19 December 2023
A recent article posted to Lew Rockwell's site is very enlightening about human nature.
Americans assume they understand human nature from a very narrow sample, bringing to the task a whole range of biases. We assume the rest of the world is just like us, when the vast majority of the human race has never been anything like us at all. Westerners are unique among all civilizations and societies in human history. We are very much an anomaly.
In this article, an Indian writer talks about his native homeland. Granted, he writes from a position and bias subservient to the Anglo-Saxon brand of Western Civilization, but that means he knows how to talk to us about something we could hardly imagine.
Our daily wage worker is submissive and harbors an extreme inferiority complex, addressing you with "sir" in every sentence. However, if you afford him respect and a seat at a table, he transforms into a roaring tyrant. He sees all social relations through an oppressor-subservient lens. Even in moments of submission, you must watch your back, as his show of respect is transactional. Gratitude and honor are foreign concepts to him.
If, through the magic of diversity quotas -- potentially reaching 50% or more -- he gets into a position of power, he will likely outdo his thoroughly corrupt predecessors in sadism, venality, and, of course, incompetence. He will be particularly ruthless with people of his kind. This is an essential part of India's karmic cycle, the never-ending cycle of depravations. And without consciousness, the karmic cycle cannot be broken.
Unhinged from any moral values, he ... cannot discern right from wrong, perpetually swaying based on expediency, materialistic desires, and survival, fluidly, instinctively, without any thought or emotional reaction, compromising with the milieu.
He goes on in this vein, pointing out how the people of India exist in a world so different from ours that we simply cannot grasp why they do not respond to changes in the environment as we expect. These are people with zero trust and only a very thin veneer of loyalty to their own kind. The only reason they show any preference for their own kind here in the US is because it's more comfortable to continue living in a familiar environment. As the writer says, it's merely transactional.
Thus, it's rare to find someone of Hindu background that is loyal to anything at all except their own comfort. It's not the simple hedonism of western slobs; these would often admit to a certain amount of moral conscience. You would think folks from India are psychopaths with no conscience, but they are loyal to a strong religious conviction that being selfish and fake is a virtue.
And they are hardly alone in this. Many African societies share a lot of this, as do many Far Eastern societies (though with a strong filial piety). It shows up to some degree across the Middle East (moderated somewhat by Islam), and even in Eastern Europe. It shows up in variations starting from our southern border and running south to Tierra del Fuego. The West is unique in holding to a high-trust social standard. Everyone else thinks westerners are deluded.
And need I say it? The Hebrew people were more like Hindus than they were to westerners, as the Hebrews were a generally low-trust society. This was contrary to the Law of Moses, and was a primary source in Israel's moral failure as a nation.
The problem is not high-trust versus low-trust, but whom you trust, and who should be able to trust you. As Jesus noted in the tale of the Good Samaritan, the priest and Levite were in breach of the Law, because they should have assumed the wounded man was a Jew, and that it was their duty to care for him (those men would not normally have been traveling alone, but would have been accompanied by at least a pair of servants each).
The point for us is that we represent Jesus Christ. He did not live in a high-trust society; we should not read His teachings and actions through a high-trust lens. We absolutely must trust the Lord, and should strive to trust each other in a qualified way. We should expect a certain amount of failure in others. We should hold forth the moral standards that come with serving Christ. The real point is that we should ensure others can trust us.
Comments
randy
Thx for this post. Long time reader 1st time comment. I have long said that we all assume that everyone grew up the same way we did. At university in the late 70's, my eyes were opened. 30 thousand students and a west Texas school. I have been from a large urban background, regular forced christian church attendance. The political current term is A person of color (PoC). Culture clash.
I was reminiscing this morning with my sister, "One of the dumbest things I have ever done, two black guys running across campus with a small TV." This was the day before class started, the scene occurred at midnight. I had picked the TV up from my high school classmates mother the same day that my parents drove the several hundred miles to the campus. I knew where the TV had come from and we were running because it was very cold, the middle of January.
Some data points from this time. One of the local churches had announced that the weekly collection, offering on Sunday service, was $1,000,000. My girl friend said something that I will never forget, "This town has a church on every corner." 70% of the incoming freshmen class did not finish university. The local university police hated the students and carried 41 magnum pistols.
I came from a low trust urban culture to a high trust university setting and graduated from a high trust culture to the present, shall I say clown world?
CatRez
Thanks for contributing. It's important for us all to be aware how others experience this world.
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