"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts"

Norman Mailer’s assertion holds culture as the fragile but powerful force keeping societies humane and individuals truly alive. The phrase “culture’s worth huge, huge risks” suggests that to nurture or defend culture, be it art, literature, philosophy, creativity, free dialogue, or critical thought, demands an openness to uncertainty and even peril. Genuine culture challenges prevailing dogmas, provokes difficult conversations, and urges acts of imagination that confront comfort zones. Such undertakings can seem hazardous to those invested in the safety of conformity, but without risking discomfort or destabilization, culture would stagnate and wither.

Mailer points to the gravity of losing culture: “Without culture we’re all totalitarian beasts.” Totalitarianism thrives in the absence of dissent, ambiguity, or nuance. A society stripped of culture loses its capacity for empathy and reflective self-critique. People become vessels for command and obedience, not inner lives and inquiry. Lacking culture, authority faces little resistance, and individuals drift toward deprivation of compassion, creativity, and individuality. In calling people “beasts,” Mailer underlines that the instinctual, unreflective side of human nature emerges when art, poetry, and philosophy are suppressed. Culture is the mechanism by which impulses are questioned, feelings are expressed, and values are collectively contested.

The quote recognizes that institutions and those hungry for power have often tried to suppress, co-opt, or control culture for their own ends. To protect and foster culture, then, is to engage in a sometimes perilous contest against the forces that prefer certainty to ambiguity, obedience to innovation, silence to song. The risks, social ostracism, censorship, even imprisonment, are real, but the alternative is worse: a flattening of human possibility. By insisting on the immense value of culture, Mailer offers a warning and a rallying cry: the preservation and exploration of culture is not only spiritually vital but also socially necessary, demanding courage and a willingness to disrupt the status quo.