Culture pt VI

It is easy for us Westerners to see how a culture of shame or fear is under demonic influence, it is almost impossible for us to see, however, how our sense of injustice is also a demonic stronghold in our culture.

It is our sense of injustice that impels us to 'stand up for our rights.' It is precisely this intense need to maintain an inviolable sense of self, an identity defined over against everything and everyone else, that leads us to shallow materialism and consumerism, shameful disavowing of our responsibility to the people and the world around us, and even outright perpetrations of evil in the name of self-gratification.

The two essential pieces of our culture that come to the forefront in all of this are individualism and injustice.

These are major aspects of our framework for understanding that are very difficult to hold before our mind as such. It is not that we are unaware of them, but that we have difficulty realizing they are artifacts of culture, not artifacts of reality, and as such are in some sense arbitrary. We are incapable of seeing in a different way, but even more problematic is the fact that we are unaware that our way of seeing is merely our way...