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In a collective culture like Japan, you take care of your responsibilities yourself to improve the collective good. It’s basically the opposite of the tragedy o
by ok_dad 1y ago
In a collective culture like Japan, you take care of your responsibilities yourself to improve the collective good. It’s basically the opposite of the tragedy of the commons in individualistic cultures, IMO.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered not because of a requirement that you conform, but because you’re not doing your responsibilities, so someone else has to do it.
America is much more conformist than Japan, it’s just than in Japan you’ll work a mediocre job and enjoy it because that’s your role and you appreciate that you’re a part of a whole. Whereas in America you might be able to theoretically do “better”, but there’s no safety.
- latentsea 1y ago> The nail that sticks out gets hammered not because of a requirement that you conform, but because you’re not doing your responsibilities, so someone else has to do it. Unfortunately, in practice it's ingrained by a tonne of instances of getting told off for minor infractions of seemingly very arbitrary rules, to the point where it's so ingrained that you just stop questioning it because it's not worth the energy to do so anymore.
- ok_dad 1y agoYea, it's not perfect, and for some it is probably very bad to be in a collective culture where they can't stretch their boundaries or do something too differently than is socially acceptable. Personally: I have mostly lived in a super-individualistic culture which, perhaps weirdly, feels more oppressive to me than a fully collective culture might. I now live in a place that straddles the two, and it works well for me so far. I think that it would be a dream if everyone could move to the place that feels most at-home for them, but until the world learns to share and support each other more, that is just a dream.