CURT AND MURRAY SELL ON CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
—“The Chinese [primary method of decidability] is stability – [non-conflict]. Chinese history is tumultuous so everything must be done in the name of maintaining equilibrium and stability in the nation state(which is seen as a collective entity).
The American [primary method of decidability] (until very recently) is reason – [negotiation]. Maintaining that people will ultimately do what’s right for themselves in the end and will act in their own self interests.
(CURT INTERJECTS: Chinese prevent conflict through denial, delay, and deceit. westerners attempt to expose conflicts and resolve them quickly. europeans regulate heavily to prevent legal conflicts later. Americans provide very precise legal rules so that limited regulation is necessary except in those cases where the exceptions have failed. These are three methods of insurance against conflict. The Chinese delay and deceive and deny until ‘matters solve themselves’. The continental method of regulate in order to limit conflicts. And the anglo method: provide clear rule of law so that those conflicts that do arise are decidable.)
It’s probably why our greatest weapon has been unleashing chaos into societies (weaponized culture)in order to drive events in a way that serve America’s greater interests.
(CURT INTERJECTS: Americans have followed the anglo enlightenment, peace of Westphalia(States are responsible for all agents within), and Postwar Consensus (human rights and fixed borders), that the world will remain peaceful through economic cooperation rather than territorial expansion. So americans seek to raise in to ‘adulthood’ every nation, so that it can participate in a meritocratic international market. This is ok, except that every nation may not have the human capital to compete successfully, and may try to circumvent that meritocratic competition by other means (islam).)
I feel like this idea failed with the Middle Eastern destabilization program of the obama administration. The realization that people are literally wired differently from the western mind I feel is a revelatory moment of catharsis for western neoliberal thinkers. Universalism is a generic lazy way of seeing collective groups of people on earth. I have watched lectures on YouTube from the army war college stating that it doesn’t really matter if we technically “lose” wars with other nation states (fail to hold territory). As long as we utterly destroy your nation and knock it back a century in its progress we have technically won against our opponent because they can’t develop a civilization strong enough to challenge us on our own territory. The third world is aware of this and some folks theorize that we are in a multigenerational asymmetric conflict with the devolving world using our own principles and mass migration (another form of warfare) against us…”— Murray Sell
(CURT INTERJECTS: agreed)