Paul Conti

We're talking about layers of emergence, right?

So if there's individual consciousness, then there's culture, right?

And we're products of the soup we swim in, so to speak.

People would say that when I was growing up, right?

We're products of the soup we swim in.

So if the soup that we're swimming in is the soup of hatred,

then it's gonna foster all of those things.

So then you think about, just in a painting with a very broad brush, the culture created in Germany prior to the Second World War, and what was the impact of the reparations after the First World War, of the punishing reparations, impoverishment, and basically humiliation that people were feeling.

Okay, there were a whole bunch of decisions that impacted that cultural perspective.

Then there must have been aspects just like I see in many ways parallels in America now of what are our standards for what we're communicating to others, right?

How is the media deciding like what's real and what's not real?

What's true?

What's not true?

What's hatred that is only going to do evil versus what's hatred that's okay because I might sell something by putting it out there?

I mean, we know that was going on.

in Germany during the rise of the Nazis.

And I think there's a parallel to, do we value truth?

Can we stand together and say, no matter how much I might disagree with you politically, we can still understand that there's right and there's wrong.

There's truth and there's lies.

So I think those are just two examples of determinants of culture.