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The complaint he has about Asians at Harvard seems somewhat valid. If there's a large tendency among them to just go for a comfy upper-middle class professional lifestyle, than these people have no business being at an elite school, if 'elite' is to have any meaning. Harvard should probably select people in a different way. 100% there are way you can figure out who has leader potential and who hasn't.
It means they should be at 2nd tier schools which can adequately prepare them for their careers, and leave places for the real elite - intelligent, ambitious, ruthless people for others who are a better fit.
Indian Bronson is a known bad actor, associated with J.Arthur Bloom who is some sort of fed baby and who Thought to be involved in some BS 'deradicalisation' meaning channelling all politics that may change the status quo into fruitless directions.
Might I just note that taking people with a known absence of morals and putting them in charge of your society falls under the heading of Bad Ideas?
I'm not a totalitarian. No one should be 'in charge' of society.
Is there a plan for putting that wish into reality that you're not sharing? If not, I fail to see the use of stating the 'should's in this case. The question was if you really think putting elites that are ruthless in charge of society is good for us.
Who is 'us' here?
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Isn't BAP's point that he thinks Han people are relentlessly ruthless in their pursuit of sociopathic ambition to the point where it degrades culture? He says:
I don't mean this as a gotcha, but the biggest frustration I have around "race discourse" is that people seem to just ladle on negative adjectives to the race under discussion instead of being precise. Are they smart-but-passive rule followers, or smart-but-sociopathic rule breakers?
No, he says too man Asians who graduate from Harvard just become highly paid upper-middle class professionals instead of actual elites- business, media, political leaders etc.
As any population, mix of both. Consider e.g. the illegal taxi thing.. It's rule-breaking of a useful but only mercantile kind. Doesn't impress him in the same way, e.g. Chinese seizure of Vancouver would.
He's right though that the Chinese with their ideas are going to wreck a system that evolved to work for a population much more prone to guilt and ideas about morality.
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I believe the synthesis would be, “They assiduously follow rules when the local context has a rigid and actively-vigilant authority structure which can be reliably expected to hold them accountable for transgressions. They break the rules when in a context where the authority is lax, or when the rules can be easily gamed. In both cases, their attitude toward the rules is not motivated by an intrinsic sense of guilt (conscience), but rather by a keen social awareness of what it’s possible to get away with at any given time and in any given context.”
Coherent, thanks.
I guess my response would be an addendum: "And that's a good thing." People are universally selfish, and I'd attribute better success at recognizing when to follow rules and when to break them as just a natural outcome of intelligence instead of a lack of character. (I also recognize that many would see that just as a defect in my own character.)
I think there is an additional distinction to be made here though. Towards what end was the rule broken?
Rule-breaking to achieve the true honest to god objective more effectively? Good.
Rule-breaking to accomplish apparent/personal objectives (that are often orthogonal or antithetical to the true objective). Understandable, but bad. Think of fluffing up meaningless KPI's and other forms of underhanded rent seeking.
In my observation, non-westerners (including the elites) don't have a strong cultural taboo towards the second kind of objective. (And what's the problem as long as you and your family is richer off in the end?). Westerners don't either, but a higher enough proportion of them do, for it to be worth something.
Ofcourse if you are observing a system with a birds eye view, it's obvious why the second system is worse.
It's hard to quantify this but it just feels to me that placing an utmost devotion to the honest to god objective even at the cost of one's own status and wealth is a very.... Christian/Western notion. Other cultures do that as means to an end towards personal status/wealth, not vice versa.
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Whether it's good or bad, while a fascinating discussion, is not germane.
It is at odds with how Western civilization works. We expect the individual to police himself and society with an internally consistent ethic and guilt. God is always watching you in particular.
And the people who are educated to form the elite of Western society should understand and hold to Western values. In principle.
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Well congratulations, you’ve just described all humans in every historical context, with compulsive rule-followers being the rare exception.
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Just winging an answer here, but I think the idea is that when it comes to personal gain they don't feel guilt and will ruthlessly defect against norms to get what they want. If caught, they will feel shame, which is distinct. C.f. the staggering rates of academic misconduct right down to cheating in university, which afaict is much more a Han problem than anyone else's.
OTOH, when it comes to official dogma, they don't seem interested in questioning it much at all. Much more conformist. This is a difference on average and there will be exceptions. But, they're two different things. Conflating both with 'rule following' is the problem here.
Scandinavians seem the same way re: conformity. It's interesting to wonder why and how. Again, the off-the-cuff supposition would be that Scandis are that way because they evolved in high-trust societies with low corruption and could generally benefit from believing the authorities, who were generally correct and benevolent. Whereas the Han evolved in a low-trust environment where people questioning authority tended to have their families exterminated to several degrees. Point deer make horse. Not questioning authority is beneficial either way, but for very different reasons, and so will play out differently.
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