It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does.
The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.)
I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another.
I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here.
Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.
Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.
The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.)
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html