“You’re not the center of the story — at least not everywhere.”
That’s the tagline of a video featuring the late President Lee Kuan Yew, described as the “founding father of Singapore,” elsewhere affectionately referred to as LKY.
The social media account responsible runs under the moniker Office of the Director of Intelligence & Strategy, which sounds like a propaganda bureau. It’s an excerpt from a 25-year-old hour-long interview with Charlie Rose.
Entitled “Not Every Culture Believes Success Starts with One Person,” the clip goes on to say that LKY “shares his understanding of a key divide between the West and many Asian societies: Where the West centers the individual and leading your own path, many Asian systems prioritize the group — family, obligation, cohesion, survival together.”
The familial and communal aspects of traditional Chinese society are not in doubt. But LKY makes two crucial errors.
“You believe in the individual as the creator of all things,” he says of Americans.
That is not even close to how American individualism views the world. For starters, most Americans continue to believe in a capitalized Creator “of all things,” and it’s not the individual. Furthermore, even the most rugged individualist understands the role of families in raising children and communities in helping humans flourish.
American liberty, as imperfect and diluted as it is, can accommodate family-values traditions and communitarian folkways as well as free radicals. The point of individualism is not that The Individual creates success ex nihilo, but that government must make no exceptions for some individuals over others based on group membership.
Which is why Chinese-Americans do so well: they are helped by their family orientation as well as freedom. They do much better here than in China, but Chinese do even better in Singapore, which sports a lower tax burden.
The kind of tax burden individualists prefer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
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3 replies on “Chinese Individualism”
Another key difference is our recognition that governments are far more likely and far more adept at removing rights, rather than protecting them.
Singapore is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party state. Maybe that’s why the Chinese do so well there. LKY was an authoritarian who ruled for decades. The government is dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP). Just how ‘free’ is Singapore? How much freedom can there be when government rules with a heavy hand and suppresses the opposition? Singapore is one island. It can afford to have a lower tax burden, since it benefits from its geographic location as a shipping hub. The people may be free to make a living but not necessarily free to express themselves or form opposition parties.
Socialism does work well at the loving family level, but it tends to fall apart at a larger government(ish) level without the binding love of a family. One of the most successful of the larger socialisms was the Oneida Colony, but it was a religious, free-love society, that reminded me of the Church of All Worlds in Heinlein’s book “Stranger in a Strange Land”.