Thursday, December 27, 2012
Hermits vs. Herds
P.96 "WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature."
P.102 (non-Western cultures) "I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family are intensely interdependent."
Simply, the Western mind focuses on the individual. Other cultures focus on the group. We are hyper-individualistic.
Though even within our society this concept also tends to divide "liberals" and "conservatives." The former focusing on groups of disenfranchised (women, the poor, minorities) while the latter tend to focus on individuals (and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps). It also brings into conflict the balance things like public health vs. liberty (seatbelt laws and affirmative action are good examples of this).
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Thought it was interesting in Haidt's other book, The Happiness Hypothesis- he talks about a human community size of 150 as the predicted ideal, based off a logarithm of brain size when compared to other organisms. It's a group size at which people can know everyone else directly, including knowledge of relations/dependencies. With the pace at which societies have expanded from hunter-gatherer times, some unnatural pressures have changed human dynamics. It's like we couldn't keep up and imploded back to individualism. Maybe.
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