You provide a pithy summation on the importance of the cultural mesh underpinning societies. This mesh determines levels of progressive, innovative, and prosperous outcomes across short or long histories. To your point, cultural bearings often go unnoticed like the air we breath, or worse, actively dismissed or constrained beginning with the rhetoric of particular groups.

Culture is perhaps most often expressed politically. Your left and right poli-positional parsing is a unique perspective that I had not thought of in cultural innovation terms, but it succinctly illustrates the active and unfortunate dismissal of cultural contexts in order to reinforce established cultural and political norms.

In this sense, culture becomes a weapon with which to attack, or defend against attacks. The embrittled rigidity of this logic always exposes the fatal weaknesses in the seeming strength of myopic or xenophobic actions. Addressing the cultural impedance consciously is only commonsensical for achieving political progress.

No doubt most of us are most comfortable in the world-views incumbent to our native cultures and we act accordingly whether ethnically or regionally. Our politics are usually the extensions of our backgrounds into the generations we influence – accepted without question and defended without thought. The need to be in the right supersedes the need to be astute.

Civilization’s greatest examples of beneficial progress and innovation have happened when cultural barriers are negotiated positively among different cultures. Certainly technology innovation has been dependent on these exchanges, from the cross-cultural adoption of the first tools to the vast knowledge generation systems of today.

Indeed, success comes from the blended acceptance of our best intercultural traits towards economic development in its fullest definition. Call these traits our weapons of mass benefit.

Thank you for your thought-provoking post!

Randy Burge