures, top-down pop cultures usually frame themselves as being focused on single, specific goals, such as supporting animal rights, rather than broader lifestyles.
Bottom-up pop cultures are inherently entropic and almost always set up in opposition to some other culture, defining themselves on what they are against rather than what they are for. While they sell themselves as having a consistent central ideology, they allow that ideology to shift in the mind of the adherent to whatever is needed to “sell” that culture. As such, bottom-up pop cultures often capitalize on outrage felt in response to some form of injustice in the world.
If you take a group of individuals from a bottom-up pop culture, you will find they often have very little in common outside of the aesthetics of their belief system and shared opposition toward certain other groups or actions. Despite this, bottom-up pop culture adherents tend to believe all other members of their culture hold the same basic values and beliefs about the world as they do.
It is common for a bottom-up pop culture to “win” a cultural battle only to find itself incapable of articulating an actionable set of demands once the opposing side concedes and asks for instruction. Any unified demands that do arise typically involve the complete extinction of whatever it is the culture opposes, and most of these opposed factors are too complex, entrenched, or amorphous to be eliminated (e.g., “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” or “the gay agenda”).
Consider the outcome of the French Revolution: When the revolutionaries “won,” they didn’t know what to do and spiraled out of control, spending a huge amount of time and resources focused on identifying and taking down more enemies instead of building a more free, equal, and fraternal society. Pop cultures are—by far—the most dangerous kinds of cultures though they often appear the most innocuous and supportive of the “little guy.”
In truth, pop cultures “support” the little guy because he is more psychologically vulnerable and has more hooks (grievances) that can be used to manipulate him. Pop cultures do not genuinely have anyone’s best interest at heart. Like all cultures, they are evolving and uncaring memetic packages.
Pop cultures can be thought of as an acid being repeatedly flung at productive cultures, melting hard cultures into soft cultures and eventually dissolving cultures entirely. They feature something even more insidious than a low birth rate: They destroy the birth rates of their neighbors.