America’s Cultural Fish Tank

The "fish tank effect"

For a long time in America, there was a large contingent of liberal Rockefeller Republicans and lots of conservative “Yellow Dog” Democrats in the South. My grandfather who passed away roughly 30 years ago was one of those “Yellow Dog” Democrats. This is a man who was pretty much a straight-down-the-line conservative who voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan. Why did he do that? On one level, it seems to make no sense. On the other hand, if you understand what “Yellow Dog” Democrats were, it makes perfect sense.

You see, if you go back to the Civil War, Abe Lincoln and the Republicans in the North were fighting Jefferson Davis and the Democrats in the South. Not only did the Republicans win, which was humiliating to Southerners, perhaps understandably after the assassination of reconciliation-minded Abe Lincoln, the Northern Republicans pushed the South around. Some of that was necessary, but still, it was resented.

Even as attitudes about race and the war slowly, but surely changed, the antagonism against Republicans was passed down from father to son across generations. Even today in the South, there’s a muted, but still REAL dislike of “Yankees” from up North moving to the South and trying to change things.

That’s the thing about culture. It tends to change very slowly, irregularly over time, sometimes in ways that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. The world is full of people who have never had a bad experience with a Jew in their life and who hate them all the same because it was passed down to them over time, the same way conservative “Yellow Dog” Democrats used to hate Republicans. Along similar lines, Thomas Sowell has a whole book called, “Black Rednecks & White Liberals” about how much of black America adopted the poor, white redneck mentality that was typical in the slaveholding South while many of the ancestors of those same white Southerners moved on from it.

One of the reasons culture can be so hard to change is because of what I like to think of as the, “fish tank effect.” The fish who live in the tank don’t necessarily understand that they’re in a fish tank. To them, it’s just how things are. There’s sand on the ground, the filter humming in the background, the pirate castle in the middle, the rock cave is in the corner, the guppies swim together over here, the angel fish swim together over there, food comes twice a day, and those big scary things look in and change the water every so often. That’s just what life is, and they adapt to it without ever examining it all that much or wondering why it’s that way.

We do the same thing.

For example, when I went to Mexico City, one of the things that stood out to me was that they had a lot of tripping hazards. There would be holes in the floor and sidewalk all over the place that were sometimes covered (not fixed) and sometimes not.  If you didn’t pay attention to where you walked, you were pretty much guaranteed to fall at best and break an ankle at worst. I was talking to a tour guide about it and told her that in the States, if someone had an obvious tripping hazard in their store and a customer fell over and hurt themselves, they’d probably be sued. She thought that sounded absolutely crazy, but if you want to understand why there’s a difference, it’s that they don’t have a “lawsuit culture” in Mexico.

Similarly, when I was in London with a woman, we had an opportunity to go into a huge, old British bunker and spend the day shooting paintballs at “zombies,” sometimes from a moving vehicle. Well, I certainly wasn’t passing that opportunity up, but when we got in there, I was kind of surprised because it was billed as a “Zombie” shoot, but there were also a number of obstacles they expected us to get over. As someone who has done a Spartan race before, I can tell you that some of the things we had to do were roughly comparable – and that was a big surprise because this wasn’t billed as some kind of fitness challenge. I did manage to overcome all of the obstacles, although some of them were a struggle, but I couldn’t help but think, “I bet if this were in America, half the people doing something like this wouldn’t be fit enough to do some of these.” On the other hand, every Brit there was thin, athletic and had no problem with those obstacles – which is why they probably thought nothing of putting the obstacles in to begin with.  

Along similar lines, one of the places I’d like to visit at some point is India. Sort of. I say sort of because I keep seeing videos of Indian food vendors handling the food they’re giving to people with their bare hands. The idea of eating this makes me want to barf (PS: Make sure to listen to this video with sound because it is HILARIOUS).

So, why do these people do all these things that seem so odd to Americans? Because they’re living in their own “fish tank,” that’s what people expect and doing these things this way seems like the most natural thing in the world.

The reason this is important is because EVERY person and EVERY culture does this. Even if you’re smart, know your history, are well-read, well-traveled, and are ready to question the way things are done, there are enormous numbers of thoughts you have and assumptions you make that happen without you even consciously thinking about it. That’s part of the “fish tank effect.” We all tend to think about and do things the way we’ve always seen them done.

This can turn into a big problem because as anyone who has ever owned a fish tank knows, it doesn’t take a lot for a tank to go from a healthy environment to one that’s toxic for fish. Maybe you put water right out of the tap with chlorine in it in the tank, add a decoration to the tank that leaches some substance into the water, the filter stops working, it gets too hot, too cold or there’s too much food in the tank and next thing you know, your fish are getting stressed, acting weird and even dropping dead.

Well, this happens in cultures, too. It happened to Rome, it happened to Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. There was a time when Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, not just a bankrupt welfare state with some cool old buildings. There were times when France was arguably the greatest nation in the world as opposed to just a preening, anti-Christian third-rate power that people still laugh at because of how badly their soldiers fought in WW2.

How does that happen? Certainly not all at once.

These cultures sprinkled in dysfunctionality, immorality, and wrong-headed ideas a little bit at a time over a very long period. Then the people, like the fish in the tank, just shrugged their shoulders, said, “This is how it has been for as long as I can remember” and just accepted things getting worse.

We’ve been doing this in America in ways great and small for decades and the accumulation of things we’ve let go, made excuses for, and ignored are now making our culture increasingly toxic. Alone, none of these things may make a huge difference. Some of them probably even seem downright insignificant, but cumulatively? They’re making the water cloudy and our culture sick.

We’ve added something like 80,000 synthetic chemicals into the food, water and air, most of which have never been fully tested on humans. Our kids play video games where they murder people en masse on a regular basis. Our TV shows have gone from Leave It to Beaver to Game of Thrones. We’ve legalized marijuana usage in many states. We’ve increasingly allowed illegal aliens to cross our borders at will. We do a poor job of assimilating legal immigrants, and we now allow them to collect welfare. We added in-school lunch programs and told kids there was no reason to feel bad about taking charity. We stopped expecting our politicians and media to tell us the truth. We let big pharma get in the driver’s seat of both science and the healthcare industry in America. We started pushing Pride Month in schools. We made gay marriage legal. We allowed politics to become the dominant factor in science and psychology. We allowed liberals to take over Hollywood and schools. We changed our immigration from favoring European nations to favoring third-worlders. Christianity declined. We stopped treating drag queens like degenerates, normalized pornography, and stopped making a real effort to protect kids from adult subjects in much of the country. We also treated it as normal to stare at a digital box (computer, TV, or cell phone) for eight hours per day. We stopped teaching patriotism. We created a system that encourages lawsuits. Our government became several orders of magnitude bigger, more expensive, and more powerful. We stopped caring about deficit spending. We allowed our military to become woke and don’t insist on accountability for military failures like Afghanistan (among others). The number of marriages dropped, the number of divorces went up astronomically and the average age that people first get married moved from the early twenties to the late twenties.

It’s worth noting that we could easily add dozens and dozens of things to this list, but there’s no need to make it exhaustive because you get the idea. However, do you know what people do in their heads when they see a list like this? The “fish tank thinking” immediately kicks in. They go, “Well, that one really isn’t all that important and we pretty much had to do that one. That one isn’t really anyone’s fault, that one sort of happened and we’ve been doing that one for a long time” and we’re right back to, “There’s sand on the ground, the filter humming in the background, the pirate castle in the middle, the rock cave is in the corner…”

Like a fish tank or a life, a culture gets better or worse a little bit at a time. It never just stays the same. It’s eternally moving in the right direction toward a clean, healthy pristine environment or a toxic cloud that makes everyone sick.

The bad part is that often, we don’t even see these negative trends until they’re very advanced and then it’s, “Well, that’s how it has always been” – even if that isn’t really true. The good part is that we still have an opportunity to do something about the toxic parts of our culture, even if it just means that we make our personal choice not to be part of those bad behaviors. If your culture has become toxic, it becomes more important than ever to cut any and every type of toxicity, small or large, out of your life and your culture. That’s because the reality is we are shaped by our environment in ways none of us fully comprehend and the more toxic it becomes, the sicker we’re all going to get by default.

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