Pop Culture & modern trends
What comes to mind when we hear the word culture? Is it the intrinsic sounds of reggae music on a Sunday morning? Or perhaps maybe the burst of flavors that hits one’s pallet from grandma's chicken around the dinner table. Regardless of what comes to mind, one thing is for certain, culture is an experience. An experience shared among, not just the individual, but large quantities of people. It is a collective.
Today, humans live in a modern world filled with modern technology, ideologies, and beliefs. But the question becomes, what is modern culture and what exactly is it based on? To understand modern culture one must understand that it is based on one thing and one thing only. Popularity. Today's society is run on popularity, better known as pop culture. Popular culture is a set of practices, beliefs and objects that embody a broadly shared meaning of a social system. Aspects of pop culture include media, fashion and trends which are geared mostly towards the youth of a society. The goal of pop culture is one thing: PROFIT. The more popular a thing, the more it is wanted and the more it can be sold.
Pop culture puts the individual in a perpetual cycle of slavery. Wanting and buying to keep up with what’s the latest, what's the newest, what's the trendiest. This behavior keeps the machine,of “the system” running like a river. The constant want and need for trends drowns the individual in a euphoric pool of dopamine. What better way to keep this cycle going than to educate the youth with mass media. What the youth learn becomes the value of the society. I’m sure if we look honestly we can even see this in ourselves.
In the times of our ancestors, the youth were educated, not with the goal of making them value trends, but making them value life and its principles. Let’s compare modern society with an ancestral or indigenous one. Let's take a look at fashion for example. What we wear today is an expression of who we feel we are. But in traditional societies what you wear is an expression of what you are truly fitting into, nature. One can take cowrie shells and see that in today's pop culture the cowrie shells have become like a symbol of cultural expression or a popular symbol of identity in which most people find to be fashionable. Its value is now reduced to a simple fashion statement. In a traditional society, children learn the importance of these shells as a spiritual tool. What makes the cowrie valuable is not how it looks in an earring but the fact that it is seen as a gift from the goddess mote or the mother of waters. This should not come as a surprise to anyone seeing as we all are in the water when in our mothers womb. From an indigenous understanding, the best way to access a deity is through the gifts offered by that deity. The cowrie was a tool to access the divine. It was even a tool used to do divinations because the mother of water mote had access to everything and every place that water touches, including human beings and everything to do with their lives . It was this understanding that gave the ancestors an idea of value towards these shells to the point where they became the first idea of money or exchange. Already we can see a clear difference in what makes something of value in a traditional society opposed to a modern one full of trends that seem to change by the day. If you want to learn more about the values of culture and indigenous perspectives please reach out to the Kebtah New Jersey Temple at (973) 373-7806 https://www.theearthcenter.org
