Two quotes: both, really, on culture. The first, from Free Northerner, is an example of a cultural practice that exists there. The parallel in NZ is you slow down when you see stock on the road. Because everyone knows that animals can be herded down the road: in some places the farm has a road through the middle of it and you need to move the cows twice a day for milking.
We don’t have the snow rituals (such as shovelling the path) because we don’t have snow.
I live in Canada. Everybody gets stuck in the snow on occasion. When you do, you’ll always have someone stop to help push your car out and get you on the way. One time I slid up the curb and got stuck in a small snowbank at 2 am on New Years (it was a patch of ice, not alcohol). The family in the house came out and helped me push and dig it out for 15 minutes, until someone in a 4×4 showed up and gave me a quick tow. I’ve stopped to help others push as well. Helping to jump-start someone else’s car is barely worth remarking on. It’s just something you do because you trust people will help you out when you need, and so we all get to avoid freezing to death trying to get our cars going.
This is a cultural practice built up by an uncountable number of positive interactions over a unnumbered years. The Canadian experience is the unnatural outlier, the Congolese experience is the natural norm. Helping strangers get their car unstuck is an unnatural cultural practice held by a limited number. It is just one of many western Europeans have built up. These practices have not built up in many (most?) other countries.
If you import foreigners from Congo who do not have this cultural practice, fewer positive interactions and more negative interactions build up, and eventually a some tipping point, you no longer have the cultural practice.
This is the harm immigration causes, it wears away at built-up cultural practices. The insidious danger of it is that this regression is barely noticeable until one day you get stuck, look around, and wonder, ‘why is nobody helping me?’
Of course, cultural practices go far beyond simply pushing someone’s car.
Most societies have these adaptive systems. Those that do not, and function as tribes, have them within the tribe: you get someone from the family to push the car out of the snow. Most of those societies are in climates where making these kind of mistakes have limited consequences: if your jeep is stuck in Africa (which is the example that Free Northerner started with) then time matters less as you won’t freeze to death.
Which brings me to a theorem: You can have a stupid society only if you are rich or the climate is warm. You can afford to have homeless people if they do not die of exposure: otherwise you need shelters or subways. You can have an idle class if you are rich enough to afford either an aristocracy or structural unemployment.
But otherwise, you cannot. You will have to accept risk, low wages, and pay your way. And you will not be able to go into the world unprepared, trusting on your emergency funds or the goodwill of others.
For the very systems that allow us to rely on such goodwill are being broken. This is unjust: this is unfair. And that does not matter. Fairness stops mattering when you leave primary school.
Here was a valuable lesson: It doesn’t matter what’s “fair.”
Life is often unfair. People wrongly suffer harm through no fault of their own, and if we allow ourselves to sulk over the harms we’ve suffered, we will never accomplish anything useful in life. Some people go through life reacting to every failure by saying, “It’s not my fault,” and blaming others for their problems. We call these people losers or, if they convert their self-pity to political ideology, we call them “activists.” Life is unfair, says the loser, and this unfairness is social injustice, and therefore we must rearrange the world to make life better for the losers. These social justice schemes never yield the “fairness” they promise, and when they fail, the ideologues who advocated these policies then blame their enemies for their failure. When feminism fails to achieve its goals, feminists always blame the patriarchy, and anyone who wants to go through life like that — lashing out at scapegoats, blaming their failures on others — is a loser.
A truly radical thought: Maybe life is fair.
Maybe the hardship you suffer is for your own good. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from a situation that seems to you manifestly unfair. Maybe your failure is not 100% your fault, but if it is only 1% your fault, you should forget about the other 99% and concentrate on whatever part of the problem you can change. If you can meet the challenge and survive, your triumph over adversity will make you stronger.
The very things that made Canada and NZ great: the ability to help, give a hand, help… do not exist in a vacuum. They require maintenance. Have too many people exploiting them, and they will break.
The last time we broke that in New Zealand, we had a three-decade land war. Let us not do that again.
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