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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I have a deep loathing for the Indian ethos of bending the truth or just straight out lying about things.

The power of just nodding in agreement, affirming that you understand, and then refusing to actually do it wins again and again.

It's amazing how unreasonably effective this tactic is, not that I condone it or anything.

It seems obvious to me that the yes-man strategy dominates all others as a way to get ahead. It's definitely the default model in most of the world. So why isn't it the default model in northern European culture? Why is Europe, especially northern Europe, so weird?

Because it doesn't work in Europe, which is just as well because yes man culture is a terrible basis for effective organisations. "Most of the world" got steamrolled by northern Europeans!

Why is Europe, especially northern western Europe, so weird?

There's an obvious answer but I dont think it's one a lot users here are going to like.

How so? If the idea is that Christians don't lie because of their Christian belief, wouldn't they start lying again once they become atheists? But that doesn't seem to have happened in, for example, the Nordic countries.

More convincing is that big changes happened once the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

Its not that "Christians don't lie" so much that the Christian worldview in general and Western attitudes regarding individual worth and the treatment of servants/subordinates in particular are unusually conducive to building trust in an otherwise low trust environment.

At the same time are we sure "wouldn't they start lying again once they become atheists?" Is not exactly what we are seeing? Do you believe that the Democratic party of Jimmy Carter would've allowed the current situation to occur? What about the party of Truman?

I hope he responds with a really off the wall interpretation like how the schisms among high IQ subsets of Europeans over theological quibbles turned into bloodshed resulting in a eugenic selection for intellectual disagreeableness.

Surely that's the kind of thing that selects for agreeableness. At least, that's what people claim about China.

Christianity led to long term cultural changes that resulted in the reaction to persistent and bloody disagreements being liberalism, and not to genocide.

Of course, that doesn't mean Christian societies can't be brutal and repressive- see the entire history of Russia- but the fragmentation in western Europe made bloody disagreements persistent enough long term to render that solution non-viable.

Christian Tzarist Russia, so brutal and so oppressive they executed in a 150 years what believers in human rationality and science killed in a year...

Important to keep the 'brutality' in perspective.

It's definitely viable in many cases to kill (all) those who disagree. However it's possible that in Western Europe the dissenters had too many resources for that.

Well yes. China did it. I'm specifically pointing to why Europe is different.

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