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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.

Material conditions shape history

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To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".

It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.

But it's undeniable that culture and how that's reflected in governance have a huge impact: South vs North Korea.

> But it's undeniable that culture and how that's reflected in governance have a huge impact: South vs North Korea.

Considering that north and south korea share the same "culture", wouldn't they be an example against your assertion?

Isn't the bigger impact that one is sanctioned by the world's sole superpower and the other is not?

Yeah, also it shows the comment is ignorant of history.

In the immediate aftermath of the Korean war, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. That changed with time, dramatically so, but initially it'd be reasonable to see the north as having better economic prospects.

> I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.

I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.

(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.

> Material conditions shape history

Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.

>Why are people so allergic to materialism?

At the risk of starting a fight... I would point at America's religious history, and the continuing threads of that today that increasingly see scientific/materialist thought as a direct threat to their ideas of how a society ought to be organized.

I mean yeah avoiding materialism in political debates is great for people dominating the material realm. I don't think that's an accident

Because a shared cultural identity is vital to maintain a cohesive society that can muster the collective resources to get shit done?

The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.

Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.

This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?

I think you are writing your comments conditioned on not just what you are responding to but also a lot of internal assumptions about their intentions. The person you are responding to said or implied nothing about surveillance or Western assumptions about China. They are making the claim (apologies to them if I am misrepresenting) that societies or governments achieve extraordinary goals (i.e. goals that they were not expected to achieve within a certain time-frame) because of the physical, economic and social conditions and not because of cultural elements. Cultural explanations are post-hoc i.e. they are used after the fact to boost morale or give a sense of unity. More concretely, if China, the US, the EU, Japan, India, Russia can launch spacecrafts to the moon, so can Nigeria and Kenya given enough time, resources and the right incentive structure even if they are culturally very different from the countries above.

Does this include the material conditions of human bio diversity? You deny "way of thinking" is itself a material differentiation but could that not be an expression of material conditions over time reshaping separate groups of people to act and think differently, who were through differing selective pressures, environments, adaptations and historical contingencies themselves "shaped" differently?

Or do you yourself have a religious belief in strict human blank slate equality?

I'm not saying relevance of culture, human bio-diversity, etc. are zeroes in terms of impact. I just get frustrated because they seem to be the only things talked about at the expense of any discussion about actual material conditions or control and distribution of resources

> Why are people so allergic to materialism?

They are made so in the Angloamerican West. The establishment wants them to focus on 'values' instead. Because if the people started thinking about material conditions, they would topple the system that concentrates 99% of the wealth in the hands of the 0.1%.

ideologies are part of the material conditions

Well if you have pay attention this user you would realize he is a very classic example of an educated and proud Chinese. No offense but an unusual amount of Chinese uniformly think and talk like that thanks to the education.

Why would you assume culture is immaterial? And to make this less emotional let’s take the micro scale; don’t you think the culture of doing engineering doesn’t affect outcomes team to team within the same company, or company to company within the same country or even country to country within the same company?

a perfect example in this context would be when a company is successful and it's attributed to culture not product market fit, funding or luck

I understand your point about misattribution but it cuts both ways. How about when a company is better than competitors because they executed better because they had a superior organizational culture. Or not successful and this is due to poor culture.

YC sets the prime examples. It is never product at the expense of who the team is and in what proven way they have worked together and plan to execute at scale.

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