6 ms·

The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s

The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s pervasive in all LA. I’d dare to say it can be found in Spain/Portugal as well.

zozbot234 5y ago
Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.
- kragen 5y ago
  No, Argentina was never either a first-world country or a developed country. What we were is rich, because a small population had conquered a large territory that yielded limitless amounts of beef, and with the advent of refrigerated shipping, that meant amounts of wealth limited only by how many cowboys and meatpackers you could hire. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality was already well in place during the Argentine civil wars, and the distance from the rhetoric of Juan Manuel de Rosas to that of Perón was really just as small as Perón claimed. Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
- 8note 5y ago
  Argentina was a successful cow product exporter, then cow products became cheap elsewhere
  - kragen 5y ago
    Well, not really. The end of the cow-product-based Argentine Golden Age didn't come from US feedlots; those were still decades in the future. It came from the Smoot-Hawley act and its beggar-thy-neighbor brethren worldwide: our economy, which had grown fat from its abundant and fine exports, suddenly found the gates closed to those exports and the drawbridges drawn up, almost everywhere in the world, precipitating the fall of democracy and the Década Infame. Within three years exports had fallen by almost two thirds, an economic disaster in an export-driven economy.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Argentina had left-wing politics in the 19 teens, well before it got really rich. Perón... is hard to pin down. Gabriel Garcia Márquez has quite correctly pointed out that peronism spans the spectrum from far-left to far-right. People tend to project on Perón what they wish to see. Fortunately Perón is far in the past now.
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    The opinion you are quoting is just the typical "not real socialism" stuff from people who don't want to admit that their ideology destroys everything it touches. They are doing it right now with Venezuela. 15 years ago they called Venezuela the future of left wing activism in South America, today they claim it was really right wing all along.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler, modeling his policies explicitly and in some detail on Mussolini's, and when he had to flee Argentina, he went to Franco's Spain. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power largely on their opposition to socialism, though they did of course attempt to co-opt its more popular policies (and in the case of Hitler even its name), and Franco's opponents in the Spanish Civil War were anarchists who were very explicitly extreme left wing. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party, who immediately started killing each other --- like, literally at the airport when his plane came in. (This is not a literary invention by Garcia Márquez; it actually happened historically.) Perón sided with the right-wing factions. Perón is hard to pin down: he adopted the most popular socialist policies with even greater enthusiasm than Hitler did. It's true that he welcomed fleeing Nazis, but he also welcomed fleeing Jews. The clearest aspect of his political alignment is that he was authoritarian and anti-elitist. But I think it's a clear mistake to identify him as a "left-wing populist". As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.
      - cryptonector 5y ago
        Argentina was quite rich, relative to the rest of the world, in 1950.
kragen 5y ago
I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's property in order to improve their own situation involves all three of those mortal sins. (To be fair, running a successful business involves a certain amount of covetousness, too.) Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers, not creators or merchants. Even today in Argentina it's considered far nobler to be an escribano or a lawyer than a physicist, a programmer, or a businessman --- but the real national heroes are football players! Pure zero-sum players. Physicians are at least somewhat honored, but Favaloro still committed suicide because of the lack of support for his work, and Diego Maradona is far more honored for cheating at football and raping teenagers (and, to be fair, playing football too) than Esteban Maradona is for his lifetime spent on eradicating Chagas disease and studies in anthropology and biology. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order. There is, by and large, no appreciation in Latin America for the actual long-term benefits of property rights, such as, for instance, letting average people obtain formal title over the land that they might currently be holding/homesteading informally in a kind of adverse possession. Of course the lack of this acknowlegdement leads to all sorts of power imbalances, and predictable tensions as some try to push back without addressing the actual underlying issues.
  - User23 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.

kragen 5y ago
No, Argentina was never either a first-world country or a developed country. What we were is rich, because a small population had conquered a large territory that yielded limitless amounts of beef, and with the advent of refrigerated shipping, that meant amounts of wealth limited only by how many cowboys and meatpackers you could hire. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality was already well in place during the Argentine civil wars, and the distance from the rhetoric of Juan Manuel de Rosas to that of Perón was really just as small as Perón claimed. Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
8note 5y ago
Argentina was a successful cow product exporter, then cow products became cheap elsewhere
- kragen 5y ago
  Well, not really. The end of the cow-product-based Argentine Golden Age didn't come from US feedlots; those were still decades in the future. It came from the Smoot-Hawley act and its beggar-thy-neighbor brethren worldwide: our economy, which had grown fat from its abundant and fine exports, suddenly found the gates closed to those exports and the drawbridges drawn up, almost everywhere in the world, precipitating the fall of democracy and the Década Infame. Within three years exports had fallen by almost two thirds, an economic disaster in an export-driven economy.
cryptonector 5y ago
Argentina had left-wing politics in the 19 teens, well before it got really rich. Perón... is hard to pin down. Gabriel Garcia Márquez has quite correctly pointed out that peronism spans the spectrum from far-left to far-right. People tend to project on Perón what they wish to see. Fortunately Perón is far in the past now.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  The opinion you are quoting is just the typical "not real socialism" stuff from people who don't want to admit that their ideology destroys everything it touches. They are doing it right now with Venezuela. 15 years ago they called Venezuela the future of left wing activism in South America, today they claim it was really right wing all along.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler, modeling his policies explicitly and in some detail on Mussolini's, and when he had to flee Argentina, he went to Franco's Spain. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power largely on their opposition to socialism, though they did of course attempt to co-opt its more popular policies (and in the case of Hitler even its name), and Franco's opponents in the Spanish Civil War were anarchists who were very explicitly extreme left wing. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party, who immediately started killing each other --- like, literally at the airport when his plane came in. (This is not a literary invention by Garcia Márquez; it actually happened historically.) Perón sided with the right-wing factions. Perón is hard to pin down: he adopted the most popular socialist policies with even greater enthusiasm than Hitler did. It's true that he welcomed fleeing Nazis, but he also welcomed fleeing Jews. The clearest aspect of his political alignment is that he was authoritarian and anti-elitist. But I think it's a clear mistake to identify him as a "left-wing populist". As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      Argentina was quite rich, relative to the rest of the world, in 1950.

kragen 5y ago

I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's property in order to improve their own situation involves all three of those mortal sins. (To be fair, running a successful business involves a certain amount of covetousness, too.) Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers, not creators or merchants. Even today in Argentina it's considered far nobler to be an escribano or a lawyer than a physicist, a programmer, or a businessman --- but the real national heroes are football players! Pure zero-sum players. Physicians are at least somewhat honored, but Favaloro still committed suicide because of the lack of support for his work, and Diego Maradona is far more honored for cheating at football and raping teenagers (and, to be fair, playing football too) than Esteban Maradona is for his lifetime spent on eradicating Chagas disease and studies in anthropology and biology. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona

zozbot234 5y ago
Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order. There is, by and large, no appreciation in Latin America for the actual long-term benefits of property rights, such as, for instance, letting average people obtain formal title over the land that they might currently be holding/homesteading informally in a kind of adverse possession. Of course the lack of this acknowlegdement leads to all sorts of power imbalances, and predictable tensions as some try to push back without addressing the actual underlying issues.
- User23 5y ago