Llosa discussing George Steiner Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture.
Our myths found to be like Matryoshka dolls
“Post-culture has destroyed the myth that the humanities humanize. What so many optimistic educationalists and philosophers believed, that a liberal education accessible to all would guarantee a future of "progress, peace, liberty and equality of opportunity in modern democracies, has not proved to be the case: ‘… the libraries, museums, theatres, universities, research centres, in and through which the transmission of the humanities and of the sciences mainly takes place, can prosper next to the concentration camps’ (p. 63). In individuals, as in society, high culture, sensibility and intelligence can, at times, coexist with the fanaticism of the torturer and the assassin. Heidegger was a Nazi, but he composed his great work on the philosophy of language within earshot of a death camp: ‘Heidegger’s pen did not stop, nor his mind go mute’ (p. 63).
In the stoic pessimism of post-culture, the security that certain differences and hierarchical value structures once offered have now disappeared: ‘The line of division separated the higher from the lower, the greater from the lesser; civilization from retarded primitivism, learning from ignorance, social privilege from subservience, seniority from immaturity, men from women. And each time “from” stood also for “above”’ (p. 66). The collapse of these distinctions is now the most salient feature of contemporary culture.
Post-culture, which is sometimes also called, significantly, the ‘counter-culture’, can admonish culture for its elitism[…]”
Excerpt From
Notes on the Death of Culture
Mario Vargas Llosa
Hierarchy is a tool used by self appointed Elites and Potentates to help keep near dynastic grip on society. Individual Sovereignty is a natural condition of human beings, every living being yearns to experience liberation. With a realization of Sovereignty, one can see there is nobody above and nobody below them.
Living in freedom in this way requires voluntary cooperative interaction. Hierarchy is a tool that helps compel people to interact in a specific way; usually involving exclusive service for the benefit of those 1% high up the totem pole.