>The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness I agree with this, and I think that's the root of many of the social

>The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness I agree with this, and I think that's the root of many of the social malaises Japan has that the OP was getting at: lack of intellectual independence and hikikomori, for example. Many of the Japanese folks I've met through work are very attentive to protocols and rules, and supremely uncomfortable without well defined sets of rules. That's a kind of sickness, isn't it?