The Whole is greater than the Sum of its parts.

When you read the letters on a page, you don't find meaning in the individual letters, but in the collection of letters called words. So dissecting a word to find its meaning may seem obtrusive to our aim. The meaning of the letters has now transcended into the words. So now, even if you know the individual letters, you still need to know the meaning of the word as a whole to understand it.

This is understood by the society. As this society and culture is the transcendence of meaning from individuals, to a bigger whole. A collective meaning higher than the sum of its individual parts. Similarly an individual, has a bigger meaning than its individual organs, because now are not simply the assembly of organs, but we are also the interactions between them, and it's the personification of those interactions, which is you. Or if we continue on this path, we may reach atoms. Individual atoms, having zero meaning on its own. But when put together, they can study themselves in the shape of a human, or attack and eat another assembly of atoms, like in the case of lions and deers.

On the macro level, the micro level, even though existent, has very little meaning, as now its meaning is derived directly from its assembly and its interactions, and not from individual identity of the atoms.

So similarly, the ultimate enemy of the universe, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ensures the eventual death of the universe where, there will be only and only entropy, but that does not directly affect us. And even though, many people use arguments like, "What's the difference, if I work or not? No one's going to know about in, say, 400 years." or like, "If nothing is permanent, then what is the society and the human phenomenon striving to achieve?" This thinking about non-permanence is the direct result of thinking about macro problems, on the micro scale. When you are thirsty, you cannot think on the scale of individual molecules of water. They don't make sense at that time, even though it is the truth. If one believes that the non-permanence is the enemy, then serious thought is warranted, because that can be very easily broken down. To drive the point home, it can said, one's own body is non-permanent. The most personal object, one can imagine, having total dominance over, and seemingly the most permanent, our own human body, is actually not so. In reality, the human body is completely replaced, right down to each and every cell, once every 7 years. So the, person who once was, during the childhood, or during the adolescent age, is completely gone and totally replaced by another set of atoms, which also personify the very same human. There's no permanence in this universe. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is another side to this coin. It means that one is always permanent, infinitely, irrespective of the changes in the universe. This is also supported by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. "Energy cannot be created nor be destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another." Your actions and individuality is inerasable, from this universe. You are inseparable from this universe. So, if universe exists, then you exist, in some form or the other.

But if everything is permanent, then why does one die, in person or in memory? The answer again, is in the scale. One matters in the scale he/she is put into. An insect fight outside in the garden, or a supernovae explosion, billions of lightyears away, does not matter. We are thus, on the sweet little spot, between both these parameters. It is good to know about both the scales and its workings. And sometimes, it does help us on our scale, too, like in the case of medicine, or psychology, or similarly in the astronomical academia, but they do not directly affect us in a way our everyday lives do. 

So our culture, which has a greater meaning than all of us combined, is not something that can be so easily removed from the equation. It is actually not possible to ignore it. The dances, songs, art, literature, government, societies, all play a part, in the propagation of our species. And they have a bigger meaning than we can ever imagine.