Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

> There is nothing inherently superior about Western culture.

I'm not necessarily intending to contradict this outright, but after having just spent a summer reading through the history of the collectivist cultures in Russia/China during the last century, all I could think of is how lucky I was not to be born into that.

So, sure, nothing "inherently" superior, but certainly comparatively superior, in my opinion.

People in Russia and China are saying the same thing about the West, having read critical histories of the modern West (e.g. Wang Huning, America Against America).

Based on the data, a lower/middle class person born in PRC almost certainly has better prospects of upward mobility and avoiding poverty.

Interesting. I just read a long expose on Mao's party and the tens of millions of Chinese people they are responsible for killing. Can you recount a similar story of the West? Just trying to understand how it compares.

There's a huge amount of documented history of mass killings, destruction of institutions, and economic exploitation by the West and USA in particular. By American authors, too.

Frankly, I'm astonished that you aren't aware of this.

Name one on par with Stalin’s agricultural reforms or the Cultural Revolution or the madness in Cambodia.

I never said I wasn't aware of the faults of the West. I'm not naive enough to think Western culture is anything close to being innocent of crimes (many which are, as you pointed out, documented).

However, I'm simply pointing out that the collectivist culture of these countries in the 20th century was responsible for killing vast swathes of their own populations. My question was, of the documented horrors influenced by Western culture, which do you see as being comparative to this unfathomable death toll?

Genocide of Native American peoples, enslavement of Africans, political subjugation of LatAm, largest modern gulag system (#1 prisoners per capita, prison slavery still practiced).

And Wang Huning's political conclusions from that would also largely support most of the imperialist actions of USA such as the forceful integration of natives and a dominant, hegemonic culture to ensure total stability.

Like, as postliberals the CCP and Russia do not like the West not because they were once dominant empires that conquered the world, in fact they respect that. They hate the West because of their belief in democracy, in diversity, in individualism and the belief in human rights.

Russia did have some problems, but China suffered badly due to colonialism.

Unquestionably some of these were unacceptable acts. But the numbers don't stack up. There's also a huge qualitative difference.

According to [0] there was a population decline adding up to 4 million native deaths (from all causes, including hunger and disease) over the past half a millennium.

Russia and China killed 5-10 million of their own people just in the past century. They had cannibal banquets where they quite literally ate the rich in public ceremonies. China, right now, has more than a million Muslims in prison camps, churning out gadgets for the communist economic machine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th...

If the issue is that you hate the United States, you'll always find something to criticize, and I think we'll never find common ground.

I grew up surrounded by many anti-American ideas. But when I tried to examine that place from a neutral point of view, in the proper context, after traveling to and living in many places, I found it impossible not to become a raving fan.

I had a really hard time stomaching the cannibalism. I had no idea this all happened until I started digging into it more recently. The stories of people being disemboweled while still alive and having their intestines feasted on just seems incomprehensible.

Puts a new spin on it when lefties tweet to "eat the rich". Stomach churning stuff.

Well that begs the question of why was China so weak that they could be easily colonized and exploited by the UK, Japan, and other foreign powers? At the time they didn't lack for population, natural resources, technology, ports, etc. Was their weakness caused by culture or something else? In other words, why were they the colonized instead of the colonizers?

I'm not trying to make excuses for the crimes against humanity committed in China by the colonial powers. But we need to look deeper into the root causes of historical events.

Well, Mao also “unified” China by systematically going into every province and murdering the opposition. Then of course they attempted to extend influence into Korea and Vietnam.

I don’t think it’s accurate to pin imperialism as a uniquely Western thing.

The locus of fast development will always develop superiority narratives. The fact is that there will always be a locus of concentrated development and it's not because it has a special culture.

> The locus of fast development will always develop superiority narratives.

True

> The fact is that there will always be a locus of concentrated development

Also true

> and it's not because it has a special culture.

I don't think this is always true. Why can't there be cultures that are more likely to serve as a locus of fast development? Sure, there are geographic and climatic factors, but there are also cultural factors.

Where would this cultural specialty sit? We're all the same naked apes everywhere. Culture develops on the resources available. The human particles are too homogeneous for a group of special human behaviors to cause development. It is much more likely that the overall configuration of economic forces to cause the storms of extra value falling somewhere to give rise to the development and following cultural assertiveness.

Kinda like the rain forest. It's the global rain patterns that cause them. It's not that the rain forests have a special rain attracting power.

> If the issue is that you hate the United States, you'll always find something to criticize, and I think we'll never find common ground.

That's the issue, I'm not viewing this through a moral lens. I know you believe a priori the West is essentially Good and communism is essentially Bad, because that is what we are taught in school. Then it becomes easy to find evidence that fits your conclusion, there is literally a government-backed industry manufacturing such "evidence" (USG has earmarked something like $3B purely for funding anti-China propaganda). There's no point trying to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

I think both systems have pros/cons, and the proof is in the pudding. China evolved out of a difficult colonial period and civil war to become world leader in many technologies.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

It’s the opposite of a rain forest in every interesting way.

Development springs from us, it doesn’t appear out of the sky like rain.

Having personally experienced the humans in various places, I’m astonished at how differently people see and engage with the world. The difference in outcome, however, is all too predictable.

> I know you believe a priori the West is essentially Good and communism is essentially Bad, because that is what we are taught in school.

I think you're attacking a strawman here, what OP is pointing out for the faults of the West, it is still a preferable choice in comparison to the brutality the Communists performed on on their own people. It's ironic really because the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward very much is a difficult thing to ignore, if at all neccessary given that Asian Tigers that China modeled itself from, in Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan did not have to resort to such policies to achieve their wealth.

I grew up in the third world in an anti-US intellectual environment. I lived in and visited countries from across the spectrum.

Now, I've concluded that the West is Good and communism is Bad. Nothing a priori about it. My only prior is that I want people to be nice, rich, happy, and free.

To say they didn't lack in technology is just crazy. By the late 18th century early 19th century around the time of the first opium war, the technological differences was quite sound, such that militarily there was no way China cannons e.g. matched anything the West had, allowing UK's navy to bombard China from practically anywhere without any consequences. In fact even into the early 20th century, during the siege of Xi'an during the 1930s, they were still using ladders, etc. to try the breach the walls like they were doing a millennium ago.

I think nradov's question stands. Why was this the case?

Look deeper. At one point China was far more technologically advanced than the UK (or rather its predecessor states). Why did China fall so far behind by 1839? Was it culture or some other factor?

Unfortunately this is not a question that can be easily addressed in a single comment on a forum, nor in a blog post. I know my answer sounds like a cop-out, but if you are willing to invest the time and energy, I'd highly recommend reading Ian Morris' magnum opus Why the West Rules -- For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.

> They had cannibal banquets where they quite literally ate the rich in public ceremonies.

Out of curiosity, what are the sources for this claim? I'm not disputing at all that communist regimes have committed large-scale evil (often beyond my wildest imagination), but nonetheless I'd like to verify this.

This is a good question with a very complicated answer. But to give a short but inaccurate answer: the older a polity becomes the worse it gets at adapting to change due to its internal politics becoming more complicated. We're seeing that in the US right now with the last three very polarizing elections.

Based on your source, that 4 million was around 96% of the Native American population.

Whereas for China and Russia, it was less than 1%.

That's a big difference.

> My only prior is that I want people to be nice, rich, happy, and free.

Even if it happens under a communist party, as in China?

There's many reasons. But one of the biggest reasons is probably simply hubris. That is Europe was importing as much technology, philosophy, resources and know how from around the world, leading up to the 18th-19th century. In fact a lot of the philosophers were to some degree familiar with some of the basics of Chinese philosophy, with e.g. David Hume, more than likely reading Chinese Buddhist philosophy (which is why many Buddhist experts tell beginners to read some of Hume's work to understand Buddhist philosophy). The fact that the Chinese did not believe in a god like the Christian God, etc. and yet were an advance civilization did help intellectuals believe that there was an alternative to e.g. scholastic philosophy and to the Christian religion, leading up to the 19th century ideas that there simply was no God (Nietzsche, etc.). It wasn't until around the 19th century when the West began to develop racial theories that they were somehow superior to everyone else, and therefore had nothing to learn from the old world.

The Chinese at some point went around the world during the Ming dynasty, sailing to Africa, etc. Found out that everyone was pretty much uncivilized in terms of technology, etc. and thought there was nothing actually out there. So later on they thought it was simply a waste of government funds to go on such expeditions, especially when everyone seemed to want to reach China instead to conduct in trade rather than the other way around. Therefore the Ming became extremely inward looking, etc. And that carried on into the Qing dynasty. But prior to that in the Song, etc. China was pretty advance. Another issue is that voyages, etc. could not be monetized. Merchants who took risks to explore the world, etc. made 100x more back on their investments, especially after the fall of the Byzantine empire to Ottomans which halted the overland silk road, forcing Europeans to find another route by sea to Asia for items they needed. The Chinese couldn't find such profits at least not in the 14th century.

Obviously this is all very simplistic, and you could easily write 1000s of pages on this topic. But to a large degree today's China is Europe of the past, where they feel they can learn from everywhere, but the West, not so much. Seems as if the two have traded places, where the West is hubristic. Thinking everyone else is pretty much stupid, and uncivilized. Although maybe mentalities of both is starting to shift again.

Google the Guangxi Massacre, the official investigation itself agrees that people very much killed and eaten in a frenzy of class struggle during the cultural revolution.

No, it's not special people that develop civilization. Civilization development is a higher order phenomenon that doesn't depend on personalities. The Whig narrative that special personalities drive development is a post hoc explanation with no basis in evidence.

The narratives around how such cultural traits evolve is not clear, and I agree are unlikely to be the post-hoc rationalization of "Great Men" setting them up.

Yet there do seem to be some traits that enable more "success" in at least something close to industrial, market-oriented societies. For example having a high-trust or risk-tolerant cultural values seems to have some success correlations.