Cultural Conditioning Quotes

“Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Isumbong mo kay Tulfo and BITAG feed our hunger for instant justice, but they are only band-aid solutions. They soothe the symptom but never heal the broken system.”
― E. Ravago, Bansang Pinipilas

“Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I was seeing in these awkward composites my own liminal self. The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage. My Arab father who gave me up to Europe without a fight. I was the freak. I had been told so and I had been taught so and I had chewed on this verdict to the extent that, no matter what, I could never purge myself of it entirely.”
― Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies

“The less a person knows, the more they trust their instinct, not realizing their instinct was trained by what they never questioned.”
― pierre lagrenat

“I regard it as a cultural artifact that only rational phenomena are respectable. I doubt that many people are sufficiently aware of the degree we are moulded by our culture and environment. In the past year Science magazine has reported two experiments along these lines.

In the first, kittens were given a carefully controlled visual pattern for their first few days of vision, and the result was that they were subsequently able to perform good visual discrimination only against the same pattern. The visual cortex developed in response to the first patterns presented to it. In the second experiment it was shown that natives unfamiliar with large-scale rectilinear features (cities, highways and the like) were unable to interpret perspective in drawings. Thus I feel our culture, education and training lead us to see the world in a certain way and, apparently, lead us to comfortably ignore or reject those aspects of reality that don’t fit.”
― Jacques F. Vallée