The day we got engaged, in 2016, we started creating our own culture, the Human culture.
We did it for three reasons:
1. One of the saddest things that could ever happen to anybody is to be considered a foreigner by your own children: no matter how you have lived, your life will have just been a dead end. Anything you have made will be misunderstood and forgotten.
This has always been the case and will always be, since cultures are cursed. If you think about it, you will notice that the culture you are used to call your own is just that of the people who subdued your ancestors. The culture your descendants will call their own will be that of your oppressors.
You could entrench yourself in “your own” culture for some generations, but you will end up losing in the long run – and, by the way, you will not even stand the chance of a proper fight: you can’t improve neither the culture nor the people –. That culture is cursed: it will disappear just as it previously caused the disappearance of your ancestors’ cultures.
The only way out of this cycle is to create a rational and beautiful culture, whose strength is grounded in itself and not in power relations. Something that will be passed down from generation to generation not just because of tribal tradition, but because it makes sense to every human being.
Moreover, you will give your descendants the most powerful tool for living a free and happy life; and you will grant your ancestors that the best of their ideas will survive and be the heritage of everyone.
2. You can’t wholly live together with your partner if you don’t share the same culture: we were both too proud to assimilate ourselves into the other’s culture, but at the same time we couldn’t accept the idea of thinking in different languages, eating different food, celebrating different holidays.
So we decided to create our own culture, taking the best from the Italian, the Chinese and – while we were at it – any other culture.
We understood we had to create our own language, numbers, calendar, holidays, literature, clothes, food, moral code, games, music, philosophy, gestures…
3. Creating your own culture, the best possible, is just the nature of every normal human being: it is at the same time the funniest and the deepest thing anyone could ever do. And since it is not just a one-person work, but a work that needs people from every generation and profession, it is the greatest thing humanity as a whole could ever do.
People have always done it and will always do: we are just doing it consciously and systematically.
Actually, if you don’t immediately get the point of this idea, if you need these and other explanations, then we are just built differently.
Our culture is not constructed from zero while sitting on an armchair, but it is the product of our life.
From the beginning we decided to follow three steps:
1. Adopting a beautiful element from a historical culture. For example the Italian language, the Chinese calendar or Caucasian dances. Something to begin with, in order to learn how this element work.
2. Modifying this cultural element with minor ones from other cultures or personal inventions. For example adding valuable German words, beautiful Persian sounds and rational Swahili noun classes to our language (that now starts differentiating from the Italian language). Something that develops the element through our intuitions, in a trial and error process.
3. Integrating this cultural element with all the others, in order to make an organical whole, full of internal references and easy to learn. For example attributing a symbolical meaning to every sound of our language, that will rationally guide our way to name things. Something that cements the element and makes it wholly Human.
P.S. Writing this fundamental chapter has been really difficult and has taken us almost seven years. The reason why we should create our own culture and how to do it has always looked obvious to us.
Il Vento d'Oriente 