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The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#41

Post by sddfd »

isoskeles wrote: post #35

> So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right around 78. And when the professor said to me in class “Puzhong, I can see that story brought up some emotions in you,” I rolled up my sleeve and checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, “nope, no emotion.” The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump…

Basically, the author questions the American Dream.

"Hard work brings success" is paraphrasing the American Dream.

The author now says he learned that success does not depend on factors that can be controlled. He uses the verb learned in contrast to taught to emphasize that he thinks this is true.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#42

Post by Nomentatus »

isoskeles wrote: post #35

> So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right around 78. And when the professor said to me in class “Puzhong, I can see that story brought up some emotions in you,” I rolled up my sleeve and checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, “nope, no emotion.” The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump…

It's not an analogy, it's a juxtaposition. He agrees with Rubin, and has told anecdotes that support that position. You just don't want to believe his conclusion, and Rubin's. That's your right, but to say that he has no position, that it's all murky and there is no conclusion; therefore you can reject his conclusion, is literally absurd.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#43

Post by Nomentatus »

kunimu wrote: post #14
bouvin wrote: post #4

> "In Communism, the future is certain; it is only the past that might not be" A fine essay, the above quote gave me a chuckle.

I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Soviet_Encyclopedia#Damn...

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#44

Post by kunimu »

ordu wrote: post #28
kunimu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.

It is simple. In the future the Communism will be built, and all the people will be happy. It is absolutely certain. Every current event proves this statement, if you think otherwise, you should educate youself better by consuming mass media. But the past is not so certain, because the past is under control of the government, and the past undego changes sometimes. The past has its blank spots, there are some unmentio…

Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of.

>you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.

Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse wrote about how, beacuse Communism is a subversive movement, and indeed the Left, it cannot gain mass media time, because of its nature as subversive; it can only be snuck in under capitalism, as capitalism is willing to accept any ideology for the sake of profit. I would recommend One-Dimensional Man on the topic of what problems Communists have with late capitalist media and production, and the hiding of information.

>If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984

I have; although it's a little funny to see Orwell used to rebut the Communist project, seeing as he was a Socialist himself who fought on the side of anarchists in Spain, there's a deeper point here that you are missing. Orwell wrote about very obvious misdirection - "war is peace", "peace is war". However, you are missing the fact that it is not this easy to see.

Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence but within the noun. In words such as "freedom", "democracy", "control", etc. the actual meaning can be discerned only by the speaker of the word and the historical time period. Please read Marcuse on this topic. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#45

Post by paulpauper »

Eventually I was able to meet the chief financial officer of my favorite company, Costco. He told me that they don’t hire any MBAs. Everyone starts by pushing trolleys. (I have seriously thought about doing just that. But my wife is strongly against it.) Maybe, I thought, that is why the company is so successful—no MBAs!

that's pretty amazing..is this really true? So if someone applied for marketing or accounting, they would still have to push carts?

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#46

Post by aluhut »

ordu wrote: post #39
fahayekwasright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really so sure? It’s not an easy thing to maintain awareness of the workings of one’s emotions, especially for someone raised in a repressive, collectivist culture that doesn’t value the internal life of the individual, and especially if that individual is on the spectrum, in which case the emotions are “buried” even deeper.

If his emotions are buried so deep, that there no way to see real world consequences of them, than maybe it is better to say, that there are no emotions? I think, that mottos in Western culture are just pathetic ones. Western culture knows nothing about how to raise steady emotions in people. I was born in USSR, and I saw how it should be done. But there is one consequence: with experience comes tolerance to external…

> Really, I can hardly believe that any adult can be touched by such a motto.

I grew up in the east block too and I come upon this quite often. The peak of it is the current political situation in the USA.

I wonder if this is connected with the pressure to be young and healthy for as long as possible or at least looking like it which allows you to participate in "young culture" whith everything that comes along with it (tech, speach, dress, views,...). The side effect is a infantile look at the world and concepts that are supposed to run it on all levels.

I work for an US company in Germany and see realities collide every day.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#47

Post by wolf550e »

kunimu wrote: post #44
ordu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simple. In the future the Communism will be built, and all the people will be happy. It is absolutely certain. Every current event proves this statement, if you think otherwise, you should educate youself better by consuming mass media. But the past is not so certain, because the past is under control of the government, and the past undego changes sometimes. The past has its blank spots, there are some unmentio…

Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of. >you should educate youself better by consuming mass media. Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? M…

'ordu answered as a person who has lived under communism. By "mass media" 'ordu meant "pravda". 'ordu is 100% correct about the communism as it was practiced in the 20th century. You are a theoretical marxist who has never seen what communism is like in practice. You would just say about every attempt to build communism that failed (which is all of them) that it was not real communism.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#49

Post by Exo_Tartarus »

I'm not exactly sure what the point of the article is or what the author is trying to say. It's pretty much an abbreviated biography bookended by some attempts at philosophizing. It is interesting to hear how much easier the author found his British curriculum than his Chinese. I was also amused by how he mocked his Stanford MBA curriculum, and how the career office people were dismissive of his passion to make money.

Smart hard working people succeed much more often than they don't. Born into difficult circumstances, their probability of 'success' (accumulating prestige and wealth) is much higher than for others.

Of course sometimes circumstances are too oppressive to overcome, and sometimes the stupid and lazy are elevated in spite of themselves... But these are exceptions.

Re: The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

#50

Post by PoliteTwig »

I find it interesting that the author only considers America from the top down - from the perspectives of institutions (Stanford, Goldman Sachs, Costco) and slogans (American Dream, All people deserve to live healthy lives). Part of me wonders if that’s due to America's own marketing, or due to his upbringing in a more totalitarian government, but for most Americans these perspectives are just as foreign.

At dinner tables and in churches all across the country, you hear people say "God is in control”. You’ll hear reminders to be humble and appreciate what you have, because anyone can get ill at any time, or lose all all their belongings in fire, or any number of bad events. The chaos out there is real, whether one believes in it or not. And there's an even bigger danger in trying to control the chaos, and history has plenty of examples (Mao's China and USSR most recent). The limited government in America was founded on a distrust of power, top-down control, and people who want to control the world. Without that bottom-up perspective, America will never make sense.

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