Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
It isn't something about them that makes them vulnerable. There's something about Western culture that makes it attractive, and it's our prosperity.This is something that has always troubled me about traditionally Buddhist or partly Budhist countries - how easily capitalism and Western culture took over there. Japan and Thailand being painful examples, but others as well. Similar has happened with many other nations and tribes worldwide. It hurts me to see a member of an African warrior tribe, dressed in a T-shirt and baseball cap. What is it about these people and nations that makes them so vulnerable to Western influence?
Keep in mind Maslow's hierarchy. When people are struggling for stability and security, or simply for survival, the niceties of their tribe's or nation's culture aren't as important to them. That's hard for us with our full bellies, safe homes, steady jobs and pampered children to understand, because we have spare emotional capacity to sit around and think about the niceties of the world's various cultures and find our own lacking. They don't.
We know that to a greater or lesser extent it's an accident of history that the West sprang ahead in the last 500 years. (Although the Enlightenment that has eluded many of the world's other societies--perhaps most glaringly Islamic--played an undeniable role in it.) America was the engine of the West's prosperity until recently, and America was an entire hemisphere that had never supported an Iron Age civilization, so its resources were largely untapped. Europe helped itself to the resources of the rest of the world, or as it was recently put, "The reason there was no Industrial Revolution in India, even though unlike China India was ready for it, is that India was forced to build England's Industrial Revolution."
But people in other countries don't understand that. They look around and see nothing but Neolithic housing, transportation, education, medical care, diplomacy, etc. and all they can do is look at Europe, America, Japan and Australia and say, "Whatever they did to get that, I want some too."
As for Japan, come on dude. Remember who lost WWII? We got to rebuild that country, from the ashes up, in our image. And we did a damn fine job of it. We even wrote their constitution. Our management consultants and efficiency experts, who couldn't get a meeting over here, went over there and were revered as sensei by a humiliated people who were determined to put as much of their past behind them as possible.