Culture is not your friend. It is for other peoples convienience.
It insults you, it disempowers you, it uses and abuses you.
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Culture: The Ultimate Cult
To the extent that you assimilate yourself to a given culture, you become but a cog in a machine to be used and abused by the objectives of that system. And that means, to use the words of the late philosopher Terence McKenna, “Culture is not your friend.” Culture is the ultimate cult. The cultures of the world are diverse, but they each in their own ways are insidious. Culture is a dehumanizing and infantilizing element designed to make you into little more than a good machine able to sustain the habitual socioeconomic objectives of a particular time and place.

Hyperreality
In postmodern philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (pronounced bow-dree-yar), there is a term called the “hyperreal.” Hyperreality is the simulation of something that never really existed. As an example, kids in college see movies about kids in college and try to mimic the actors playing kids in college because supposedly that is how kids in college are supposed to act. As a result, you have a bunch of phony kids walking around college campuses trying to live out an impossible fantasy world.

There are tons of examples of the hyperreal in contemporary culture. Being “gangsta” is a prevalent contemporary example of the hyperreal. In regular reality, there is nothing glamorous about being a poorly educated, strap-packing sociopath who makes poor investments decisions and ends up spending life in jail, or dead. Only in the warped world of the hyperreal could “gangsta” be made into something glamorous. And unfortunately, sometimes the hyperreal “gangsta” meets a real gangster who isn’t just playing pretend and the hyperreal “gangsta” ends up dead.

The hyperreal is a bizarre artifact of culture—especially contemporary culture. When people start trying to live out an idea based on a fictional story, the result is hyperreality. In culture, it is not enough to be a human being, a person instead has to be a certain kind of human being based on a hyperreal role. And in American consumer culture Madison Avenue is more than happy to sell you your own unique image, role, and personality (turn you into a walking billboard) so that you may find what kind of “special” cog you are in the socioeconomic machine.

Make, Don’t Be Made
You know those animatronic humans (pirates, presidents, etc.) they have at Disney World? It takes a good amount of artistry (aesthetic and technological aptitude) to make an animatronic human, but it doesn’t take much artistry for a human to mimic an animatronic human.

This world does not need human robots; it needs humans that can make robots. It needs engineers, not engineered humans. It needs artists, not artificial people. And overall, it needs the creative, not the created. Yet, culture is a force that would have you be like an animatronic robot—an actor playing a mechanical socioeconomic role.

Edges
Culture defines the edges of acceptable reality. And cultures tend to always think they know everything except a few little things that will be figured out shortly. Yet, if people never ventured outside the boundaries of their given culture then the world would be stagnant. Usually the people who end up being the most useful to future cultures are the people who spend their lives unrestrained by cultural boundaries and so discover something new. And ironically, those most useful people are also usually the ones most shunned in order to protect the precious status-quo that makes up a given culture.

Conclusion
Culture is only your friend if you want to be a robot and treat other people like robots. If, on the other hand, you would like to be an actual human being, then you must learn to surf the edges of culture and the known and be prepared to experience the unknown.