Here we'll talk about the core of our proposal—to change the very relationship we have with information. And through information, the relationship we have with the world; and with ourselves.

The relationship we have with information, and through information with the world and with ourselves, is founded on unstated beliefs and values. Like the foundations of a house, they hold the entire edifice of our culture, while themselves remaining invisible. That's why we call them simply foundations.

Needless to say, a cultural revival is really just a natural result of a fundamental shift in those foundations. Wasn't that what the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, were really all about?

From the traditional culture we have adopted a myth, incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. That myth now serves the foundation stone on which the edifice of our culture has been erected.

A key to cultural revival

As most movies do, Alain Resnais' "My American Uncle" follows its characters through strained relationships with parents, career ups and downs and love-related hopes and disappointments. But here a meta-narrative is also offered, which (we would like to propose) turns this into a new paradigm art project.

"My American Uncle" was a successful (also as an art project) attempt to federate a socially relevant insight of a researche by creating a movie. At the end of the movie, neuroscientist Henri Laborit, the researcher, delivers the following conclusion:

The unconscious is a formidable instrument. Not only because it holds all that we have repressed, things too painful for us to express, because we'd be punished by society. But also because all that is authorized, even rewarded by society, has been placed in our brain since birth. We're unaware of its presence, and yet it guides our actions. This unconscious, which is not Freud's, is the most dangerous. What we call the personality of an individual is built up from a grab-bag of value judgments, prejudices and platitudes. As he grows older, they become more and more rigid, less and less subject to question. Take away one single stone from this edifice, and it all crumbles. The result is anguish. And anguish stops at nothing, neither murder, nor genocide, nor war, in the case of social groups.

We are beginning to understand by what mechanism, why and how, throughout the history and in the present, the hierarchies of dominance have been established. To go to the moon, we must know the laws of gravity. Knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free of gravity. It merely allows us to utilize it.

Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, until they know it has always been used to dominate others, there is little chance that anything will change.

Reality and beyond

Did Moses really return from Mount Sinai with ten commandments, written in stone by God himself?

For centuries, our ancestors considered this a fact. But to the modern mind, the fact that this would violate some established "laws of nature" takes precedence.

When Nietzsche observed, famously, that "God is dead", he did not of course mean that God had physically died. Or even that the belief in God lost its bearings in our culture, which was an obvious fact. What he meant was that we, as culture, lost a compendium of functions that had earlier rested on the belief in God as foundations.

Can we really survive in a complex world, develop human quality and culture, without any principles to live by? And without even a foundation on which such principles could be developed?

"Reality" is a myth

Our contemporary culture too is founded a popular belief—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; that "correspondence with reality" can be rationally verified; and that the "scientific worldview" is a result of such verification, and hence "objectively true".

"Correspondence with reality" cannot be verified

In "Evolution of Physics", Einstein and Infeld explained why "correspondence to reality" cannot be rationally verified, by using the parable of a closed watch. Einstein, furthermore, held the position that the belief that the results of our speculation or reflection correspond to reality is a common product of illusion—as we commented [here].

Since our goal is not to give a new "objectively true" statement of fact, but only to submit a legitimate way of looking at our theme, nothing more needs to be said.

Our culture too has been founded on a myth

It follows that our culture too has been founded on a myth. But this can be easily understood, and also forgiven, if one takes into account that the belief that "truth" means "correspondence with reality" is deeply engrained in our 'cultural DNA', including our common sense and our language. When I write "worldviews", my word processor underlines it in red. The word "worldview" doesn't have a plural; since there is only one world, there can be only one worldview—the one that corresponds to that world.