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“Merry Christmas,” says my friend's husband.

It's a surreal moment.

He's Jewish, I'm Pagan. Christmas isn't a terribly active category for either of us.

Do I detect irony? No. I shake my head and smile.

“You too,” I say, pondering the complexities of human interaction.

As my friend and I enter the store, we're met with a near-solid bank of red.

It's January 3, 2025.

“Gee, I wonder what holiday's coming up next,” she deadpans.

In western societies (like all societies), people have fundamental and largely unspoken assumptions about how the world is supposed to work and how we are to behave.

Subscribers to these assumptions believe that they are inherently entitled to certain rights, for example, and that governance should protect these rights and enable redress if they are violated: something called justice. They assume that sexually exclusive life commitment by two partners is the default and only “real” relationship format, which is known as monogamy. They view men as superior to women in a wide variety of ways, and that women exist primarily to advance the wishes of men, a system called patriarchy. They accept hierarchical authority to set behavioral rules and the policing power of governance up to and including the usage of violence to enforce them, an arrangement known as the social contract. They view other cultures as inferior to their own, and believe it acceptable to subjugate and exploit them for their cultural resources and homelands, which is colonialism. They view darker-skinned people and people of non-European extraction with suspicion, if not hostility and/or contempt, which is racism. They assume that an acceptably “normal” relationship is between a (cis-gendered) man and a (cis-gendered) woman, which is heteronormativity. They assign particular qualities, behaviors, interests and even colors as “belonging” to one gender or another, which are gender norms. They agree that the exchange of labor ultimately benefiting an investor class for the means to acquire life necessities like shelter, food and health care is a valid and normal transaction, and that they are entitled to whatever they can afford with money, which is capitalism, and that to loyally and diligently engage in this exchange is both a moral good, which is celebrated as the work ethic, and will lead to economic and status advancement, which is meritocracy. They are uncomfortable and insecure about sexuality and pleasure, which leads them to condemn those who openly enjoy and celebrate them, condemning them as immoral hedonists.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Overculture lately: how the dominant values and paradigms of our societies inform how we think, how we speak, and what we do.

For a discussion of all that, I invite you to listen to this week’s episode of THE WONDER podcast. That will give you a good sense of what I’m talking about. It was a great conversation with Arwen Gwyneth.