Life, Writing, Weirdness

The cultural programming you’re force fed as a child runs deep.

I’ve been an open atheist for several decades, but do you know how many stupid hymns and Christian children’s songs still live rent-free in my head? Sometimes it seems like all of them. Apparently, Aristotle said something to the tune of, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the foundation of the man.” I’ve heard it reshaped more than once from a religious perspective as, “Give me the child until he is twelve, and I will show you the man.” I think this is probable a conflation of the Aristotle quote and Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Either way, it amounts to start the indoctrination when we’re too young to understand what’s going on or necessarily distinguish fact from truth. Get ‘em while they’re young.

And the programming runs deep.

It’s not just religion, of course. I can sing the theme song or imitate the theme music from pretty much any show I watched regularly as a child, the commercials that were targeted at us, Schoolhouse Rock, the Saturday morning PSAs disguised as short cartoons. We didn’t have the remotely same level of choice that can be had today. Kids’ programming was on once a week, and there were only three major networks plus the public broadcaster so you glued yourself to the television and focused with every fibre of your being, opening your neurons for manipulation. Most of my teenage preferences were consumed at the same intensity, and a Top 40 song from the 80s that I haven’t heard since then can come on the radio and be instantly recognizable.

Because the programming runs deep.

Do you have any idea how much racist, sexist, and homophobic crap I grew up with? Do I even know? I came of age in the 80s. How many of our classics have lines of dialogue that raise eyebrows now? How much of our entertainment now comes with content warnings? How much more of it should? I don’t want to think about how much of it blew right by because it was normal.

The cultural icons we had who were out were obviously out, but so many weren’t because there was still a lot of fear. Nonconformity with the norms our society told us were correct and proper took so much more bravery than anyone should need to have just to be themselves. Of those of us who learned to think for ourselves, most of us didn’t learn to speak up or speak out for a long time. And even with most of my adult life spent trying to break out of that mode, it’s still so ingrained that sometimes there’s still hesitation.

The programming runs deep.

The human brain takes a lot of shortcuts and makes a lot of pre-conscious decisions based on what it assumes is correct, and it does that based on the information and norms you’ve absorbed your whole life without bothering to consult with your higher functions first. Sometimes, it sits on those shortcuts for decades, pulling them out when you damned well know better.

An example case, unless I was introduced to you with their use, sooner or later, I’m going to fuck up your pronouns. My brain will take one of those shortcuts based on some bias I’m not even aware of and I’ll use the wrong one. It probably won’t be while I’m talking directly to you. It may not even be while you’re there but instead while I’m telling someone else about the really cool thing you did or sent me or told me about. But it will happen eventually.

And about a tenth of a second after I do it, just in the nick of too late, my conscious brain will catch that fuck up and correct it. Probably, I’ll swear at myself, and probably more than once. If you’re there, you’ll probably tell me it’s okay because you know I’m trying to get it right. That will make me feel marginally better, but you won’t manage to convince me it’s actually okay. I need to address it. I need to rewrite the programming.

And the programming runs deep.

Given time and practice, it will happen less often. Eventually, it won’t happen at all. There’s no way to predict how long it will take to properly rewrite the code, but it will stick if I keep working at it.

But the programming runs so damned deep.

I’ve made a lot of programming changes as an adult, things that never even occurred to me were a problem until someone drew my attention to it or something unexpected made me clue in. We can fight against that programming, and, though it’s sometimes a long and mentally arduous process, we can change it.

I say “we”, but that’s not as inclusive a “we” as I want it to be. The ability to change your own mental programming comes after the desire to, and that desire comes after recognizing that you need to. To figure that out, I think you need to regularly, even constantly, examine why you think what you think and why you react how you react. That requires a mental leap to the realization that your understanding of the world is not perfect and not complete. Not everyone makes that leap, which is painfully obvious in the world we currently live in.

I have hope. More some days than others, but I do have hope.

Be well, everyone.