This 6-pillar curriculum teaches the basic literacy we need to be personally and financially successful and to do so in a manner in which together we evolve a culture that supports the emergence of an advanced human civilization.
For the second episode of our Young Builders series, Ricardo Oskam and Vanessa Harlander traveled to Poland for a cultural adventure with brilliant Food for the Soul host Nina Heyn.
Thank you. There’s a large Polish and Ukrainian community where I live, so it was eye opening learning about their history. Also inspired me to start taking my son to more museums!
Culture is a set of norms that allow us to feel safe when we can be sure that others will follow those norms. When those norms are scrambled, we feel unsafe, unmoored, and as a result unconnected. Norms create community (why do people like cults so much?), they create safety and trust. Manners and history are a part of this, but in our current environment they are not the only part.
An example of mixing cultures:
A Native-American chief holds a sweat lodge on a white man’s property for the first time. A white guy gets invited who is unaware, or unwilling to follow typical co-ed sweat lodge norms and wears a small towel into the lodge. No one says anything, due to a misunderstanding of each other’s norms and cultural expectations. The naked guy is later referred to as ‘violent’. The behavior stirred up lots of stereotypes and racist thoughts – the Native Americans assuming they had to accept this because of entitled white people norms, me (a white woman) assuming this was accepted because of misogynistic native american cultural norms.
Without clear cutural norms, we don’t know how to behave, we don’t know how to prioritize our energies, we don’t know how to deal with conflict (the same native americans watched two white people do a conflict using the cultural norms of Non-violent-communication. They saw two people who just liked to stir the pot, while the white people saw two people who were communicating effectively.
Recently someone wrote a big blog post on how cultural norms dictated the interaction between Mamdani and Trump – that Mamdani treated Trump like an elder that would talk to him like a child and then let him do what he would do – and how most people not accustomed to those norms missed the nuance in the very Indian-like cultural behavior of Mamdani. Culture dictates when it is appropriate to push back and how, and when it is appropriate to concede or just smile and say ‘yes sir’ and then go your own way. When cultures clash, conflicts become difficult to manage or to understand.
Culture is not just about holding your fork correctly or knowing history – all important, it is also about realizing how to resolve conflicts that create more harmony. With a lack of cultural understanding, the white man owning the property and native american chief were too afraid to kick naked guy out of the sweat lodge. With a lack of cultural understanding, people can misinterpret a man from another culture’s lack of disagreement as agreement or capitulation, or a fearlessness to engage as rude or violent.
Nice to have young role models, people that I can relate to!
Wonderful! xo -Jennifer
Thank you. There’s a large Polish and Ukrainian community where I live, so it was eye opening learning about their history. Also inspired me to start taking my son to more museums!
Culture is a set of norms that allow us to feel safe when we can be sure that others will follow those norms. When those norms are scrambled, we feel unsafe, unmoored, and as a result unconnected. Norms create community (why do people like cults so much?), they create safety and trust. Manners and history are a part of this, but in our current environment they are not the only part.
An example of mixing cultures:
A Native-American chief holds a sweat lodge on a white man’s property for the first time. A white guy gets invited who is unaware, or unwilling to follow typical co-ed sweat lodge norms and wears a small towel into the lodge. No one says anything, due to a misunderstanding of each other’s norms and cultural expectations. The naked guy is later referred to as ‘violent’. The behavior stirred up lots of stereotypes and racist thoughts – the Native Americans assuming they had to accept this because of entitled white people norms, me (a white woman) assuming this was accepted because of misogynistic native american cultural norms.
Without clear cutural norms, we don’t know how to behave, we don’t know how to prioritize our energies, we don’t know how to deal with conflict (the same native americans watched two white people do a conflict using the cultural norms of Non-violent-communication. They saw two people who just liked to stir the pot, while the white people saw two people who were communicating effectively.
Recently someone wrote a big blog post on how cultural norms dictated the interaction between Mamdani and Trump – that Mamdani treated Trump like an elder that would talk to him like a child and then let him do what he would do – and how most people not accustomed to those norms missed the nuance in the very Indian-like cultural behavior of Mamdani. Culture dictates when it is appropriate to push back and how, and when it is appropriate to concede or just smile and say ‘yes sir’ and then go your own way. When cultures clash, conflicts become difficult to manage or to understand.
Culture is not just about holding your fork correctly or knowing history – all important, it is also about realizing how to resolve conflicts that create more harmony. With a lack of cultural understanding, the white man owning the property and native american chief were too afraid to kick naked guy out of the sweat lodge. With a lack of cultural understanding, people can misinterpret a man from another culture’s lack of disagreement as agreement or capitulation, or a fearlessness to engage as rude or violent.
Nice to have young role models, people that I can relate to!