Dr. Jordan Peterson:
> "I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era; but also when Mao was [in] China--there were other places as well. [I was] trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly. I started studying that at the collectivist level, looking for political or economic reasons. But as I investigated further those levels of analysis [...] weren't providing the answers that I wanted--I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say in Nazi Germany: but there's something to learn at an individual level. That's my estimation. I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader. I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either. As I read more and more about the situation, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray."
> "[...] The lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an awful lot about the role of the individual: people like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a perennial classic and a great book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument."
> "So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance and that taught me a lot. It taught me about responsibility. About the responsibility of the sovereign individual. We have an idea in our [Western] culture, it's a very powerful idea: that each of us is of intrinsic value. But associated with that value is a responsibility: we have a responsibility for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state."
This begs the question: are Chinese business men and women willing to falsify their own experience at the expense of the {environment,personal integrity} to make a buck and/or survive?
The business culture of dishonesty (borrowing from HN user docker_up) can't persist forever.