The World's Most Toxic Value System
I have read this essay three times over the past few weeks, and I cannot agree more with both the writer of this essay and Ralph Peters, a person quoted in the essay. Here's the relevant portion:
Ralph Peters, in "Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States" (Parameters, Spring 1998, pp. 36-47), identified the following indicators of societal failure. Each is accompanied by a brief quote from his essay.
- Restrictions on the free flow of information.
- Whether on our own soil or abroad, those segments of humanity that fear and reject knowledge of the world (and, often, of themselves) are condemned to failure, poverty, and bitterness.
- The subjugation of women.
- Authority over their women is the only power many males will ever enjoy. From Greece to the Ganges, half the world is afraid of girls and gratified by their subjugation. It is a prescription for cultural mediocrity, economic failure--and inexpressible boredom.
- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
- The cult of victimhood, a plague on the least-successful elements in our own society, retards the development of entire continents. When individuals or cultures cannot accept responsibility for their own failures, they will repeat the behaviors that led to failure. Accepting responsibility for failure is difficult, and correspondingly rare. The cultures of North America, Northern Europe, Japan, and Korea (each in its own way) share an unusual talent for looking in the mirror and keeping their eyes open.
- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
- Where blood ties rule, you cannot trust the contract, let alone the handshake.
- Domination by a restrictive religion.
- The price of competitiveness is the courage to be uncertain--not an absence of belief, but a synthetic capability that can at once accommodate belief and its contradictions.
- A low valuation of education.
- Any society that starves education is a loser. Cultures that do not see inherent value in education are losers. This is even true for some of our own sub-cultures--groups for whom education has little appeal as means or end....
- Low prestige assigned to work.
- States and cultures "win" just by getting up earlier and putting in eight honest hours and a little overtime.