[curio_Pol_curio]

USians being proud of their nonconformism is like PG or Elon taking pride in their (children's) (meta)cognitive abilities (or HN talking its curiosity book)

The more sophisticated equilibrium to compare with the Japanese is the Swiss: it seems that the reason Swiss max(quirkiness) is significantly less that JP's is that CH has been optimising for skepticism of Karens ("pride" is maybe the key metric to look at, if we care to do a 3-agent strong-link weak-link analysis)

As SF (city and literary genre) become less like the frontier, the individual-community tradeoff is going to look more like the Dutch-- all the commercialised quirkiness does is make you groan, the way rbanffy's kids make him (if he has any)!

Btw, 2-way Protecting Power Mandate is a terrestrial image of the Mandate of Heaven, imho

https://www.swisscommunity.org/en/news-media/swiss-revue/art...

(I read the above as OSA propaganda :)

Eg between minimally viable narcissists and individuals who are merely or quietly nonconformist