A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.

If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.

One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

> People are the same everywhere

That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.

Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.

But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.

> We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.

And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.

It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.

And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down with executing people for apostasy?

Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.

What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.

And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

I will only add - I speak from experience here.