There’s a Civilization-game style “tech tree” for cultural and social development. Some societies are further along in that development than others.
Pakistan faces the same cultural problem as Afghanistan and parts of the middle east: in large parts of the country, extended kinship groups dominate society, precluding the development of civic institutions and functioning government. That’s not true for the whole country. Parts of Pakistan are culturally like India or Bangladesh: it has a long history of governance by central institutions, even if that governance is dysfunctional. Imagine if 50% of the U.S. population was Appalachians. The U.S. would be a much less successful country also.
The opposite is true! You’ll get farther in life when you realize that how groups of people are socialized to behave matters a lot—and that’s true whether you’re talking about corporate culture or a country’s culture.
People whose brains are as soft as their hearts sell false equality, but its harmful. It’s like telling the obese person they’re great and that their problems are due to “bad genetics” or factors outside their control. It’s a polite lie and it is damaging.
Understanding that culture is just a type of technology is how you get miracles like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923. He thought culture was destiny, and he harnessed that realization to make his culture rich.
> And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.
Oh, it’s far too late for that. As the kids say, he’s cooked. He’ll be complaining about hypothetical Appalachians invading New England or New York or the United States (all actual examples, see below) in the nursing home.
I don’t understand. Do you (1) think Appalachia is great, or (2) you agree that Appalachia lags the rest of the U.S., but think that has nothing to do with how Appalachian parents socialize their children to behave what they teach their kids to value?
Pakistan spent quite a bit on education in East Pakistan up until 1971. and I've even pointed you to the article in Prothom Alo where Bangladeshi experts admitted that but you do you. It's not like Ibn Khaldun didn't hit on similar points with asabiyya but saying we have A/B testing here is wild.
