| > The thing people like you don't seem to understand is that individualism is a very western thing Read my comment again - I explicitly acknowledged this. I'd say that most of your comment is attacking a top-down "exporting democracy" whether covertly, led by the State Department, outright invasion, etc. I agree that these things are evil, especially when "democracy" is used as the marketing for the primary concern of implementing USD-denominated markets. So where we differ is the bottom up emergent behavior of people making their own choices. > historically people worry about the well being of their children and society which means not getting killed/raped, having economic and academic opportunities,etc... and beyonf that also, the will of their god being implemented. And yet, those are the same exact people choosing to use technology that provides things like (very imperfect) communications privacy. Your argument implies that their choices are wrong, so what you're really saying is that the larger population needs to be paternalistically protected from themselves. Which brings us to the huge unstated assumption of your comment that for every society we should respect some ambient "values" of the society, with some more powerful in-group protecting those values against the larger population. I agree that's a descriptive statement about the power structure of basically every society. But I don't agree that it's a prescriptive model with inherent moral value. And yes, I do know this viewpoint is a very "western" philosophy. I put "western" in quotes because it seems like a strong general attractor, as communications technology enables human-to-human communication unmediated by traditional top-down power structures. I'm also learning not to handicap myself by getting stuck in the doldrums of relativism. To the extent that it may be inherently western, spreading our own culture through arms length communication and voluntary buy in is a hell of a lot more defensible than the traditional ways of spreading culture - violent conquest and subjugation. |