I lived in England in the first half of the 1970s,
before moving to the European continent, hoping tolead a more cosmopolitan life, so my first hand
experiences of living in the UK are somewhat dated.
Having come from Australia, my first country, I was
struck by how much poorer England was at that time.
But, lately, I’ve been reading about the effects of
Thatcherism and Reaganism, i.e. the stimulating
effects that free markets and the cutting back on
“welfare-stateism” had on the economic growth rates
of these two countries. This lesson has been well
learned now, decades after these two leaders. The US
grew strongly over these decades, and influenced the
UK, due to the common language. Once the US and
UK started growing well, other countries were
influenced, and opened up their markets to free trade.
Even conservative, traditionally minded, socialist
countries like, China, India, and France, have gone
strongly capitalist (in about that order), as a result.
Consulting the internet, I see that at the time of
writing, the UK ranks about 10th in the world (in
exchange rate terms) in its GNP (Gross National
Product) per capita (per person). The US was only 6 th .
Both countries were beaten by the Scandinavian
countries and Switzerland. The UK was well above
France (17 th ) and Germany (18 th ). So my image of the
UK as being poor is no longer appropriate.This shows that a country can pull itself up by its
own bootstraps and turn itself around. I didn't like the
insular minded attitude of Maggie Thatcher (the
female prime minister of the UK in the 1980s) to the
then European Community (now the European
Union), so I was happy when she was fired by her
party as prime minister, but I have to admire what she
did for the country’s economic growth patterns.
Insular
Britain is an island, and therefore, inevitably it seems,
suffers from an insular minded mentality, that is so
different from the multi-lingual cosmopolitan
mentality of the continental Europeans, especially the
small continental (West) European countries. The
latter have land boundaries. The UK has sea
boundaries. The Brits say “overseas” to refer to other
countries. The continental Europeans have words in
their languages meaning “out of the country” e.g. “im
Ausland” (Germany), “in het Buitenland” (Dutch) to
refer to “other countries”. When it is so easy to hop
in one’s car, drive for a few hours and arrive in
another country on the European continent, it is not
surprising that the continental Europeans are far more
cosmopolitan and multi-lingual than the mono-
cultured, mono-lingual Brits, who have to makemuch more of an effort to put themselves in another
country. (The same argument is even stronger for the
supremely insular minded Americans - more on this
later).
I remember in the 1970s living in Britain, how
insular minded I found the British. In those days
there was no international cable TV or satellite TV
bringing in channels from other countries. I have read
that Europe’s policy of putting the TV and radio
channels of the European continent into the cable and
satellite of most European countries, has probably
had more effect than any other factor in creating a
sense of collective “European-ness”, and has helped
considerably in easing the path of the creation of the
European Union.
It is, after all, the Europeans who are leading the
world in the creation of the next major historical
political phase of building a “post national political
unit” (PNPU) in the form of the European Union, that
so many other trade blocs around the world, at the
time of writing, are essentially copying.
Unfortunately, the Brits are slow to respond to the
lead of the EU. It is mostly France and Germany who
lead the EU. Britain was slow to join it, and still does
not have the Euro (the EU’s currency unit, which isincreasingly replacing the dollar as the international
currency unit of choice. The Americans are spending
more than they earn, and print dollars to pay their
debts. As a result, the value of the dollar is lowering,
and correspondingly the value of the Euro is rising.
Many countries now prefer to have their reserves in
Euros than dollars. Both China and Japan are awash
in an excessive number of increasingly worthless
dollars.)
In Brussels, the capital of Europe, where I lived for
many years, the UK had the reputation of being “the
guards van of Europe” (or in US vernacular, the
“caboose of Europe”), with its implication that the
last carriage on the train possessed the brake that
could slow down the whole (European) train.
Thatcher’s anti-Europeanism, made her detested in
Brussels. She was not a European. She was perceived
as being an “island dwelling Brit” who “did not
belong on the European train”. Eventually, her own
political party saw the light, and threw her out of
power.
But that was in the 1980s. Times change. Now, the
UK has the “Chunnel” (i.e. the “Channel Tunnel”
running under the British Channel (or “La Manche”
as the French call it – the channel is as much French
as it is British). It is now easy to just sit in a train for3 hours and travel down-town to down-town from
London to Paris and vice versa. As a result, the
British have become a lot more cosmopolitan. I hear
the effects on BBC radio on the internet. The
classical musicians who perform in London are as
likely to be French as British (given BBC travel
budget constraints).
The Brits too have broad band internet, so like the
rest of the rich countries of the world have been
exposed to the best (and the worst!) of what the
world has to offer and like the Australians above,
have had their national horizons expanded.
Since it has been some 30+ years since I lived in the
UK, I have to admit my first hand opinions on the
country are dating quite a bit. A country can change a
lot in 30 years. It can get a lot richer and its mentality
can change as a new generation takes power with a
new agenda and ideology. What happened to Britain
can serve as an example to other countries, that it is
possible for an insular minded, poor country to really
turn itself around. Ireland is an even better example,
which at the time of writing ranked 8 th in GNP/capita
(just above Japan and the UK). But Ireland is way too
small population-wise (4 million people) to have
much intellectual impact on the world.I turn now to the culture whose values are closest to
my own, i.e. intellectual elitist. Who else could I be
talking about, other than “les Francais”!
e)
France
CONS
I never actually lived in France. But I did live very
close to it, in French speaking Belgium (i.e. in
Brussels) for about 15 years. My then second wife, a
native French speaking Belgian was totally
“intellectually colonized” by French culture, reading
only French magazines, and rarely reading Belgian
ones, or rarely watching Belgian TV. She found
French media far more interesting and superior. The
French speaking Belgians number only about 3
million compared to France’s 64 million. It is not
surprising that the French label the French speaking
Belgians as “les petits Belges” (the little Belgians).
The latter are smaller in both size and mentality.
It would be difficult for any nation to compete with
the French, a nation that has given so much to the
world. I must have taken the train to Paris at least 30times over the years. With recent TGV (Tres Grande
Vitesse) (i.e. Very High Speed) train links between
Brussels and Paris (and between Paris and most of
the major cities of Western Europe, and still
expanding) one can now travel between these two
cities in about 80 minutes. (Recently the Americans
have introduced a similar (Amtrak) service called
“Acela Express”, but with much slower trains than
the TGV, between Boston and Washington DC,
stopping at New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
So the French TGV inspired the Americans to copy it,
but decades later.)
But, France certainly has its faults, and can learn
from other countries, which is something that it has
great difficulty in doing, partly due to the country’s
linguistic insularity (the French have had a very hard
time accepting that English has become the “linga
franca” of our times, so Anglo-Saxon ideas take
longer to penetrate French minds than other minds in
most other European countries.
Chauvinism
As I mentioned in this Chapter 2, the French used to
be insufferably arrogant, in an offensive way, i.e.
unjustified. Arrogance per se, is not necessarily a badthing, if there is (in my mind) some solid justification
for it. The Americans are arrogant, almost
unconsciously. They are so used to being the
dominant culture for the past 50 years, that they no
longer even bother to consider the possibility that
other countries (or political blocs), especially Europe,
are beating them. “Big Europe” (i.e. the EU, with its
500 million people, and constantly growing, as more
countries beat a path to Brussels to join the EU) is
one and a half times larger in population terms, than
“little America”.
Europeans are beating the US in so many things
recently, that traditional American unconscious
condescension
and
insularity
has
become
unacceptable to Europeans, resulting in a wave of
European “anti-Americanism” that is pushing the US
off world center stage.
Until about a decade or so before the time of writing,
i.e. until France got cable and satellite TV, the French
used to be insufferably arrogant, living in a dream
world of their own imagined superiority, based on a
historical reality, but no longer in tune with the
modern world. But once millions of French could see
with their own eyes the superiorities of their
neighboring countries in Europe and the US, and
once they were rich enough to tourist internationallyin large numbers, they did a complete “U turn” in
their self esteem.
They went from arrogant to depressed, as they
absorbed the lesson that they were “not special”, and
in fact, in many respects, they were not even “above
average”. A national malaise followed that the
French still suffer under, at the time of writing. The
latest ploy of the French seems to be, to “lead the EU
bandwagon”, and become “big” again. I wish them
luck.
Here is a case where being exposed to other cultures
and their respective superiorities, severely deflated
the self importance of the French and brought them
into line with international realities. (The same is yet
to happen to the Americans, because the Americans
still don't have much in the way of international
media. The self inflated ego of the Americans is just
waiting to be pricked. I predict it will happen in only
the next few years. Hopefully the publication of this
book may make a contribution towards that end. The
time is certainly ripe. More on this later.)
HygieneAs mentioned in the CONS section on France in the
previous chapter, I was truly disgusted by the lack of
personal hygiene of the French. They were truly a
dirty people. I’ve not been exposed to French groups
on a daily basis for a decade, so I don't know if things
have improved much. If not, then perhaps the
international media in France may create a stereotype
in the French mind of “les sales Francais” (“the dirty
French”) and I don't mean in a morally
condescending way – I mean literally, in the hygiene
of their toilets, and their housing etc. If the French
can feel an international social pressure against them
to literally clean up their act, then perhaps they will. I
can’t really labor this point.
“La Surface”
One of the most maddening aspects of the French
mentality, that I could never accept, was their
preoccupation with the appearance of things in
preference to the effectiveness of their function. To
the French, looks are very important. Efficiency or
effectiveness is secondary. These priorities to me felt
superficial, childish, and very annoying, especially
when French gadgets or social institutions didn't
work. I have the impression, that the French are aboutas much concerned with “not losing face” as the
Chinese.
The Brits complain (in unflattering terms) of the
“fragile froggy ego”. (A “frog” is a British slang
derogatory term for a Frenchman). What can the
French learn from their neighboring Europeans (and
later, the rest of the world as GloMedia expands
across the planet) on this point?
I wouldn't be at all surprised that the existence of the
European Union, and the common European market,
has forced French companies to improve the
functionality of their products and services, given the
size of their European export market, i.e. the rest of
the EU which is 7 times larger than the French home
market. The populations of the countries of the EU
have a huge choice of products coming from many
countries which are both good to look at and are
functional. French products that please the eye but
don't work well will not be bought again, and French
companies will lose out in the international
competition. It is not surprising that business people
are hard nosed. Their noses are close to the realities
of life and the market.
So once again, exposure to the competition of
standards coming from other cultures has influencedthe French positively. I can only wonder if such
economic phenomena as international competition on
a grand scale, i.e. over the whole country, have
changed the mentality of the French in a deep way -
so that it is no longer enough to be content with the
appearance of something. A gadget, a service, a
discussion, has to have real substance as well.
Flowery words with little real content are only so
much French “hot air”.
f) Germany
I never lived in Germany, so cannot speak with the
authority of first hand experience, but I did get to see
German TV every evening when I was living in
Brussels and got fluent in the German language. One
of the major reasons why I moved from the UK to
Brussels was to adopt the cosmopolitan lifestyle, by
absorbing the languages and cultural treasures of
several world-class cultures, i.e. French and German.
I got fluent in those two languages (plus Dutch) and
benefited mightily. I became a very different person
from what I was when I first left Australia as a young
man of 23, i.e. mono-cultured, mono-lingual, or just
plain “mono”.I really admire the Germans. They are the biggest
culture in Europe (82 million people) and have given
the world so much – their beautiful world-dominating
classical music (that enriches every day of my life),
their philosophy, their literature, their science, their
world class engineering, their discipline, their
efficiency.
Despite all this, the Germans were, until only fairly
recently, the worlds most hated people, because they
also caused the deaths of roughly 50 million people.
Until the recent revelations of just how great a tyrant
China’s “Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong was, it was
thought for a long time that Hitler (an
Austrian/German) was history’s greatest criminal,
killing more people than any other person.
Thanks to recent research coming from the Chinese,
we now know that that dishonor goes to Mao, who is
estimated to have killed some 70-80 million Chinese
in his 30 year “reign of terror”. I will say more about
this when I talk about China.
But, to see Germany in a historical perspective, the
Hitler period only lasted a mere 12 years, thank god!
(1933-1945), but those years were the low point of
the 20 th century, as industrialized killing destroyed
the lives of some 50-100 million people in WW2.At least the Germans have come to terms with their
past and have shown a genuine contrition towards
their victim countries and hang their heads in shame
at the appropriate moments, so unlike the Japanese,
who are still considered by most of their neighboring
victim countries to be an “unrepentant criminal
nation” – more on this later when I talk about Japan.
CONS
Most Hated
I only had one CON point for the Germans in
Chapter 2, and have already discussed this point a bit
in the above paragraphs.
Fortunately for the Germans, there was a clean break
in regimes between the Nazis and the democrats who
took power afterwards. There were no Nazis amongst
the leaders in the post war generation. Those
democratic leaders actually despised the Nazis, to
such a point that whenever some young neo-Nazi
thugs did something atrocious in post WW2 Germany,
such as burning Turkish migrants alive in their homes,
the German government would replay holocaustdocumentaries on national TV, to remind the German
public of its horrible past, and to evoke enough guilt
so as not to repeat such mass horrors. The idea is to
create a public backlash against the rise of the Neo-
Nazis.
A similar clean break between the WW2 leaders and
the post war leaders did not take place in Japan, and
that is one of the reasons why the Japanese have
never truly come to terms with their guilt ridden past
in WW2. They killed about 30 million Asians in the
1930s and 1940s according to various Asian scholars.
This does not make them as great a tyrant as the
super tyrants of the 20 th century (i.e. Mao, Hitler, and
Stalin, in that order) but their crimes are still massive
nevertheless, and are still not “punished”.
The German population has been well educated by
the Jews in Hollywood, as to what happened in the
Holocaust, when the Nazis gassed 6 million Jews
(including the Polish Jewish mother of my second
wife).
Personally I get rather annoyed by the preoccupation
by the American Jews as to the enormity of the
Holocaust. Of course it was terrible for the Jews, but
one should see this crime in its historical context. As
a crime it is vastly overshadowed by the far largercrime of the Nazis when they killed about 20-30
million Russians when they invaded Russia in 1941.
It was the Russians who broke the back of the Nazis
and drained Nazi resources, despite the pretence of
the Americans, that it was they who beat the Nazis.
(Well, the American did beat the Nazis on the
western front, but only because the latter had run out
of resources fighting the Russians all the way from
Stalingrad to Berlin, city by city).
Thus, partly due to the influence of American movies,
modern Germans are fully aware and have been well
educated as to the massive crimes of their
grandparents, and feel a national shame (“Kultur
Schande” (“Shame of the Culture”). So the Germans
have already learned this lesson. The rest of the
planet, especially other European nations, have
accepted German guilt, and now work closely with
Germany to build the new Europe, the European
Union, the biggest trading bloc on the planet, a major
super power of the 21 st century, and possibly the vital
stepping stone towards the creation of a global state.
A sufficiently expanded European Union may
become a Global Union. More on this idea in Chapter
5.
So in the case of German war guilt, most Germans
are already well informed about the suffering theirparents and grandparents caused the world. The rise
of a GloMedia will not affect that level of awareness
much more, I think.
g) Japan
I lived 8 years in Japan, i.e. through most of the
1990s. So this period is still quite fresh in my
memory. It is also the decade in which I seriously
started to write a lot, so not surprisingly I have a lot
of writing about Japan, which explains why the
section on Japan in Chapter 2 is the largest. This may
give the impression that I “really have it in for Japan”
(i.e. I am more critical of Japan than any of the other
countries I have lived in) due to the quantity of
negative pages in this book on Japan. But this is only
an impression, due to the fact that I didn't want to
throw away these many pages, so chose to use them
in this book.
Actually, I am most critical of China, the country I
currently live in, because I am more disgusted by its
faults than by those of any other country I have lived
in. China is poor and not a democracy, and has more
to learn from other countries than do the 6 other
countries I have lived in.But I would place Japan as the second worst of the
countries mentioned in the previous chapter. Both
China and Japan are Asian, and are located in a
(historically speaking) most undemocratic part of the
world (i.e. until fairly recently, where now 2/3 of
Asian countries have made transitions from
dictatorships to democracies. Asia too is joining the
worldwide democratization process that has already
caused 120+ nations to install democratic, multi party
systems). Japan is at least a fairly solid democracy,
whereas China is still a brutal dictatorship that
murders its students when they protest in favor of
democracy. (I’m referring of course to the
Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing of 1989, an
event I saw live on CNN, when I was a grad student
in the US).
I have lived only a year in China at the time of
writing, so in time the quantity of my writing on
China will outstrip what I have written on Japan. But
that hasn't happened yet, so in this book, there is
more criticism on Japan than on any other country in
this book.
CONSMost Insular
As explained fairly graphically in the previous
chapter, the Japanese are supremely insular minded.
This has been a natural consequence of their
geography. The last major influx of migrants to Japan
was from Korea about 2000 years ago, when Chinese
armies went on a conquering spree in the area,
causing a million Koreans to flee for their lives to
Japan, where they introduced rice cultivation, and
created the first emperors, i.e. the first “Japanese”
emperors were Korean.
Today, archeologists in Japan are not allowed to
investigate the early emperor tombs, in case they
discover something “embarrassing” (e.g. evidence
that the first emperors were in fact Korean, a fact
commonly known amongst history-conscious
Koreans, but virtually unknown in modern Japan,
such is the degree of mono-cultured chauvinism and
insularity of the Japanese people.
To the Japanese, their “history” commences around
700 A.D. which is fairly “modern times” to the
Chinese, who have a history of about 5000 years.
The Japanese are the most homogeneous culture on
the planet, with 98% of them from one culture, 1%Korean (whose genes are the same and the remaining
1% are the other foreigners, including the few
westerners. Japan is an isolated island (actually 4
main islands) lying several hundred kilometers from
their nearest populated neighbor of Korea. With such
geographical and cultural isolation and homogeneity,
it is not surprising that the Japanese have one of the
strongest “them and us” mentalities in the world.
I lived in Japan for 8 years, and can testify to this
sense of the Japanese exclusion of the foreigner. If
the US and similar migrant nations are amongst the
most “open” in the world, i.e. accepting of the
migrant, then Japan is one of the most “closed”, and
non accepting. The average Japanese simply cannot
get it into his head, that a westerner (with different
hair color, different eye color, different height, and
skin color) could ever be a “fellow citizen”.
The Japanese are deeply racist, and have a policy of
keeping foreigners on the fringe of their culture. It is
very difficult for foreigners to get long term jobs in
Japan. The usual policy regarding employment of
foreigners is to give them one year renewable
contracts, so that the idea of giving them contracts
with no time limit would be virtually unheard of,
even counter intuitive (“But you will return to yourhome country, wont you, after your “visit” to
Japan?”).
It was largely for this reason that nearly all the
westerners who came to Japan in the 1990s, including
myself, left the country. Japan is simply too closed,
too racist and unaccepting of foreigners for the latter
to tolerate the country for very long.
In the 2000s, Japan now has a reputation in the
western countries of being a culture “unfit for
westerners to live in”, and is now paying the heavy
price of having to absorb the lesson, that “Japan will
never be “Number One”. Given the number of books
that were written by Japanese authors in the 1980s
and 1990s on the theme of Japan taking over from the
US as the world’s dominant nation, particularly in
terms of GNP and the creation of science and
technology, it came as a shock to Japanese to learn
that nearly all the westerners had gone, who had
“rejected the country”, and that Japan was “on its
own again”.
Given Japan’s appalling “creativity record” (e.g. the
very low number of Nobel prizes it has won, which at
the time of writing, was only 12 compared to the 160
won by the US, 110 by the UK, 94 by Germany and
54 by France), and considering its large population(127 million, making it the 10 th largest in the world),
the Japanese are now having to come to terms with
the idea that they will never be “ichi ban” (the best)
because they are not creative enough to do it on their
own.
Speaking generally, for any country that wishes to
become “Number One”, (and that is now true of
China), it will have to attract and KEEP (and keeping
is the hard part), the best brains in the world. No
country, even China or India, with a fifth of the
world’s population each, can hope to compete with
some other country that is capable of attracting and
keeping the best brains in the world.
At the moment, that “Number One” country is the US.
It attracts the top brains, i.e. the top scientists and
thinkers, due to its traditionally high salaries, and the
willingness of the culture to accept foreigners,
especially foreigners “with brains”.
The top country with the world’s top brains wins
most of the Nobel prizes and elicits the envy and
respect of the world, for its intellectual, scientific,
technological, and economic prowess. The US is still
the world leader in that respect.Since there are no effective minorities in Japan, there
were no real voices of opposition to deflate or prick
the balloon of national Japanese arrogance and
delusion of the 1980s and 1990s concerning the
Japanese predictions of their future global dominance.
After a decade or so of such self congratulation, it has
come as a real shock to the Japanese to be forced to
absorb the lesson of “Japanese inferiority”. In fact it
was a double whammy. Not only did nearly all the
foreigners choose to leave, but the Japanese economy
itself stagnated, as Japanese politicians proved
themselves incapable of solving Japan’s economic
woes.
I suppose part of the reason why the foreigners left,
beside Japanese racism and the Japanese “closed”
mentality, was the relatively uncompetitive salaries
compared to those in the US, which grew
economically very strongly in the 1990s under the
Clinton administration.
So, the Japanese have paid a very heavy price for
their insularity, so what can be done to “open up”
Japan, so that foreigners can find the place bearable,
and choose to live there long term?
The Japanese burocrats, who effectively run the
country, have been trying to solve this problem. Oneof the things they have done is to put “tourist scenes”
on their national television, during the breaks
between shows. For example, instead of several
minutes of ads, the Japanese public can watch scenes
of daily life of people walking around some famous
square in some famous European or American city,
the rationale being that exposure to such “foreign”
scenes will motivate the Japanese public to travel
more and hence become less insular, and hence more
accepting of non Japanese.
This is all very fine and I wish the Americans and
other peoples would do the same, but the Japanese
burocracy are as much a “part of the problem” as
they are “part of the solution”, in the following sense.
It took me years to hear a decent theory as to why the
Japanese have such a problem with their “war guilt”.
Why is it that the Japanese are so uncontrite about
their war crimes when compared with the Germans?
The contrast between the two is like night and day. I
finally heard an interview on Chinese national
television (the English speaking channel, CCTV 9) of
a Korean diplomat who gave what I thought to be the
most coherent explanation I have heard so far.
He thought the main reason was ultimately due to the
Americans, who decided at the end of WW2 to allowthe Japanese to keep their emperor, whom the
militarists during the war had brainwashed the
Japanese public to “worship”. The Truman
presidency at the time reasoned that if the US
deposed the emperor (a form of “deicide”), the US
occupation forces would suffer more casualties at the
hands of the Japanese public. So the Japanese got to
keep their emperor.
The Americans then set about purging the Japanese
wartime regime of fascists amongst the politicians
and business leaders, but then the cold war with the
USSR came, and the Americans needed an “ally” in
the region, so the US government did a U-turn in its
policy with Japan. It became much less harsh, and
allowed Japanese who would normally have been
denied positions of power to return, so that Japan
would not be tempted to go communist.
This was particularly true of the Japanese burocrats,
who were almost unpurged. It was these burocrats
who later ran the country, and hence kept their long
held views on the “holiness” of the Japanese emperor.
Since the emperor was highly involved in the daily
running of the Japanese war effort, if the Japanese
public were exposed to a thorough analysis of what
Japan did in WW2, then the role of the emperor
would become public.The Australian prime minister at the end of WW2,
wanted to see the Japanese emperor hanged, but was
overridden by the Americans, whose nuclear bombs
and fire bombing had forced the Japanese to
surrender, so it was the Americans who “called the
shots” on policy in Japan. So thanks to the Japanese
burocratic “protection” of the “house of the emperor”,
the Japanese public remains in a state of relative
amnesia about their role in the WW2, especially their
role in China.
Another obvious reason is that due to the very
homogeneity of the Japanese, there are no minority
groups living in the country to force the majority to
reflect on their awful past. The Japanese are quite
happy to simply “forget” their past. This is quite
understandable to some extent. The Japanese suffered
terribly at the hands of the Americans, who treated
the Japanese “like insects” in many respects.
Throughout the 1930s the Americans were getting
reports on the atrocities committed by the Japanese in
China. American disgust with the fascist Japanese
regime mounted to the point where the US finally
threatened an oil embargo on Japan, unless it got out
of China. The “Rape of Nanking” (in which Japanese
soldiers killed about 300,000 Chinese civilians in anorgy of rape and slaughter in that city in 1937)
certainly did not help the American view of “the
Japs”.
The Americans fire bombed most of Japan’s major
cities, towards the end of the war. In one night of fire
bombing over Tokyo, about a third of it was “fire-
stormed” off the map. Yet still the Japanese did not
surrender. It was not until the “triple whammy” of the
Hiroshima bomb of August 6 th (1945), the invasion
by Russia on August 8 th and the Nagasaki bomb on
August 9 th , that brought the Japanese to their knees.
When living in Japan myself in the 1990s,
occasionally I would get dagger eyed looks from old
Japanese in the train. I suppose I reminded them of
the people who brought terror from the skies in 1945.
The American disgust with the notorious Japanese
cruelty (that all the Asian neighboring countries also
complained so hatefully about) caused the Americans
to be equally cruel in turn, and had little qualms in
“roasting the Japs”.
So, the Japanese really suffered in the last year of
WW2, and understandably want to “blot out the
horror” from their minds. So they do, and hence the
terrible war atrocities that they committed in Asia inWW2 (killing about 30 million Asians, according to
some scholars) go largely unexamined. The Japanese
public is mostly ignorant about what their parents and
grandparents did during the war.
This national “amnesia” is the source of great
bitterness amongst the Chinese, who lost about 20
million people to the Japanese invaders in the 1930s
and 1940s.
I too feel the same way, especially now that I am
living in China. In my daily conversation, when
referring to the Japanese I routinely use the
derogatory term “Japs” as a form of punishment.
The Japanese, sooner or later will have to come to
terms with the fact that they committed one of the
worst crimes in human history, i.e. killing about 30
million Asians, in the 1930s and 40s. This crime is
bad enough, but the fact that the Japanese do not feel
any guilt about what they did, due to their
government’s deliberate suppression of real
information from the public about these horrible
events, is itself a crime. As a consequence I will
continue to call Japs “Japs” until I become convinced
that they are truly sorry for what they did, and look
deeply into their hearts and examine why they did
what they did. It is my way of punishing them.When periodically, modern Japanese politicians
make outrageous statements such as “Nanking
(Nanjing) didn't happen”, or the “Sex slaves (or the
“comfort women” as the Japanese call them
euphemistically) were all prostitutes and volunteers”,
or they “water down” the high school history text
books on WW2, to make the Japanese invasion seem
anything but that, then not surprisingly, howls of
hatred and anger come from Japan’s neighboring
countries which were invaded by the Japanese in
WW2, especially from Korea and China.
Japan has a major relations problem with its Asian
neighboring countries, caused largely by its supreme
insularity. What can be done about it?
One of the first things that comes to my mind, would
be to give the Japanese public access to the TV
satellite signals of non Japanese satellites, so that the
Japanese public can watch the TV programs of other
Asian nations, the way Europeans can watch the TV
channels of other European nations other than their
own.
But of course, the Japanese burocrats don't want the
Japanese public to be exposed to such “dangerous”
information. It might cause the Japanese public tostart asking awkward questions, especially by young
Japanese. It might cause some Japanese to become
conscious of the role of the current Japanese
emperor’s father in WW2, as well as dragging up the
“black days’ of the Japanese past.
So the Japanese do not get to see non Japanese TV
channels (although I did have America’s CNN during
my 8 years in Japan). As a consequence, the Japanese
remain inter-culturally ignorant, mono, and
insensitive to the very legitimate complaints and
hatreds of their Asian neighbors. The Chinese still
hate the Japanese, even after 60 years since the war
has finished. The Koreans had, until recently, a ban
on the import into Korea of Japanese popular culture
(e.g. pop songs, comics etc). One can imagine the
strength of the hatred that led to such legislation. It
took half a century of cooling to rescind the law.
Under present circumstances, there is not much point
in me pushing for Japan to get international TV
channels in its living rooms. The insular minded
forces against such a suggestion are very strong. The
Japanese are also extremely nationalistic and don't
like being criticized by foreigners, especially by
westerners, with whom they have a love-hate
relationship.So what can one do? Well, there is always the
internet. I keep coming back to this idea. A billion
times faster internet than the one we have today, will
truly open up the minds of the Japanese people. Japan
is now the 9 th richest country in the world in terms of
GNP/capita in exchange rate terms. Large numbers of
Japanese are now traveling to other countries, and
that must have some effect on their minds.
But I don't see major shifts by Japan until they are
subject to the same powerful influences of GloMedia
as the rest of the world. Until Japan expresses real
war guilt and calms the hatreds of its neighbors, no
real Asian common market, or Asian Union will be
possible, despite the fact that it has been the Japanese
who have been pushing the idea recently (i.e. to have
an “EU (European Union)-like” organization in east
Asia, consisting of Japan, China, Vietnam, India
etc). If such an organization could be formed, it
would comprise nearly half the world’s population,
and be the biggest economic and trading bloc in the
world.
But such things are not going to happen while Japan
remains in its traditional state of guiltless amnesia
and insularity.I suspect that Asia will be one of the last regions of
the planet to form a true economic and political union.
It was, until recently, a most undemocratic part of the
world. Japan is still not a “full” democracy, a point I
will be discussing next, and China is still at least a
decade or more away from its democratic transition.
(See Fig. 1 later in this chapter.)
China does not want its citizens to be able to view the
TV channels from other countries either, but for
different reasons. Most of China’s neighbors now are
democracies. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party)
does not want the Chinese population agitating any
faster for a democratic transition, than it does already.
The CCP wants to stay in power.
Hence China is just as bad as Japan that way, i.e. in
not allowing its respective citizens to “open up their
minds” to international media. I think we will just
have to wait for the BRAD Law (bit rate annual
doubling) to perform its magic, making the
phenomenon of GloMedia possible and easy.
I have spent a lot of time on Japan’s insularity. It was
the aspect of Japan that I felt I suffered from the most
when I was living there in the 1990s. I feel that the
Japanese also suffer from their insularity, but beingtypical monos, they are ignorant of that idea. They
live in a state of “mono-ed ignorance”.
Not a Real Democracy
The LDP (Japan’s “Liberal Democratic Party”) is the
country’s largest, and has been in power, almost
without interruption, since the end of WW2. This is
no democracy in the usual sense of the word. In a
healthy democracy, at least two political parties
alternate in exercising power, as the electorate throws
out one party to allow the opposition to improve
things. This does not happen, in Japan. The Japanese
are extremely conformist, and conservative. They
continue to re-elect the same old party year after year,
decade after decade. This keeps the opposition parties
inexperienced in government, and hence creates a
vicious circle. This is not good for the country.
Japan has many, many faults (at least as seen through
western eyes, and definitely through my eyes, as I
showed clearly, I hope, in Chapter 2). I really feel
that the Japanese have a lot to learn from other
cultures, especially from the more advanced western
countries, but that is not going to happen, unless the
Japanese can be exposed to these “foreign” ideas and
alternative ways of doing things.For me, Japan is a classic case of how millions of
people can suffer, due to their adherence to “stupid”
local customs, and due to ignorance of superior
alternatives. This is one of the main ideas of this
book, and reappears throughout these chapters. It is
one of the main lessons I have learned in my life as a
multi. It is one of the “theme ideas” of my life. The
strength of my conviction concerning this idea is the
main motivation behind the writing of this book. I
really feel I have something to teach the Japanese
(and by generalization, to many other cultures as
well).
But the Japanese I feel are a special case (especially
for me as a westerner). The Japanese are easterners
(i.e. Asians) and were far less advanced, around mid
19 th century, relative to the westerners. They were
thus forced to “modernize” western style, or be
colonized by the west.
The Japanese had the presence of mind to send their
smart young men to the west and bring back western
learning, to modernize Japan, to make it
technologically and militarily strong, so it could
resist the European and American colonial onslaught.
Japan succeeded, and even defeated Russian early in
the 20 th century.But Japan, did not concentrate much on absorbing
western cultural and social ways. This created a kind
of “halfway house” in Japan of being technologically
modern but socially backward by western standards.
It explains to some extent why Japan today is still
only a “quasi democracy”. Admittedly democracy
was imposed by force under the occupation of the
American general MacArthur, after WW2. The
Japanese did not develop it spontaneously themselves.
It was a social structure imposed on the Japanese
people by a conquering power.
From my western point of view, and having lived in
Japan for 8 years, I feel that the country is materially
modern, technically modern, but socially quite
retarded, relative to the west, and suffers
unnecessarily. But, Japanese insularity is so great,
that too few Japanese would agree with such an
opinion. They are simply unaware of (superior)
alternatives.
To make the Japanese more democratic would be to
change their basic conservatism, and that will be no
easy task. Younger Japanese have grown up with
wealth, and are much more individualistic than their
parents, and certainly their grand parents, and will
hopefully be more inclined to be more critical, andhence more likely to throw out the LDP. With new
blood in power, there should be a lot more social
innovation, as fresh political minds bring in badly
needed social reforms.
Again, here is where GloMedia could play a major
role. Exposing millions of Japanese to alternative
ideas, to how things are organized, and how people
feel about things in many other cultures, will have a
revolutionary effect on Japanese minds. They will
learn to question more, be less conformist, more
individualistic, and assertive. I see GloMedia having
more of an impact on a country like Japan than most
western countries. The Japanese need it more.
In a sense, the Chinese need it far more than Japan,
but I have lower expectations of China. China is still
“3 rd world”, a truly backward nation in many respects,
so inevitably, I don't respect it as much as I do Japan.
Because of that greater respect level, I expect more of
Japan. I expect it to be not only a technically
advanced nation, which it is, (and in fact it is the
world’s leading nation in some respects, e.g. robotics,
reliable cars, etc) but I expect it to be socially
advanced as well, but it isn’t. Its social level of
development puts it several decades behind most
western countries, and that disappoints me.I expect that the huge impact of GloMedia and other
globalizing forces will cause the Japanese to open up
their truly insular minds and force them to start
thinking globally. This will be very much to their
benefit.
Sex Roles
I stated with considerable force in Chapter 2 that of
all the 7 countries I have lived in, relations between
the sexes are worst in Japan. The two sexes live in
different worlds. The women are not “liberated” in
the western sense, i.e. they do not have real careers of
their own and remain largely financially dependent
(parasitic) on their workaholic salary-man husbands.
The husbands work long hours, come home after the
children are asleep, and in time fall out of love with
their wives, and vice versa. There is a real emotional,
sexual poverty in Japan as a result. The so called
“water trade”, i.e. the sex industry, is larger than the
national defense budget! This is tragic and stupid.
What can be done? Changing sex roles is no easy
task. Sex roles are deeply embedded in the life
expectations of millions of people and are not easily
modified, especially in a culture as conformist and asuncreative as groupist Japan. Japanese sex roles are
many decades behind the west.
The Japanese haven’t even had their feminist
revolution yet. Japanese women are still largely
housewives or work part time for paltry money with
paltry skills. They thus rely on their husband’s salary
to live well. The husbands then bear the brunt of the
burden of earning the family living.
For westerners, this is so old fashioned. The west had
its feminist revolution in the 70s and its masculist
revolution (at least in Europe, much less so in the US)
the following decade. In Japan it would be simply
premature to push masculist ideas (i.e. that women
should educate themselves to the limits of their
ability, and have careers, so as not to parasite upon
men’s money).
The masculists cannot operate in a culture in which
women don't have real careers. A prerequisite for
masculism in a country is that women are mostly
careerists, so that men can afford to work less, earn
less and not be parasited upon by their economically
useless wives. Japan is still to have its feminist
revolution, let alone its masculist revolution.As a former masculist myself in Europe in the 1980s,
I was appalled at the social backwardness of Japan’s
sex roles when I was living there.
How to change sex roles? The answer is the same as
to the previous questions, i.e. by exposing the
Japanese to alternative life styles, e.g. through
foreign movies, the internet, foreign travel, and
especially in the future with GloMedia.
If millions of young Japanese can chat readily with
westerners on the internet in the global language,
then they will be influenced by the opinions of the
westerners, who are decades ahead of them regarding
sex roles. The Japanese will then come to see their
traditional sex roles as terribly restrictive and inferior
and want to throw them off. As an example of this
kind of thing in the previous generation, look at the
way parentally arranged marriages have virtually
died out, once the Japanese became exposed to
western customs.
Once Japanese become conscious of the level of
emotional and sexual poverty they live in due to their
ignorant adherence to outdated conservative sex roles,
then they will throw them off and begin to lead
happier lives, the way millions of westerners do.
Most westerners living in Japan I talked to aboutJapanese sex roles were appalled by the level of
emotional poverty of the Japanese.
Education, Creativity, Exams
Why do western children not have the “examination
hell” of Japanese children? Largely because as adults
they will be free to quit companies they don't like
working for and not be afraid of not being hired again
by another company. In Japan, there is still a strong
tradition amongst the big companies, that a true
careerist “marries” the company for life, and that the
managers of a big company will not want to hire
someone who quit another big company, because that
person might do the same to their company.
This attitude indirectly generates “examination hell”,
because then if one is married for life to a single
company, it is critical to get into that company at the
beginning of ones career. The companies have quotas
for the top university entrants, e.g. preferably
students from Tokyo University, Kyoto University,
etc. So it is then critical to get into such universities.
Top high schools get their graduates into the top
universities, so it is critical to get into the top high
school, etc, right down the chain of logic to the top
kindergartens.Such is the miserable life of Japans children, caught
up in an examination hell, learning a lot of useless
knowledge and having their childhood ruined.
What went wrong? Why does the west not have such
problems, and how can the Japanese learn from the
west to overcome such problems?
I think the ultimate answer is that the Japanese learn
to be more individualistic. That way, if they don't like
a company, they can leave it and go to another
company. If the majority of young people have this
attitude, then the traditional managers of a big
company will create a bad reputation for that
company if word gets out that it will not hire people
who have quit from their previous companies.
A greater degree of assertiveness of Japan’s young
graduates should change things. When the
conservative managers see that their company is
getting a bad reputation for being conservative and
that they are not attracting the top graduates as a
result, then they will be forced to change their
attitudes, or they risk themselves being fired or not
getting promotions.Japan is rich enough, to have lots of universities,
(unlike China, which also has an examination hell,
but of a different sort. In China’s case there are too
few universities for millions of potential students. In
practice, about half of Chinese college applicants fail
the very tough nation wide university entrance exams.
They are then doomed to a less affluent life.)
Young Japanese are heavily into western music,
movies, etc, and are being strongly influenced by
western values and are adopting them. This is making
them much more individualistic, so it is probably
only a question of a decade or more before the
examination hell dissipates. Once graduates can
change companies freely as is the case in the west,
then it will not be so critical as to which company is
their first. This will take the pressure off the high
schoolers, so that they do not need to study so hard,
learning a lot of useless garbage for largely memory-
based entrance exams.
What about Japan’s creativity problem? Japan has an
awful reputation as being creatively sterile, of being a
“copy-cat-culture”.
When I moved to China and started touristing a lot
around the country, I was struck by how little was
truly original of what I remember of Japan. Nearlyeverything that I thought was originally Japanese was
in fact Chinese. My contempt for Japanese creativity
increased even further as a result.
Why then are the Japanese so uncreative? My second
wife, when she was still alive in the 1990s in Japan,
was a professor of the French language at a major
foreign language university. She used to complain to
me how difficult it was to get her (mostly female
Japanese) students to express their opinions freely (in
French). She said she would feed them the phrase
“Moi, je quoi que ...” (“I think that ...”) and expect
them to complete the sentence with some opinion of
theirs.
She observed how repressed were her students at
stating what they thought about anything. “Malades!”
she would say (i.e. “sick, sick”). Because she was
much more exposed to the inferiorities of the
Japanese on a daily basis than I was, she became far
more contemptuous of these inferiorities than I did.
As a researcher at the time (before I became a
professor in the US and later a professor in China) I
quickly became conscious as to how incapable the
Japanese were at brain storming, i.e. at thinking up
new ideas in a group. They were useless at it, asthough their culture had never encouraged them to
brain storm.
I quickly learned to ignore my Japanese researcher
colleagues and socialized largely only with fellow
westerners, who could brain storm. Soon I learned
that the intellectual output of the Japanese on the
world stage, in terms of world class thinkers, was
virtually zero. That knowledge killed my motivation
to learn the Japanese language and written characters.
I was convinced there would be no intellectual payoff
at the end of my effort. This was so different from
my experience of learning French and German and
then benefiting enormously from the cultural richness
of those two world class cultures. For me, Japan was
an intellectual pygmy.
How could Japan become more creative? I think the
primary way to make Japanese more creative will be
to reduce the awful conformist pressure placed by
Japanese on themselves. So where does the
conformist pressure come from? I suspect that the
basic answer to this question is Japanese
overcrowding. Japan has nearly half the population of
the US squeezed into an area only one fifth of the
area of the US state of California.Hence the Japanese live like sardines, and have done
so for many centuries. They have learned to be
extremely polite to each other, of necessity, since if
they were as free to be as critical of each other as are
westerners, then they would soon be at each others
throats, especially in 3-generational family
households.
Also, Japan is extremely homogeneous, so everyone
understands how everyone else thinks. So individual
differences are more noticeable. In cultures that are
more heterogeneous, it is easier to be more
individualist. Personally, I take advantage of this
greater freedom given to foreigners. I don't have to
conform as much to group cultural norms. (“Oh, he’s
just a foreigner. He can’t be expected to know the
norms”. Great! That suits me fine. I get to do what I
want to do.)
To reduce the social pressure, there need to be fewer
Japanese. In the 1930s the Japanese tried to solve
their “Lebensraum” (a German word for “living
space”) problem by colonizing the Chinese, but with
only a few million Japanese soldiers and a million
Chinese villages, that solution was doomed from the
start. If the Japanese generals had not been so insular
minded and knew more about China, they would not
have made such an elementary mistake.Now, there is a new solution. Japanese women are so
appalled at the traditional housewife role that they are
delaying significantly their marriages until their
biological clocks are really starting to tick (i.e. they
are over 30 years old and their fertility is starting to
drop). But that means that the number of children
they will have before they become infertile will fall.
As a result, Japan’s population will fall by a sizable
fraction in the next few decades.
Good! Hopefully then, this drop in the population
size will reduce the conformist pressure, so that it
will be easier for Japanese to be more individualist,
so that Japanese primary schools don't have to kill off
the individualistic, creative spark in their students.
There is another solution that is helping, and that is
earthquake proof apartment blocks. What does that
have to do with fostering a greater level of creativity
amongst the Japanese?
Japan lies on one of the most earthquake prone
regions of the planet, right over a major subduction
zone of two major tectonic plates, i.e. the Asian plate
and the Pacific plate. I felt mild and not so mild earth
tremors every month or so when I lived in Japan. I
was only a few kilometers from the infamous Kobeearthquake of 1995 that killed 6000 Japanese that
was a big one. I was waiting for my apartment
building to collapse, so heavy was the shaking, but it
was modern and earthquake proof, so I’m still here to
write this book, but it was the most frightening 20
seconds of my life.
By using earthquake proofing techniques, Japanese
apartment blocks can be built with many storeys
(“high-risers”). The Japanese are now building up
rather than out. There is no more out, only up. This
gives space for Japanese children to have their own
rooms, and to be less subject to group pressure.
Amongst the middle class now, it is the norm for
children to have their own rooms.
With millions of Japanese children having their own
rooms, their own space, their own individuality, then
in time, that “wave of individuality” will ripple right
through Japanese society as those children grow up
and take positions of power in Japanese culture,
changing it profoundly along the way.
Rabbit Hutches
The Eurocrat (i.e. a burocrat of the European
Community) who termed the coin “(Japanese) rabbithutches” probably had no idea how famous his snide
description of Japanese housing standards would
become, but it’s true.
On my first day in Japan, I was stunned at how low
standard the housing was, how poor for a so-called
“developed country”. Many of the houses I saw were
described to me as being middle middle class, but to
me they looked like western slums.
Why the difference? There are several reasons. One
is that the Japanese are paranoid about growing their
own rice. The Japanese believe (probably correctly)
that they have no friends, and in their insularity, feel
that they cannot trust any of their neighboring
countries to grow their rice for them, and much more
cheaply.
Hence precious land is taken up, even in big cities
where tiny patches of rice paddies are often squeezed
between multistory office blocks. Total madness!
The Americans feel that they could solve Japan’s
rabbit hutch problem overnight with just a few
fundamental changes in the bylaws of city land use,
that deal with where rice can be grown. But the
Japanese lack the imagination to do such things, and
no one complains, so things remain as they are, andpeople continue to live in slums (rabbit hutches), with
little space to stretch out in, physically or
psychologically.
So, how could Japan get some international friends,
and have them grow much cheaper rice, so that it
does not need be grown domestically, so that land
prices can be reduced, so that young couples do not
need to spend most of their housing money on buying
the land and then have so little money left over, that
all they can afford is a rabbit hutch.
How to make Japan friendlier to other countries?
More foreign travel will help. Greater war guilt
would help a lot. And of course, in the coming few
decades, the GloMedia will make Japanese much
more multi and trusting of other countries because
they will understand them better.
The reverse case is also true of course. A major event
for Japan will be when China goes democratic and
learns more about Japan. Once trust levels between
the two countries increase, it will be more likely that
an “Asian Union” can be formed that would be the
Asian equivalent of the EU. Then China could export
much cheaper rice to Japan, so that Japanese land
prices would become much cheaper, so the rabbit
hutches would disappear, being replaced by high riseluxury apartments, hence more square meters per
person, hence an increase in individuality, and a
corresponding decrease in Japanese groupist
conformist pressure.
At the present time, few Japanese choose to be
tourists in China, because they know how much the
Chinese hate them. So a vicious circle is established.
The Japanese don't travel much in China, so the
stereotyped image of the Chinese regarding the
Japanese is not challenged by being confronted with
real live face to face Japanese, who might actually be
quite nice people, not the skin peeling, baby
bayoneting monsters of the wartime generation
Japanese in China.
Japanese should therefore make more effort to be
tourists in China, which is their “cultural mother
country”, that gave them their Buddhism, their
Confucianism, their writing system, and so much else.
With millions of face to face interactions between
Chinese and Japanese, relations between the two
countries will improve. Things should improve a lot
once China has gone democratic and both countries
have GloMedia. Then Japanese will be much better
informed about their war crimes and feel guilty, and
Chinese will soften their hearts correspondingly.
Then with a much greater level of trust between thetwo peoples, an Asian Union can be formed, as a
stepping stone, like the EU, towards the creation of a
global state.
Minorities
The Japanese are notorious for treating their
minorities badly. This may be due largely to Japanese
ignorance as to how it feels to be a foreigner. As
more Japanese travel, they will learn from first hand
experience how it feels to be the “odd one out”, i.e. to
be a foreigner surrounded by multitudes of “strange”
people. This should make them more sympathetic
towards the minorities and hence treat them better.
Having a GloMedia will only enhance this greater
level of sympathy. Also, as other countries become
more conscious of Japan’s bad treatment of its
minorities, greater international social pressure will
be placed on Japan, thus forcing millions of Japanese
to be ashamed of what they are doing or not doing to
their minorities. As a result of this pressure,
expressed largely through GloMedia, the quality of
life of the minorities should get better.
Emotional PovertyAs mentioned above, I do not feel the Japanese are a
particularly happy people. My second wife, who
interacted with Japanese students every week day,
felt this far more strongly that I did. She felt that the
whole culture was fundamental ill, and felt sorry for
Japanese. But, due to the fact that she had to deal
with the culture’s limitations on a daily basis, it drove
her crazy. She ended up loathing the Japanese.
According to her, the root of the Japanese “lack of
happiness” problem was the deep seated groupist
repression of individuality, which she felt made them
crazy.
One can make an analogy with sexual repression. The
sex drive and the drive to “individuation” (in the
Jungian sense of the term - i.e. the need for
individuals to develop their skills and general
competence levels in life) are deep seated. If either of
them is thwarted then people can become very
unhappy. Each time I look at aged Roman Catholic
priests for example, they rarely seem to me to be
happy people. Most of them look bitter, as though
they have really missed out on something vital in life,
which of course they have, namely sex, relationships,
love and children.These priests had bought into Roman Catholic
brainwashing that it was a good thing and essential
that they be celibate, so that they could better
dedicate their minds to their “god”. The reality
however was that the opposite was true. These priests,
especially the younger ones, spent so much of their
mental energy repressing their sexuality that in fact,
they had less time for their “god”.
As the world secularizes, especially in Europe where
this process is many decades ahead of the US for
example, the whole issue of celibacy is becoming so
unpopular, that the Roman Catholic Church is having
great difficulty now in obtaining new recruits for the
priesthood. The major obstacle to recruitment is
celibacy, according to the opinions of young men.
One can extrapolate the recruitment rate and hence
predict roughly when the Roman Catholic Church in
Rome will be forced to allow marriage of their priests.
It will be either that, or see the church become
priestless, and hence see it die.
In the Japanese case, it is less clear to the Japanese
just what the source of their malaise is. One needs to
be a foreigner living in Japan to feel it consciously. A
mono-cultured Japanese will probably not even be
conscious of the malaise. He/she will express thismalaise unconsciously in much the same way the
aged priests expressed their deep-seated and probably
unconscious resentment that they had missed out on
something vital to their lives.
How to get the Japanese to become conscious that
there is a problem and to motivate them to change, to
make themselves happier? Again, the answer is by
exposure to the norms of other cultures, i.e. by
making Japanese into multis, by the powerful impact
of GloMedia.
The Japanese, especially young impressionable
Japanese, and in particular the youth, will be
influenced strongly by the way dozens of other
cultures live, because they will be able to see for
themselves in vivid life size 3D images the daily lives
of dozens of alternative lifestyles, alternative cultures.
They will be influenced by these, and come to
question strongly the limitations of their own, and
then in time will rebel.
Unfortunately, at the high school level, which is the
traditional time for youths to rebel from the norms of
their parents, it may already be too late. The real
damage has already been done to primary school
students, when they are virtually ‘cartes blanches”
(clean slates, to be written on).In conventional Japanese culture, it is quite normal
for very small children to be given more freedom
than would be normal in the west. The rationale
behind this greater freedom is that “My child will
soon go to school and will be taught to be “Japanese”)
meaning that the child will be taught to become a
member of the group, i.e. the child will have its
individuality repressed and acquire a “cookie cutter
personality”.
From a westerner’s viewpoint, the social conditioning
of the (primary) school is a sustained brainwashing of
the children to conform to group norms, to learn to
feel happy by being accepted by the group, and
suppressing their own individual needs if they
conflict with the norms of the group.
With such a conditioning, the group members will
feel threatened by any individualistic behavior of a
group member and apply strong conformist pressure
on the “deviant” to “get back into line”. This often
takes the form of bullying.
After a childhood of such conformist, groupist
brainwashing, millions of Japanese children grow up
into creatively stunted and poorly individuated adults,
with conformist personalities, i.e. all coming out ofthe same mould, hence the above term “cookie cutter
personality”.
But, most Japanese are unaware that there is a
problem. They are so extremely mono-cultured that
they have absolutely no intercultural basis for
comparison with which to be able to view themselves
from “outside”, so to speak.
But by using the GloMedia to multi-culturize
themselves, they will become able to view their own
behavior from outside. When millions of people do
this, then pressure will mount from young parents not
to kill their children’s individuality, so that schools
and the Education Ministry (Monbusho) will have to
listen, otherwise there will be mass revolt by the
parents, and the youth.
Today, Japan has the planet’s worst bullying problem.
The frequency of bullying in Japan’s schools is
appalling. Where does this come from? Obviously
the children are feeling very pressured. Part of this
pressure comes from the “examination hell”
discussed earlier. Part of it comes from the
conformist pressure. Both need to be gotten rid of.
Western countries have a much lower incidence of
bullying because the pressure on western children isless. They are much more individualized and so feel
freer. They are not brainwashed to conform to a
Japanese cookie cutter norm, so do not feel
threatened by the expression of individuality by other
children, hence are less motivated to force other
children to conform, i.e. they bully less.
Overcoming Japan’s bullying problem needs a two
prong attack. One is to rid the country of the
examination hell, which is utterly redundant, and the
other is to foster individuation a lot more in Japanese
culture. The latter will be possible with high rise
apartments and greater living space for children with
their own rooms, as discussed earlier.
Corrupt
Japan is incredibly corrupt. When I was living in
Japan in the 1990s, and in those days I read a daily
newspaper (which I no longer do, relying nowadays
on my laptop and wifi for my world news) a day did
not go by without some newspaper report of some
scandal going on somewhere. Japan is a conformist
culture, so people have difficulty asserting
themselves, particularly against group norms.It is therefore difficult for Japanese to be “whistle
blowers” (i.e. people who raise the alarm, and report
on cheating and corruption). As a result, a lot of it
goes on, and few people complain. Obviously many
do, otherwise the many cases would not get into the
newspapers and other media, but nevertheless, the
general corruption level is much higher than in the
west (but far less than in China, a topic I will talk
about later).
Japan is a culture of few lawyers. Japanese sue each
other far less frequently than in the US, which is
probably the other extreme, by world standards. In a
passive, non litigious culture, people feel more
inclined to cheat, and do, because they feel that they
can “get away with it”. If Japanese were more
individualistic and assertive, then probably the
general level of corruption would be less.
Hence as Japanese individualize more, due to
GloMedia, the general level of corruption should go
down, because it will be tolerated less and punished
more. There will be more whistle blowers who will
not stand for it.
Superiority MythIn a culture which is as homogeneous and mono-
cultured as Japan, with almost no minority groups to
challenge majority myths, it is easy for Japanese
superiority myths to be self sustaining. Every culture
is self congratulatory. Every culture has people who
get emotional with their flag and their national
anthem. (Look at the Olympic gold medalists on the
podia when their anthems are played and their flags
are raised).
But in Japan’s case, these chauvinisms take a more
extreme form. There have been many pseudo-
scientific books written in Japan about Japanese
superiority. Some of them are simply “funny” to non
Japanese, but in many cases they are written in all
seriousness, and many Japanese believe them.
With world travel and GloMedia, the Japanese will
be able to go through the same de-mythification of
their chauvinistic values as did the French in the
1990s, or the young Australians did in the 1970s, i.e.
they can be exposed to the superior realities of non
Japanese cultures elsewhere on the planet. It will be a
painful process. It is not easy to be forced to give up
one’s cherished beliefs in one’s culture’s superiority.
There is a deep need to feel superior to others. It is
ego satisfying.Nearly all human beings feel the need to be a
member of a group, since we evolved as deeply
social apes. Therefore, it is not surprising that it is a
source of satisfaction to feel that the group one
belongs to is superior to others. This psychological
phenomenon occurs in all nation states. Why do all
countries have national flags and national anthems!?
So, to be given concrete proof that one’s group is not
so special, and is in fact, relative to most other
cultures on the planet, one of the worst in certain
respects, can be deeply disturbing, demoralizing,
even depressing. It is not surprising, that attempts by
non Japanese to demythologize the Japanese have
been largely unsuccessful, but with the enormous
influence of GloMedia in the future, the Japanese will
not be able to resist the onslaught. They will lose
their chauvinism, and so will all other cultures on the
planet, and that will greatly aid the growth of a sense
of a global culture, especially when a truly global
language develops and is widely used in
communication across the planet.
Sado-Masochism
Japanese have a reputation for having sado-
masochistic personalities. On their television aregames of such a type, e.g. how long can someone
tolerate sitting in a tub of ice water.
I had a woman friend in Japan who would pull back
my finger towards the wrist to “see how much pain I
could take”. This struck me as “sick”, and I objected
strongly to her and told her never to do that again.
We then got into an argument about whether doing
such a thing was symptomatic of Japanese sado-
masochism, and whether such a national
characteristic might help explain why the Japanese
were so hated by their Asian neighbors in WW2 for
Japan’s infamous cruelty. I suspect so.
Where does this sado-masochism come from, and
how to remove it, to make Japanese happier? I
suspect it is yet another symptom of Japan’s lack of
individualism. When young Japanese are pressured to
conform all their young lives, they develop sado-
masochistic personalities. Japanese sado-masochism
would account for the high incidence of bullying in
the schools. Thus the suggestions given above for
ridding Japan of its overcrowding and bullying
problems would apply here as well. When Japanese
children can grow up with much healthier
individuation, they will be less sado-masochistic and
happier.h)
U.S.
CONS
Arrogant
The Americans are arrogant. That is for sure. They
have a world wide reputation for that. For example,
in the Sydney Olympics in 2000, the intercultural
insensitivities of the Americans barracking “USA,
USA!” made them extremely unpopular, to the point
that later in the Olympics, when an American
competitor screwed up or lost, the non Americans in
the stands actually cheered (or rather jeered).
As mentioned earlier, the US is today unquestionably
the planet’s dominant culture. It is “Number One” in
so many things, that it is quite natural for Americans,
especially less educated ones, to feel and express
their sense of superiority when they are overseas.
Thus, to some extent, the world will simply have to
put up with American arrogance, because it is valid,
it is warranted. The Americans simply “are” superior.
I have lived 5 years in the US, which was my 6 thcountry, so it was easy for me to feel its many
superiorities, by simply comparing the way
Americans did things with how things were done in
the previous 5 countries I had lived in.
But, cultures rise and fall, as history shows us.
Personally, I feel that the US is already on the way
down, but that most Americans don't know it yet.
Going down is a relative concept. In reality, life
quality is actually improving for most Americans as
time goes on, as economic standards of living
improve, education gets better etc. But things are
improving a lot faster in more dynamic cultures, in
much bigger cultures. (Here, I’m thinking about the
culture I’m currently living in, i.e. China). I don't see
the US remaining “top dog” this century. I see China
or India or Europe taking the top spot this century,
until (I hope) there are no more countries, only Globa.
Nevertheless, even though a particular country may
be considered to be top dog in general, no country is
top in everything, across the board. The US certainly
has its faults, and inferiorities. In fact it is seriously
starting to fall behind other cultures, especially
Europe, at such a rate, that the Europeans are
increasingly sneering at Americans, particularly
considering American insularity, and arrogance.Europeans are now criticizing the Americans for the
same kinds of reasons the Americans used to criticize
the French in the 1950s, with such sentiments as “the
arrogant inferiority of the French”.
Europeans are overtaking the Americans in many
fields now, but most Americans are unaware of this
fact, and maintain their traditional superior attitudes
towards Europeans, that are no longer justified in fact.
The Europeans are more cosmopolitan, more multi-
cultured than the Americans and often know more
about America that the Americans know about
Europe.
So what is happening is that increasingly, Europeans
are feeling superior towards Americans, based on
modern realities, yet are faced with traditional
American feelings of superiority towards Europeans
that are based on outdated realities. But the
Americans, being extremely insular, mono-cultured,
and definitely mono-lingual, are simply unaware that
their attitudes are increasingly becoming outdated.
There is thus no “meeting of minds”. The two sets of
superiority attitudes, simply “go past each other”.
How can Americans lose their arrogance, at least to
the extent that they become better informed as to
their relative inferiorities? Again, GloMedia will playa pivotal role. Americans do travel internationally,
but usually only the better educated, more intellectual
Americans. Most Americans are content to explore
their own vast, continent-sized country, and not have
to bother with foreign languages, and “bloody
foreigners”.
Americans have the “disadvantage” of having created
the world language, and hence can afford to be
linguistically lazy. Americans and the Brits have a
bad international reputation for being “foreign
language” incompetent and lazy. Americans’ mono-
lingualism makes them more mono, less multi, less
cosmopolitan, and less sophisticated in the eyes of
multis.
Nevertheless, it will be the Americans, very probably,
who will continue developing the “BRAD Law”
phenomenon (i.e. the bit rate annual doubling of the
internet speed). Thus it will be largely the Americans
who will (indirectly) globalize the world. It will be
the Americans who, in the coming 30 years, from the
time of writing, will pioneer the technologies that
will create GloMedia.
When the Americans apply GloMedia to themselves,
they will be in for a rude awakening, as they learn of
their many inferiorities, as discussed in Chapter 2 andfurther elaborated on in this chapter. It will be a
shock for Americans, because today they live largely
in a state of national self-congratulatory delusion.
Americans are not a sophisticated people by world
standards, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Once the GloMedia images come into the living
rooms of hundreds of millions of Americans from all
over the world, they will come to learn that they are
not so special in many respects (as will also the rest
of the world’s countries, as they learn about
themselves). Americans will be humbled and become
conscious of their many failings and be motivated to
catch up with the world’s leaders in those areas
where the US is behind, and in some cases, way
behind (e.g. no National Health Service, the death
penalty, shitty television, religious superstitions, etc).
Americans are a genetically energetic, individualistic
people. They selected themselves in choosing to
become migrants in the first place. They were
typically European working class or lower-middle
class people, who felt they could have a better life
with more opportunities in the new world than the old.
Thus the source of America’s migrants was mostly
from Europe’s “lower half”, and that basic reality,
has colored American culture ever since.The US is not a sophisticated culture, as is all too
painfully obvious to the French, for example, who are
the most sophisticated people in Europe, and
probably the world. The French sneer at Americans
for good reason. But of course, mono-cultured
Americans will not understand why the French sneer
at them. The American monos have not had the
experience of living in the more sophisticated culture
of France, so do not understand why the French turn
up their noses at American lower class vulgarity, and
American “middle class mindlessness”.
Perhaps once America’s “genetic intellectuals” (i.e.
those Americans born with elite intelligence levels,
e.g. the top 1%) are exposed to the way French
culture caters to French intellectuals, and fosters
them in a way that America’s middle class culture
does not foster American intellectuals (e.g. France
has the elite newspaper “Le Monde” (the World), and
“France Culture” (radio for French intellectuals)),
they may relish being cared for, for the first time in
their lives, and become avid Francophiles. French
culture may give them something that American
culture does not, i.e. support and recognition. French
culture would “value their (intellectual) values”.
America’s middle class culture, with its awful ad
infested television, its dumbed down news services,its crass pop music, its school bands (rather than
school orchestras), etc simply alienate America’s
intellectuals, so they “drop out” of mass American
society. For them to feel nurtured by a culture, as
French culture does to its intellectuals, who are
treated as “les dieux, les intellectuelles” (“the gods,
the intellectuals”) may be an intoxicating experience
for them.
I know I felt this way once I became fluent enough in
French to really begin to absorb French values into
my personality. I benefited enormously from feeling
nurtured and valued by a whole culture, so different
from the first culture I grew up in, i.e. Australia,
which basically despised its intellectuals, who were
thought to be “elitist” (a dirty word in migrant
cultures), but not in France.
Fat
Americans are fat and continue to get fatter. This is
not just an American problem. It is in fact a
consequence of general affluence. The citizens of
many rich western countries are getting fat, and for
similar reasons, namely, everyone has cars, they sit
for hours with a laptop and the internet (as admittedly
I do myself), they don’t walk, they eat too muchcheap junk food, and have unhealthy diets due to
ignorance of what is good food to eat.
In the case of the US, the statistics on obesity are
appalling. Two thirds of the US population is at least
overweight, and of these, half are considered obese.
I saw this myself in my 5 years in the US. As a male,
I found only about a tenth of American women were
slim and curvy enough, by my sexual tastes, to be
considered worthy of a second glance. I find Chinese
women far more attractive that way, perhaps about
60%.
There is growing awareness in the US, that the
obesity epidemic has become the nation’s number
one health problem, and that it is getting worse year
by year.
Because the US has been the first large nation in the
world to be confronted with this obesity epidemic,
due to it reaching a state of mass material affluence
before most other countries, the US will have to
pioneer measures to tackle the problem. This is
starting. But there are measures that Americans can
learn from other cultures. An early form of GloMedia
should exist within 10 years of the time of writing, so
that Americans can watch what and how othercultures eat, who are not fat. They will be able to
learn of superior diets from other cultures and
become critical of the traditional fatty diets of their
own culture. The GloMedia should help a lot in
raising Americans’ consciousness concerning healthy
eating.
Religious
America is one of the most religious of western
countries. To a European, it is surprising, even
shocking. One wonders “Why has religion not died
out in America the way it has (largely) in Europe?”
“Why are Americans still religious?” “Are
Americans more gullible than Europeans?” “Are
Americans less educated into the basic principles of
scientific skepticism than Europeans?” “Are
America’s intellectuals less effective in slapping
down religious superstitions in the US than are
intellectuals in Europe?”
The statistics on US religiosity are amazing. For
example, according to surveys, some 95% of
Americans claim belief in some kind of “higher
power” (i.e. some kind of “god”).I read an American sociology text book, which said,
in the chapter on the sociology of religion, that
surveys asking the question “Is god important in your
daily life?” received a yes answer from 70% of
Americans, and 10% of Danes.
Religion is truly dying in Europe, so the attitude gap
between Europe and America on religious questions
is becoming ever larger. America is secularizing, but
so much more slowly than Europe. Why is that?
This is a difficult question worthy of many sociology
PhD theses to untangle. I can only offer my
suggested answers here.
I suspect there are many factors causing religion to be
maintained in the US and much less so in Europe.
Here are some.
a) The US is a much less sophisticated, more middle
and lower class culture than Europe, so is less
intellectually critical, more “mindless” than Europe,
so is less questioning and skeptical of religious
dogmas than Europe.
b) The US lacks an intellectual upper class with a
tradition of “slapping down” middle class (religious)
mindlessness. In the US, the intellectuals keep quietabout their religious skepticism, whereas in Europe
they give it free rein. The result is that the European
middle class feel much more brow beaten about
religion than is the case in the US.
c) The US was populated by many of Europe’s
“religious nuts”, who were actually more “ridiculed”
in Europe than “persecuted”, who then fled to the US
when they had the chance. They brought their
“religious genes” with them (i.e. a genetic disposition
to religiosity).
d) So many religious communities came to the US
from Europe, that the whole culture was founded on
religion.
e) The US migrants, i.e. largely middle and lower
class Europeans, cut themselves off from their
mother countries, so that their cultural values “froze”
in the US. They were no longer exposed to the
updating and modernizing views of the genii and the
opinion makers of their home cultures. They simply
kept the middle and lower class religious values and
customs that they had at the time they immigrated,
and did not modify them much. In the meantime,
their European home countries moved on.f) Americans moved into a virgin country with a huge
surface area. Large numbers of small towns were
created, which are not known to be breeders of
original thought. Small towns create few genii, so
small towns tend to be very conservative and middle
or lower class. The new thinking tends to occur in the
big cities, but there were proportionally fewer of
those in the US in the 19 th century. Since the US has
a higher proportion of its citizens living in small
towns than Europe, it is not surprising that the US is
more conservative, and hence more traditional, and
hence more religious than Europe.
g) America is such a brutal culture that Americans
still “need” religion to sooth their crushed egos.
American migrants were by their nature rather selfish
individualists. It took that type of people to uproot
themselves from their original European communities
and cut themselves off from family and friends.
Deeply social and caring personalities would have
been much less likely to do this. America is thus
filled with “rugged individualists” (to use the
American expression that is widely used). America
was such a melting pot, with people from nearly a
hundred different nations, speaking different
languages, worshiping different gods, that any real
sense of community and common values were muchless developed than in the more homogeneous
cultures of Europe, i.e. the old world countries.
As a result, America’s early capitalism was brutal.
There were no unions, no worker political parties
(even today), no progressive taxation, so the net
result of all this indifference to the well being of the
individual in the economic context, is that Americans
live in a culture that is far more “uncaring” than in
old world cultures. Europeans, Japanese, Australians,
Canadians, etc are shocked at the level of brutal
indifference shown by Americans to Americans.
This brutality reflects in the fact that the Americans
are the only industrialized people in the world not to
have a national health service, so that some 45
million Americans don't even have health insurance.
The uninsured can have their economic lives ruined
by a health accident. Americans are one of the few
countries in the world that still have the death penalty
(along with a few other countries, such as Iran, North
Korea, China, etc, all of whom are hardly paragons of
enlightened caring societies).
The Europeans are particularly appalled at the
American death penalty. The European attitude is
“My god, the Americans murder their murderers!”
with all the hypocrisy that that implies. America’shillbilly gun laws (i.e. it is so easy to buy a gun in the
US) kill 30,000 Americans a year, with periodic mass
killings that make world news, but the Americans fail
to learn anything, so that these mass killings simply
continue, monotonously, year after dreary year.
Japan, where private ownership of guns is banned,
has only 100 gun deaths a year, and as a result, the
Japanese feel much safer walking the street at night
than in gun obsessed America.
The net effect of all this brutality and communal
indifference in the US, is, I suspect, a cultural
“malaise” which manifests itself in the form of a deep
unsatisfied need of Americans to feel comforted by a
community that “cares” for them, so Americans
actually need religion much more than say Europeans,
or Japanese, who have much more caring, nurturing
cultures.
What I found rather pathetic about US culture when I
was living there was that many Americans join
churches to obtain social, communal support, instead
of turning to other organizations. Thus millions of
middle class Americans get their heads filled with
2000 year old “Christist” superstitions that make no
sense in terms of modern scientific knowledge, or
critical thinking, which turns them into gullible fools,from the point of view of Europeans or Japanese. The
Japanese woman friend I had when I was living in
Japan described western Christianity as a “mental
disease”. “Yes”, I agreed, “Marx called religion ‘the
opium of the masses’ ”.
Thus the attitude gap on religion between Europeans
and Japanese on the one hand and Americans on the
other, is large and growing, as Europeans are
secularizing much faster than Americans. Europeans
are now openly ridiculing Americans for their “19 th
century attitudes towards religion”. English books
(i.e. books written by Englishmen) are now written
that openly encourage Americans to be more
intellectually critical and to throw off their religious
superstitions.
Due to our globalizing economy, publishers too are
forming larger markets, so that major authors, writing
in English, can expect to have their books published
simultaneously in all the English speaking countries,
which means that Americans are increasingly
exposed to European attitudes to religion, i.e. to
European ridicule of religion.
GloMedia can only strengthen this process, i.e.
Americans will come literally face to face (at least in
terms of realistic 3D image terms) with Europeans,who will not hesitate to contest American middle
class mindlessness, when it comes to religion. It will
be a most uncomfortable experience for millions of
Americans to have their religious beliefs stripped
away from them by snide Europeans.
In the US, the tradition of “bitey” (i.e. assertive)
upper class intellectual rigor barely exists, but in
Europe it does, and the European intellectual upper
class will not hesitate to demolish American
religiosity, when the technology allows it, as
GloMedia will. In a manner of speaking, one can say
that, at least in terms of religious ideas, that the
Europeans will re-colonize Americans’ minds.
But, you may argue, GloMedia is a two (actually
multi-) way street. American religious organizations
and individuals will be able to influence European
minds and the minds of other countries. But this may
do more harm than good to the Americans. For
example, imagine millions of Europeans being able
to watch American “tele-evangelical” programs on
the GloMedia. The “Give me your hearts and your
dollars!” message of such programs will only
increase European ridicule against American
gullibility.No Upper Class
As mentioned several times in earlier sections, the
US never had an upper class, at least not in the sense
of the European upper class. Americans speak of
their own upper class, but it is defined largely in
terms of money, not in terms of cultural values. The
American upper class would be dismissed by the
European upper class as being “vulgar nouveau
riche” (French for “new rich”), uncivilized, and
philistinic”.
As mentioned earlier, this lack of an old world style
upper class is a natural phenomenon of colonies, of
new world cultures, namely that the upper class
members of the old world countries, the colonizing
countries are, on the whole, not interested in
migrating to a frontier, barbarian culture, where a
wilderness has to be tamed. They are simply not
attracted by such a (literally) hands-on life-style.
Upper class intellectuals want to work with their
minds, not their hands, so what would they do in a
wilderness?
The characteristic lack of an upper class in the
colonies has led, by default, to such cultures beingdominated by middle class values, with middle class
tastes, ideas, and ideologies.
Once GloMedia comes, the greater intellectual
criticality of the Europeans will have a profound
effect on the Americans. The American middle class
will be bombarded by European criticality,
undermining traditional American values. I predict
(as I mentioned above briefly) that the US will be
intellectually re-colonized by the Europeans, at least
in terms of social institutions and beliefs.
Of course, the Europeans will also be profoundly
influenced by the Americans, whose superior energy
levels and science will shake up traditional, rather
stodgy European ways of doing things. Americans
have a much stronger sense of “get up and go” than
do the more hide-bound traditional Europeans. After
all, Americans selected themselves in literally,
getting up and going (from Europe to America) when
they emigrated.
GloMedia will influence both communities on either
side of the Atlantic profoundly. The US will be made
more sophisticated, more intellectually critical, less
middle class mindlessly gullible, and the Europeans
will be jolted into shaking up their rather
conservative ways of doing things.For example, the Americans threw out compulsory,
ageist retirement in the mid 1980s, due to the law
suits filed by private organizations such as the AARP
(American Association of Retired Persons), which is
one of the biggest and most powerful political
lobbying groups in the US.
As a result, the US has had anti ageist retirement
legislation for some 20+ years, whereas Europe is
only just starting to introduce such legislation at the
time of writing. Thus in Europe, a person who is
perfectly happy to keep working and who wants to,
whether for the money or for the pleasure, can be
compulsorily retired, i.e. effectively fired, simply
because of that person’s age. Such ageism is seen as
barbaric in the US. The Europeans have a lot to learn
from the Americans. So does the rest of the world.
Brutal
How can American culture be made less brutal? The
answer to this question is linked with the topic to be
discussed after this one, i.e. on the extent to which
the US is dominated by “mono media”. One of the
major reasons why America does not become less
brutal is that it is simply unaware that it is brutal (byinternational standards). For the US to reform its gun
laws, throw out the death penalty, create a national
health service, decrease the power of corporations
over individuals, etc, millions of voting Americans
will need to be made aware that Americans are
suffering from their culture’s brutality.
Here is where GloMedia could have a powerful effect.
By being exposed to the minds and opinions of other
cultures, particularly European, Americans will
become far more aware of the relative inferiorities of
their own culture, than is the case at the time of
writing. They will have their political horizons
extended, and they will learn that there are millions
of people overseas who look down on American
ways of doing things. That will jolt Americans.
It will cause them to reflect. They will ask “Why do
the Europeans (and other cultures) look upon many
US institutions as backward? What’s wrong with
these institutions?” and then the education process
can start. Americans will become more conscious of
alternative ways of doing things. They will become
more accustomed to looking elsewhere for
alternatives, so as to have a basis for comparison. As
discussed more forcefully in the next section, the
habit of looking overseas for ideas on how to betterorganize things is highly underdeveloped in the US,
to the cost of Americans’ quality of life.
So GloMedia should make Americans much more
cosmopolitan in their attitudes towards their own
institutions, and in terms of how broadly they “fish”
for new ideas on how to improve them.
Once millions of voting middle class Americans
become conscious of how backward the US is in
certain respects by international standards, a sense of
national shame will be generated, that will probably
motivate political change to improve things. It will be
refreshing to hear Americans saying such things as
“Well, look at country X, they have Y, and we don't.
Why not?”
Mono Media
In my multi-cultured view, the US is suffocatingly
insular minded. After becoming accustomed to
having multi-country European television, when I
was living in Brussels, in Europe, I became
accustomed to being able to zap not just TV channels,
but cultures. I really missed that in the US.In Europe, due to the European wide television
channels in the living rooms of millions of Europeans,
there is a much stronger sense of internationalism, i.e.
one was much more likely to hear statements from
politicians, commentators, academics, opinion
makers in general, who made comparisons between
what was happening in their country, compared to
what was happening in some other European country.
Such comparisons were made because the
commentators had been able to watch the television
of other countries, and could see with their own eyes,
alternative ways of doing things, or alternative ideas.
It was refreshing for me in my newly acquired multi-
lingual state in the 1980s, living in Brussels, to zap
from one culture and language to another and get the
“two sides” to a dispute between two countries.
When, for example, a controversy came up between
Germany and France, or between the continental
Europeans and the more insular minded UK, on some
European Community problem, I was able to hear
both points of view.
I was not brainwashed by what I call “the tyranny of
mono-cultured media”. I was influenced by what I
heard on both sides. Both had rational views,
although often I felt that the continental Europeanshad a broader vision and a more multi-cultured
perspective than did the island-dwelling mono-
lingual, mono-cultured Brits. The Brits were simply
unaware of their relative insularity and lack of inter-
cultural sophistication.
The same is even truer of the Americans. In my 5
years living in the US, I very rarely heard Americans
on the media make statements such as “Well, what do
the Xers think about this issue? What do they do?”
(where X is some other country or international bloc,
such as the EU).
My impression is that Americans in general are so
insular minded and have been globally dominant for
so long, that it simply does not cross their minds to
consider the possibility that they might be able to
learn from the superiorities of other cultures - the
unconscious attitude being, that the US is so far
ahead of the rest of the world, that the US has
nothing to learn from other cultures, and hence it
would be a waste of time even considering what other
cultures think.
Historically speaking, this American attitude in the
early 21 st century is similar to the attitude expressed
by the Chinese towards westerners, during the period
of the last Chinese dynasty (the Qing) in the 19 thcentury. A consequence of that Chinese attitude is
that a century later, the Chinese who live in today’s
“CCP dynasty” are now desperately trying to catch
up to the west. In the century between the Qing and
today, the Chinese fell massively behind the west.
Will the US be doing something similar in half a
century?
There are other factors at work in the US that
promote insular mindedness. This will take many
paragraphs to explain. In general, the less intelligent
a person is, the narrower are the conceptual and
cultural horizons of that person. For example, when I
was a young man traveling around Western Europe
on a shoestring budget, staying at youth hostels, I was
struck by the high intelligence levels of my fellow
hostellers.
Nearly all of them were university graduates and post
graduates. I rarely met any one I could describe as
being working class with below average intelligence.
The smarter people had selected themselves in
choosing to be curious about, and wanting to see how
other cultures lived. It left a deep impression on me.
When talking about the US, one can debate whether
the country is as democratic as European countries.
My impression is that the corporations in the US havemore power over individuals’ lives than in Europe.
Europe has a stronger socialist tradition and does not
tolerate what is fairly normal in the US. For example,
the US never had a true “workers political party” the
way Britain had the “Labour Party” or Germany had
the “Social Democratic Party” etc.
The US has a much less developed sense of
communal caring than does Europe, so there is less
pressure to create institutions for the common good.
There is a tradition in the US that government is a
necessary evil, and should be minimized, rather than
the more European attitude that the best brains should
go into government to better the lives of the people.
In the US, the best brains often go into business. The
Americans have a saying, due to one of their
presidents, that “The business of America is
business”. In general, in the US, CEOs of major
companies have a greater prestige level than do
American writers/intellectuals. The reverse is true in
France or Germany, which have much stronger
intellectual traditions than the US.
So, capitalist corporate values have more power in
the US than in Europe, so corporatist values tend to
dominate the way things are done in the US. This hasunfortunate consequences for American television
and particularly American television news services.
When I was living in Brussels, I had a “movie
girlfriend”. My French speaking wife spent her
working day with clients in an advertising agency,
and wanted to get away from people in the evenings.
I spent my time in front of a computer screen as a
researcher and grad student, and hence needed to
socialize in the evenings.
So I got a “movie girlfriend” who liked to watch
“quality” (i.e. what the Americans would call “artsy”)
movies and that is the point. She was a French
speaker and had a most condescending attitude
towards what she and her French speaking
compatriots called movies that were “commercial”.
This French word has connotations quite distinct
from those of its English language equivalent. In the
French mind, a “commercial” movie was from
Hollywood, aimed at the “Bell peaking” majority (i.e.
at the middle of the IQ (Bell or Gaussian) distribution
curve) so as to maximize profits. The French attitude
was to sneer at American “dumbed down” tastes. The
French were critical of the American value expressed
by Hollywood movie producers that it was moreimportant to make movies that make money than to
make movies that have quality.
This Hollywood value that money making was more
important than quality, that the masses (“Bell
peakers”) always had to be catered to at the expense
of the intellectual minority (the upper fringe of the IQ
Bell curve) was a constant source of contempt by the
French intellectuals of mass American culture. The
general feeling was that very few movies of real
quality came out of the US - that they were nearly all
“commercial”.
My movie girlfriend (actually I had several over the
years) and I would most often choose to watch
movies from cultures that opened our eyes to new
worlds. We far preferred to watch movies from India,
China, Iraq, Japan, etc than a shoot-em-up, violent,
action packed, intellectually vacuous, American
Hollywood blockbuster.
The type of movies that the US makes and exports, to
make more money (because there are a lot more “Bell
peakers” (or just “peakers”) outside the US than
inside, reflects on US values, and the same is true of
US television news and US TV programs in general.In the US, television in general is not in the control of
the government. US values are far too individualistic
and anti government to have the government have
much control over the media. Hence the same
corporatist values apply to US television, as in most
of the rest of US culture. The result is that US
television is geared towards maximizing profits, by
selling advertising on their television at maximum
prices, to reach the largest audience, so that the
“admass” peakers buy the advertisers’ products.
Americans use a system called “ratings” to determine
which TV shows are the most watched. If the ratings
(i.e. the proportion of the population who watch one
TV show compared to others) drops too low, that
show is killed, because it will not be able to attract
large advertising revenues, because too few people
watch it to be influenced by the ads to buy the
advertisers products.
To cause the greatest numbers of TV viewers to
watch a given show, the TV producers explicitly or
implicitly pay heed to the reality of the Bell curve
and aim their show at the peakers, ignoring the
“fringers” (i.e. the people at the fringe of the Bell
curve, i.e. the really dumb and the really smart).The problem in the US is that nearly all the media is
in the hands of the corporations, and hence the same
“peakerist” ideology applies. The net effect is that
American television (and radio) is ad infested, with
annoying ads appearing every few minutes, flogging
products that most viewers and listeners are not
interested in. This constant peppering of TV
programs by “ads” tends to promote a shallow
minded materialist view of the world. It is not
surprising that your average American mind is
crassly materialist, shallow minded, and has an
attention span of about 15 minutes (the uninterrupted
program time between the ads).
The intellectual level of these shows is now so bad,
so finely tuned to aim at the peakers, that American
intellectuals almost universally have simply stopped
watching US television. It is simply “too bad” for
them, “too dumbed down”. This is tragic, because it
then means that America’s intellectuals are not being
as well informed as they could be if they had a
broader, less “peakered” media, as is the case in
Europe for example, where the media is much more
under state (i.e. government) control.
The UK with its BBC, France with its TF (Television
Francaise), Italy with its RAI, etc have control over
some of the TV channels of their countries (the restbeing commercial and ad ridden). They also have a
more socially responsible attitude and a policy that
the general public should be catered to. Thus these
national media institutions feel the moral obligation
to create programs that cater not only to the peakers
but to the fringers as well.
In the case of the BBC for example, it was well
known amongst the Brits, that the BBC1 TV channel
was for the peakers and the “dummies”, and that the
BBC2 TV channel was more for the intellectuals. The
net result was that when American intellectuals lived
in Britain for a while they were agreeably surprised
to be able to watch British TV programs that were
definitely more “up market” (as the Americans would
say, i.e. demanding a higher level of intelligence to
appreciate) than the drivel they were accustomed to
in the US, that they rarely watched.
The fact that US TV programs and TV news shows
are so dumbed down, means that American
intellectuals simply don’t watch them, because they
insult the intellectuals’ intelligence. Also, these
programs do not inform the peakers very well either.
The peakers may enjoy watching the peaker level
news items, but they do not learn very much from
them.For example, instead of learning that the European
Union has a new treaty that will have historic
consequences for future global politics, the peakers
learn that a mother panda in a Chinese zoo has had a
cute little baby panda that is wowing the Beijing
public. The “anchor” (i.e. the main news reader) then
adds “Oooooh isn’t it cute!”).
This dumbing-down is narrowing the conceptual,
intellectual and geographical horizons of Americans
on a mass scale, with the result that Americans are
pitifully ignorant of other countries. Due to such
ignorance, and unawareness of the superiorities of
other countries, Americans are simply unable to be
influenced by such superiorities, for the simple
reason that they know almost nothing about them.
In this sense, the US media is doing a disservice to its
public, who are treated merely as ad fodder to
America’s corporations rather than as people to be
respected and educated. Europeans, Japanese, etc
look down on America for this, and appropriately so.
It is a major failing and inferiority of the US.
So, when GloMedia comes, America’s intellectuals
will be in for a treat. They will be able to feed their
hungry minds with world media, greatly enlarging
their intellectual and cultural horizons. They will beshocked at how backward America is in so many
respects, and feel ashamed. They will then be
motivated to push the US to catch up to the standards
of the world’s leading countries.
The growth of GloMedia will have a particularly
liberating effect on the US that has got itself stuck
into a particularly obnoxious vicious circle. As the
US media dumbs down increasingly, a higher
proportion of the brighter half of the US population
stops watching television, so the ratings then push the
dumbing down even further, causing more people to
stop watching, etc.
The result is that Americans have now become an
international disgrace. They are seen by the advanced
western countries increasingly as being narrow
minded, inter-culturally ignorant, and inter-culturally
incompetent. They are mono-lingual, mono-cultured,
and are even more “arrogantly inferior” than were the
French in the 1980s.