Your Culture Decides Your Fate

I used to think that individualism was the absolute best thing, and that any culture who didn’t practice individualism just happened to not know how individualism worked. Then I met the Chinese.

If you ask a Chinese person why they think the Chinese government is good, two things will happen. The first is that they will assure you that, actually, they don’t like the CCP, thank you very much. But then they’ll back that point up by saying the CCP is a necessary evil — that it simply is better to live under the shadow of a government that tells you what to do and how to act than to have to figure all that out yourself.

This, to me, is deeply and utterly insane.

As a born-and-raised proud American, there is probably nothing more alien to us than the thought patterns of the Chinese. In fact, I would argue that the only reason we do beef with them so much (and, to be fair, vice versa) is because of the dissonance that comes with thousands of years of sociological evolution in the complete opposite direction.

To be clear, I do get it now. I can understand the benefits of collectivism — the idea of the entire group uplifting every individual, rather than every person for themselves — I could just never agree with it. It’s true — your culture decides your fate.

Politics isn’t a problem. You can have a country with people who are more socialist, or capitalist — far right, or far left. I would even argue (as I’ve met many of them) that you could have a communist who is also an individualist — perhaps someone who does not quite understand the.consequences of communism, but could be a communist supporter regardless. No, it has to deal with a level deeper than this. It has to do with the culture.

Culture, of course, determines politics and religion. In some ways it works the other way around, but for the most part the culture element stays the strongest. This idea of individualism versus collectivism — of “individual as the unit” versus “group as the unit” — determines everything else. This is why I’ve given so much emphasis on the problem in the past.

And in those previous attempts, I spent more time arguing how individualism was the objectively correct answer. In hindsight, this was rather silly coming from the guy who thinks even morality is subjective. But I think it is a testament to how strong this bias is — people will wage entire wars over something they were told at birth.

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