No light at the end of the tunnel

Abstract

Culture is a system of attitudes, values, and knowledge that is widely shared within a society and transmitted from generation to generation. (...) The more central and early learned aspects of culture are resistant to change, both because it requires a massive effort to change central elements of an adult's cognitive organization, and because one's most central values become ends in themselves, the abandonment of which would produce deep uncertainty and anxiety. In the face of the major and enduring shifts in societal conditions, even central parts of a culture may be transformed but they are much more apt to change through intergenerational population replacement than by the conversion of already-socialized adults (Inglehart 1990).