Travel As Transformation: Conquer the Limits of Culture to Discover Your Own Identity by Gregory Diehl

Author:Gregory Diehl
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Identity Publications
Published: 2016-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Early in my travels, I became a teacher because something in me was deeply curious about how our world passed old values on to new generations. Working in education gave me unique insight into the parts of culture normally hidden from outsiders and casual tourists. It also gave me a deep resentment for those who maintain their culture at the cost of corrupting young minds. To see children be made into vessels for arbitrary cultural values on a massive scale would be the fire that would consume me. Working with humans at every stage of development showed me that what most countries call education is a form of cultural narcissism. Whatever is important to prevailing authorities must also be made important to the up-and-coming crop of citizens. Because the old crop of humans believes in something, so too must the new crop. In witnessing this generational transfer of values, I saw the true enemy of progress.

To burn in hell is to see the complete dismantling of one’s core values within and around him. Because my new environments allowed me to explore myself, I became aware of how much I cared about nurturing and protecting potential. I developed a deep affinity for children and animals because they were unaffected by the corrupting influence of culture. But everything casts a shadow. By choosing to care, I opened up the possibility of losing what I cared about. My most life-affirming experiences were followed by my most destructive ones – experiences which would push me past a psychological breaking point I didn’t know I had.

I know now that it was necessary for me to survive a deep emotional pain unique to my experience of reality. From this I learned that anything which holds power over us does so for important reasons. Enslavement, in fact, can teach us more about ourselves than freedom. More than anything, travel has shown me the full breadth of what humans are capable of. I learned that the worst of humanity is not our ability to commit momentary acts of violence or personal oppression. It is how we rear children to live as receptacles for our own outdated ideologies and traditions. The dignity of humanity lies in our ability to think for ourselves. The unconscious acceptance that culture must be passed on to new generations actively suppresses this dignity.

By the time I booked my first trip to Asia to work as an English teacher in China, I had already seen many new types of extremes in the world. China blew them all out of the water. There, I discovered that a place existed where each day human beings were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the street, and where homogeneity ruled. There was so much to see, but so little variety. It felt dystopian and surreal to become a functioning part of the social machine which existed to remove each individual’s individuality.

Through daily interactions, I learned that the Chinese did not appreciate questioning why things were the way that they were in their lives.

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