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Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

Building institutions and culture takes centuries and can be lost quickly. Take heart that the West is burning its cultural capital quickly and becoming low trust as people start to realize they're in a reputation poor environment.

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More than just that, it takes a lot of luck. You need people in power at key moments who can rise to the occasion and then peacefully pass along power. You need leaders who build institutions and not networks of patronage. You need people in place who are willing to accept the constraints of rule of law, and to establish that norm.

[*edit] can someone downvoting explain what they disagree with here?

I didn't downvote you but you can't really call it all luck, because if that were the case you would see a random smattering of countries becoming successful and others failing, however what you see in the real world is continents either being successful or failing. Unfortunately I think some of the major actors at play here are too politically sensitive to talk about, but I don't think there's much luck involved at the end of the day

I said it also requires luck.

> in the real world is continents either being successful or failing

Hardly. Chile is quite successful while Argentina is kind of a mess and Bolivia is worse. Uruguay is doing well also. Brazil is doing reasonably well, all things considered too. Venezuela is an absolute mess.

Europe is a really mixed bag as well.

I wonder what South Korea would become if tomorrow morning China invaded NK and SK and made them into a single country with North Koreans in charge.

Why is that something to take heart in? It sounds ugly and spiteful to me.

Is schadenfreude not your favorite flavor of ice cream?

No I genuinely derive joy from seeing others, be it individuals or entire nations, do well.

I’m not perfect of course, so sometimes I do feel schadenfreude. But I never mistake it for a good thing, but rather a sign of my own imperfection.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/jeff-reynolds/2017/05/31/things-...

Note this was written in 2017. A lot has happened since the which affirms what GP is saying about the degradation of cultural capital here in the west.

Such as? From what I can see the most important parts of Western cultural capital are still in place and operating correctly (peaceful transition of power through elections, rule of law, freedom of speech)

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