It's THE Culture, Stupid!...The Genesis of a Book well Lived....

                         

              The Genesis of It’s the Culture, Stupid!

By Tony Venuti

This book didn’t begin as a book. It began decades ago, although I didn’t know it at the time.

For years, I wrote blog posts, essays, arguments, observations, and reflections about the world around me. Some I published. Others I sent by email or left sitting in my inbox—some for more than a decade, some for decades. They weren’t chapters. They weren’t written to fill an outline. They were simply my thoughts, recorded as life happened.

I wrote about society, history, human nature, freedom, responsibility, and the often astonishing gap between what people believe and what they actually know. I had experiences worth examining, questions worth asking, and no shortage of opinions. But I wasn’t assembling a manuscript. I was living my life—and writing along the way.

Only later did I begin to see a connection among those scattered pieces. Again and again, I had returned to the same question: How does something become accepted as true, right, desirable, or even respectable simply because it has become POPULAR?

That question led me to POPULARIZED, to PopCULTure, and to the distinction between a perception of reality and reality itself. The essays, the posts, and the memories started to look less like separate writings and more like parts of one continuing conversation.

I didn’t invent a philosophy for the purpose of writing a book. I recognized the philosophy that had been taking shape through years of experience, observation, and effort. In that sense, the philosophy created the book—not the other way around.

And now there it is: It’s the Culture, Stupid! In print. A lifetime of thinking, doubting, learning, and assessing between two covers.

THE BOOK LIVED. I simply came to recognize it.