Transcription
You hear a lot of people these days grieving the death of monoculture. This one shared mainstream pop culture we all have or used to have that's now going away. Basically between 1945 and maybe 2005, humanity experienced this sort of glitch where for the first time millions of people saw the exact same images and heard the exact same truth simultaneously.
For most of human history your village was maybe 150 people. But now with the invention of the radio and then the television and then the internet, your village grew to millions and billions of people forced into a single sensory room. So if you think about it, in the world of our medieval ancestors before all of this mass communication, what did reality and pop culture actually look like? Well, we kind of spent the 20th century all on one singular pop culture acid trip together, and now we've splintered off into all of these much smaller, algorithmically specified acid trips.
Looking back to the Middle Ages, the cultural acid trip was always much more local. Have you ever heard of urgot? It's this fungus that grows on damp rye, and it actually contains lysurgic acid, which is the chemical precursor to LSD. Medieval diets were hyperlocalized, meaning generally you ate what was grown within a close proximity to your village. If some of the rye crop close to your village got infected with urgot and then that rye was turned into bread that was sold at the local market, suddenly everyone in the village would be absolutely tripping balls. Meanwhile, 5 miles up the river, maybe their rye didn't have any urgot at all, and they're just going about their usual lives. Two medieval villages 5 mi apart existing in completely different realities.
I know this sounds absolutely insane, but it actually did happen. We can look at the chronicle of Flotoart of Reams from around 945 AD, who was an eyewitness to probably the most famous ergotism outbreak of the Middle Ages. He watched people literally go crazy from eating bad bread. And he wrote, "A plague of fire began to rage among the people, consuming their limbs and leaving them blackened while many were seized by strange visions and tremors."
Now, go back to that mental map we were talking about of two villages 5 mi apart. You've got one going nuts, the other one's totally normal, and most importantly, there's no national televised news to tell the normal village about the hallucinating one. Maybe someone might wander over there and tell them, but that's a maybe. It's not a certainty.
This all might sound pretty silly to you, but it's actually exactly the paradigm we live in now. Say you live in an apartment building with a next-door neighbor literally on the other side of the wall. You could sit scrolling TikTok at night and see people dancing and clips from TV shows and red carpet interviews or whatever, a 100 ft away from you. Your neighbor could also be scrolling TikTok and seeing insanely radical political propaganda or AI-doctored versions of world events. They're getting blasted on Urgot and you're not. Or maybe it's the other way around. Brain rot, more like brain Urgot. Can I get a hell yeah? But in the morning, you both wake up and go work your jobs and sit in traffic and live in the same physical world, but not the same reality.
A knight in northern England and a merchant in southern Italy lived in totally different cultural realities too. There was Catholicism as the unifying force, and both men would have had somewhat similar experiences with the mass and the liturgical rhythms of Catholic life, but there were cultural differences even there. And apart from that, it's not like they both had the same bards they liked or they both knew the same jig.
Now, we could dive into pop culture in the high and late Middle Ages, but I feel like you already know all about that. Chivalry, tournaments, King Arthur, cool fancy hats. How much more can I really say about these things? A lot, actually. And I certainly will in future videos, but for now, I want to dive into what pop culture was like in the early Middle Ages, what's more commonly referred to as the Dark Ages. I specifically want to travel to northern Scotland to get acquainted with the Pictish people and their culture because I think they give us an interesting mirror to examine ourselves with.
When you think Scotland these days, you probably think bagpipes and Irn-Bru and truly disturbing takeout options. But go back in time about 1700 years and things looked a lot different. Scotland was populated by a race of uncivilized barbarians in loincloths with bizarre rituals and truly shocking physical appearances. Oh, wait. Sorry. I'm still reading the section on modern Scotland. Well, I guess not much has changed. Just kidding. Shout out to Scotland. Amazing people and one of the most beautiful places in the world.
But back in the day, the region was populated by the Picts. And this was around the same time the Romans had colonized Britain. They came into contact with the Picts and thought they were complete savages with an insane sense of style. And Julius Caesar, even though he never actually saw them in person, wrote that they stain themselves with woad, which produces a dark blue color. And by this means they are more terrifying to face in battle. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Picts were covered in tattoos or body paint. There's still a healthy degree of historical argument about which it was. Pict comes from the Latin word "picti," meaning painted folk, or possibly tattooed ones. And the contemporary chroniclers are split on whether the Picts were just rocking body paint or if this was permanent ink.
The one thing they weren't split on, though, was that they hated these dudes. Gildas, a sixth-century British churchman writing hundreds of years after Caesar, described them as "loathsome hordes, dark swarms of worms that emerge from the narrow crevices of their holes when the sun is high, preferring to cover their villainous faces with hair rather than their private parts and surrounding areas." Honestly, these people sound like they would be a lot of fun to party with. And Gildas sounds like a classic Dark Ages racist, but that's neither here nor there. The Picts were clearly outsiders, and they also clearly leaned into this.
Now, I've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately, and I wanted to talk about it in this video because I feel like it was maybe the peak of monoculture in the United States, and it can show us how much things have actually changed. If you don't know what it is, it's a show centered around an advertising agency in New York in the 1960s, which is what I'm saying is the peak of American monoculture. And the protagonist, or or anti-protagonist, is Don Draper, this handsome advertising genius who has a lot of personal problems. I promise there's a killer connection here with the Picts, so stay with me.
Don has this creative team that works under him, and they're always pitching him ideas for new advertising campaigns. Here's the interesting part. He always tells them to "dumb it down. Take that part out. American audiences won't understand that. That's too complicated." I don't know if he would have thought of it this way, but the reason he's saying this is because he's positioned at an extremely unique time in history. There's still the effects of the post-war boom. Most people have a television set and they're watching the same handful of shows altogether every night. Movie stars are household names. Men wear suits and hats everywhere. And your parents would beat you with a shoe if they caught you listening to Bob Dylan or whatever.
My point here is that especially in the later seasons when television advertising becomes the thing, Donnie Boy recognizes that if something isn't on one of the three major networks, ABC, CBS, or NBC, it might as well not exist. His agency, Sterling Cooper, is selling the idea of the mass brand, this vibe that we are all sharing simultaneously. And it's the first time in history that regional and tribal markers are starting to disappear. There's this forced social cohesion. And whether you're in Northern Maine or Southern California, if you have a TV, you're experiencing the same culture. I can't stress enough how insane this would seem to our medieval ancestors. It would be like trying to explain to them that millions of people were having the same exact dream night after night, and it was a dream that they were never really waking up from.
Now, the reason the Picts are my medieval example is because they were the antithesis of this in every possible way, maybe more so than any other group of people for a thousand years. Just a super quick plug, Medieval Mindset merch has officially arrived. Hit the link in the description. You can get the Medieval Mindset t-shirt with this sick Charlemagne design on the back. 100% ringspun cotton, nine different colors, heavyweight, feels great. We've also got dad hats. We've got mugs in black and white. Check it out today. Also, go sign up for the Patreon. We do a book club. I do a weekly podcast. I post long-form essays on there that don't make it to the main channel as scripts and tons of other stuff, including sneak previews of my videos before they actually drop. So, go ahead, sign up, get your merch, join the Medieval Mindset nation, castle, kingdom. Um, that's it. Anyway, back to the video.
Both the Saxons and the Romans came and tried to push their monocultures on these painted people of the north. But over and over again, the Picts chose local. And when I say local, I mean really local. You know how sometimes you'll see a meme on your For You page that is so ridiculously niche that you don't know anyone in your life you could show it to? Like it would require so many layers of random knowledge that it's basically unintelligible outside of your feed. The Picts were already doing this many, many, many, many moons ago.
Like most Dark Age cultures, they didn't have a standardized Latin alphabet or really any kind of alphabet that historians are aware of, but they did have Pictish symbol stones. You can still see today all of the cool stuff they came up with, like the Pictish beast or the double disc. What did these symbols mean? Your guess is as good as mine, and archaeological surveys seem to suggest that they could have meant different things in different regions. Pict land was a confederation of tribes organized by overkings and lesser kings. Government started to become more centralized later in the Middle Ages, but this is a time when culture was passed around horizontally. There wasn't this grand capital of high nobility deciding the fashion trends and whatnot. If you were in a certain area and you saw a stone with the Pictish beast carved into it, you could probably tell that it was made by one of your tribesmen and you could understand exactly the message he was trying to communicate, even though someone else from a different Pictish tribe might not be able to.
Now, one thing that's important to point out here is that all of this was totally deliberate. I've talked in other videos about how Latin was, of course, the common language of medieval Europe. No matter what your local dialect was, the language of commerce and education and religion was Latin. Obviously, part of the post-Roman legacy in the West. The Picts just didn't want any part of that. They wouldn't give up even an inch of their local identity. So, they just opted out. They went with the symbols instead. It's very likely that the tattoos were also a big part of this, and it was how they distinguished themselves from their non-Pictish neighbors and, more importantly, from the Romans, Saxons, and Britons to the south. To them, Pictish culture was the only culture, and trying to integrate into a broader mainstream would only water down what was actually important to them.
Bringing it back to the modern day, there are shows on TV right now, like "Land Man," that are absolutely massive. I'm talking millions and millions of viewers. Your parents probably watch these shows, and all of them were apparently made by the same guy, Taylor Sheridan. The thing is, if you're under 40 years old, there's a very good chance you've never even heard of these shows. Let me reiterate again. "Land Man" is the biggest show on TV, and I would bet if you're watching this video right now, based on my audience metrics, you've probably never seen a single episode. So, what are you watching? You're watching your own Pictish symbols of Medieval Mindset videos and brain rot on your Instagram feed, or you're picking and choosing whatever you watch on Netflix based on your specific interests. In a way, you're opting out. You're choosing not to learn Latin, or in this case, "Land Man." People talk about this like it's some terrible thing that's tearing our culture apart, but I think it's kind of beautiful. Obviously, my big hope with all of this is that it goes offline, too, and we start reinvesting our time and energy into local, regional culture. I think a lot of us are going to realize in the coming years that local culture is absolutely worth fighting for.
Now, let's go a little east because I feel like I don't talk about the Byzantine Empire enough on this channel, which is ironic because we're basically reliving their history. Everything in the Byzantine world revolved around the capital city of Constantinople, just like everything in American culture, at least up until recently, revolved around Hollywood. But there's a fundamental question here that we have to answer. How in God's name did Constantinople manage to be the most technologically advanced city on Earth for 1,000 years without ever forcing a standardized mindset or monoculture on its people?
Well, actually, it tried to with the Byzantine Iconoclasm. Emperor Leo III decided it was high time to press a monoculture on the people. Things had not been going well militarily, and his boys in the field had been repeatedly trounced by the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate. So he, of course, concluded that this must be divine wrath caused by the worship of icons. The Byzantines were Orthodox Christians, and if you've ever seen Orthodox icons, they're absolutely gorgeous. It's worth noting here that St. John of Damascus, one of the foremost Orthodox thinkers of the time, famously wrote, "I do not worship matter. I worship the God of matter who became matter for my sake and worked out my salvation through matter." The historical record is pretty blurry on whether or not anyone was actually worshiping these things, but Leo decided they were, and also decided it was high time to do something about it. Also, just like with Catholicism in Western Europe, the icons showed thousands of local saints and different artistic styles that represented the beautiful cultural patchwork that the empire actually was.
To understand this next part, we have to go back even further, but stick with me here. I promise it'll all make sense. 400 years earlier, in 312 AD, the emperor Constantine was fighting a civil war against his rival Maxentius for control of the Western Roman Empire. Constantine had already moved the Roman capital to Byzantium, which would come to be known as Constantinople, and he had laid the foundations for what would become the Byzantine Empire. Now he just needed to settle things to the west. The Romans were always big on divine signs, just like Leo was a few centuries later when he decided the Umayyads were a sign of divine anger. The night before this big battle with Maxentius, Constantine famously looked to the sky for one of those divine signs. And what he saw was pretty mind-blowing. It was a huge cross with an inscription under it saying, "Conquer by this."
Now, at this point, Christianity was still a minority religion that was growing in influence, and paganism was still popular throughout the empire. The next day, Constantine painted crosses on all of his banners and crushed Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and decided, "Hey, I saw that cross in the sky. I did what it told me and I won. This Jesus guy must be right about something." So, he went about unifying the empire under Christianity with mixed results that I'm sure I'll cover in another video.
All right, so what does all of this have to do with monoculture or Emperor Leo? A lot, actually. And thank you for sticking with me through my lengthy digression. Constantine had had so much success unifying his people under the symbol of the cross. And as Leo looked out at his culturally diverse empire that also happened to be coming off the tail end of a series of humiliating military defeats, he decided to try and do the exact same thing. In his legal code, the Ecloga, Leo humbly described himself as "the shepherd whose duty it was to keep the flock from straying into corrupt practices." So he did away with all of these locally unique icons to create one uniform worship that everyone could abide by. And I look good today. By banning icons, the Byzantine state was basically saying, "You don't need a local image in your village to get you closer to God. You only need the imperial cross and the emperor's law."
All right. So, what became of all this? Well, people weren't too happy. Turns out having your own unique regional practices is a natural human impulse, and people like to protect their culture from being absorbed into some homogeneous blob. If your village in Cappadocia had an icon of St. George, that image was a point of pride and local safety. When Leo sent his men to whitewash an image like this, it certainly felt to the locals like they were actually trying to do away with the village's identity. It took a little over a century, but eventually this attempt at getting rid of icons turned out to be a massive waste of time and resources. The Triumph of Orthodoxy was declared in 843 AD under the Empress Theodora, and it basically meant that the state had realized a hard truth. A centralized empire cannot survive without local meaning. The government literally had to back down because the social fabric was tearing. And it turned out that people were more loyal to their local icons than their emperor, which actually makes a lot of sense considering how often the Byzantine emperors were replaced.
I guess you could say the social fabric is tearing in the same way today. Just look at both major political parties in the United States. For decades, there was at least some degree of intellectual and cultural agreement on both sides. But in the last few years, it's all splintered apart, and now everyone is losing their minds. Now, it's not like you're a Republican or a Democrat. You have to be specifically part of some subset of those parties, usually centered around a specific influencer. This affects the messaging, too, because with the internet and all of our individualized algorithms, it's getting harder and harder to send one cohesive political message. It all ends up getting filtered and warped, and anyone with a little bit of charisma and social media acumen can pick up the ball and become the figurehead of a new movement. Basically, young people don't want CNN and Fox News to tell them what to think anymore. So, they're picking the local icons of the algorithm over the decaying dinosaur of the media empire.
This brings us to the question of what it even means to be famous in a world without monoculture. Maybe now in 2026, you could be kind of famous to a 100 million people like Flo from the Progressive commercials or something. In the Middle Ages, you would be deeply famous to a 100 people, and that meant a lot more. This is why I'm saying we need to bring back the concept of the local legend. The guy who everybody in your town knows because he did something crazy or he's just a weird, awesome dude.
Let's travel to medieval Africa so we can learn exactly how to bring this back and make regional culture flourish again. The Mali Empire was based in West Africa and lasted from 1226 to 1610 AD. It had a history before 1226, but those records were only preserved through the tradition of oral storytelling that was a cornerstone of the regional culture. I'm sure you've heard of the medieval European concept of the bard, who would travel and recount epic tales over and over again to different audiences all across the land. The Mali equivalent was the Griot. Except with the Griots, the significance ran even deeper than just transmitting the stories of those who had achieved something incredible. They were poets and historians and genealogists and musicians all wrapped into one. And they defined what it meant to be famous in medieval Africa.
The Griots would pass down stories from generation to generation. And each Griot would add details that made sense to their current audience. In a way, you could say modern fame is wide, but it's shallow. Like a lot of people might know who you are, but nobody really knows your story, no matter how much of it you share on Instagram. In the Mali Empire, like most places throughout the medieval world, fame was narrow, but it was deep, and most importantly, it was local. The Griots were the exclusive guardians of a specific family's history. Obviously, general popularity still mattered for the medieval concept of fame, but it was really more so a partnership between the real man of action and the eternal man of memory.
Let's look at the Sundiata story. Probably the most famous of all the Griot stories that can still be pieced together today. It dates at least as far back as the 13th century. And it tells the story of Sundiata Keita, who overcomes childhood sickness and exile to unite the Mandinka people, defeat the sorcerer king Sumanguru Kante, and establish the Mali Empire. In the story, there's this Griot named Bala Faseke, and he defines his role to King Sundiata by saying, "I am the word and you are the deed. I am the memory of mankind. By my word, the deeds of kings are saved for posterity. I hold the key to 36 kingdoms. Without me, the names of kings would fall into oblivion."
This is about as far from monoculture as you can possibly get, but it sounds pretty good, at least to me. Every noble family had its own private history, which basically meant that Mali society was a collection of deep, independent stories that all coexisted side by side.
Speaking of fame, there's this thing with the new wave of internet fame where you're more identified by your social media handle than your actual name. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but Mr. Beast's legal government name isn't actually Mr. Beast, and my name isn't actually Medieval Mindset, but it doesn't matter what our names are because you all know him as Mr. Beast and me as Medieval Mindset. You might think this is some new concept, but the Mali would love to have a word with you about that. They used this concept of praise names, or "mana," essentially to link themselves to a reality that was much larger than the individual self. You weren't just a single person. That kind of idea would be insane to the medieval mind anywhere. You were the latest iteration of your lineage, and you were also part of a larger divine creation. For the Mali, saying someone's praised name was this ritual act that brought invisible ancestors back into the room.
Going back to the story of Sundiata, he wasn't just the king. They also called him "the Lion of Mali," "the Son of the Buffalo Woman," "the Master of the Forge." I mean, the list of fantastic praise names goes on and on. If there's one thing you take from this video, it's that we absolutely need to bring this concept back. Don't call your unemployed friend by his regular name. Call him "the First Among the Jobless" or something like that. Make it cool and epic.
The natural modern impulse when hearing about something from history, like these praise names, is to conclude that they must have been doing it for the same reason that someone like Mr. Beast would do it. Mr. Beast is a lot catchier than Jimmy Donaldson, and it's easier to be remembered with a name like that. But the Mali weren't doing this to be original or unique. They wanted to be exemplary. They wanted to fit so perfectly into the legend of their ancestors that they became immortal. Woo! I'm getting goosebumps just talking about this. Don't you love history?
I don't really think we care about immortality anymore. And there's no way Andy Warhol could have known how right he was when he said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Think about it. There might be some influencer I see on my Instagram feed all the time, and to me, they're super famous, but you might not have ever heard of them. Even a few decades ago, this would have been unheard of.
There's this former CIA analyst named Martin Gurri, and he argued in his book, "The Revolt of the Public," that the 20th century was the era of the "high church of information." What he means by that is for about 80 years we lived in this state of mass consensus, but it wasn't because we actually agreed. It was just because we were all getting the exact same information. It's what Don Draper recognized and capitalized on, and what every big media company is scrambling to make sense of now that it's pretty much gone.
There is, of course, something beautiful and unifying about monoculture. It's nice to gather around the water cooler in the morning and discuss the same show everyone watched last night, but this isn't natural, and it isn't the way we're wired. Pop culture is turning back into medieval culture, and I think that's actually pretty great news.
But let's put the finishing touches on our medieval masterpiece here. We can sit around and mourn the death of monoculture until the cows come home. We can wonder why the Super Bowl, supposedly the pinnacle of American monoculture, gets lower and lower viewership ratings every year. I'm sure it's just because everyone's trapped in their social media bubble and not because the ads are all AI and the only ones that aren't AI are trying to convince you to get addicted to sports betting. Opting out and pursuing the things that actually enrich your soul seems to be the way to go.
There's the aspect of this where your algorithm is unique to you, but I think we need to take it a step further. I've mentioned in previous videos how the new sexy trend is to be chronically offline besides watching Medieval Mindset on YouTube. Obviously, be more like a Pict today, even if you're not heavily tattooed. Invest time and energy into what's actually going on in your community. And let's bring back a sense of localized, unified culture because it's the only positive response we can have to the death of this broader monoculture. Medieval people did it. Hell, everyone did it up until like 80 years ago. It's totally doable. And if you look, you can see there's a growing hunger for it, especially among the younger generations.
But what do you think about these trends? And more importantly, what would your Mali praise name be? Let me know in the comments. As always, I'm John. This has been Medieval Mindset. And remember, the past isn't gone. It's simply waiting to be rediscovered.