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[–]Jacinda 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I posted a link earlier to a review of a book by a liberal Harvard Professor which attempted to identify unique aspects of Western culture. I've reposted an edited version of my submission statement below.

[According to Henrich, Westerners] exhibit a far greater "neurological and psychological" set of capacities for:

  • trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others

  • patience and self control

  • time drift and hard work

  • reduced in-group nepotism

  • free will and the capacity to make its own decisions

  • analytical over holistic thinking

  • impartial principles and objectivity

  • original and nonconformist thinking?

[Snip...]

Here is the gist of his thesis: the uniqueness of the West, its attachment to the rule of law, its representative institutions, its scientific predilection for drawing distinct categories and assigning objects with properties to account for their behavior, its intense attachment to the rights of individuals, are products of the unique ways in which the brains of whites came to be wired in the High Middle Ages. It was not that whites were accultured to think in a WEIRD way after they created modern liberal institutions; it was, rather, that they first began to think weirdly when the Catholic Church destroyed their kin-based organizations, their extended families, clans and lineages, and prohibited cousin marriages and polygynous marriages, in favor of nuclear monogamous families. [Cont...]

This explains why multiculturalism is such a threat; it destroys the high trust societies that Europeans have formed that benefit their particular way of thinking and operating, while simultaneously opening them to abuse by low trust, clannish, and nepotistic groups. Ironically the immigrants become a protected class; my own country now has entire government agencies that cater exclusively to third world immigrants at the expense of the original inhabitants.

The government, of necessity must become more authoritarian and little we start to resemble the third world.

The comments section in below the original article is also worth reading.