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Between 2017 and 2018, the #Oscars, #Grammys, and #GoldenGlobes lost 14 million viewers around the world, and there is a lot of shocked questioning in America on why this is happening. The reason is simple, though it would be hard for America to accept it. For a long time, the
rest of the world accepted Western culture as the epitome of artistic achievement and took at its cues from Western culture. But slowly and subtly this has changed. The West, especially America, does not charm people by its lifestyle anymore. In fact in the East a lot of people
now feel that the lifestyle that American-style capitalism triggered is harmful not only for individual lifestyles but also for the world (for instance in energy consumption). Also, American values are no longer seen as the ones that people want to emulate, especially in Asia
where a lot of people, no matter how progressive, still value the family as a vital unit, a concept that has, and is becoming, alien in many parts America (and the West). From the love of non-processed food to valuing the free markets but not endless greed, large parts of the
world are rejecting American values. There is also the question of religion, which is important in most of the non-Western world (in India, for instance, around 90% or more regularly say in surveys that they consider themselves being part of some kind of religious structure). And
for a long time American companies and American foreign policy thought that the world would be reshaped to look like America - and it has in many ways. But people have also woken up to what is wonderful about America - the enterprise, the openness, the hard work, the innovation -
while rejecting a lot of American culture that they do not like. But both the American Right and the American Left believe they can shove down their values onto the rest of the world (this is a belief some other parts of the West also hold on to). This is not happening and will
not happen. Especially when people see that the West, and America, are giving up on the best things that they had - openness for argument, fearless free speech, endless space to debate anything, freedom to try any enterprise and freedom to fail, a sense of individual before
government. So the allure of the Western, and specially American, values is thinning around the world. I believe there are still amazing things in Western culture, and specifically American culture, but people around the world want to see the Americans defend those things first.
When they see that Americans themselves do not value their freedoms and their ethics, naturally cultural artifacts like grand award shows grow shabby and a little dated in their minds (our minds). As someone who benefited from the near limitless power of American intellectual
freedoms, I hope that America realises that it needs to stand up and defend the values for which the world looked up to it. And I hope it realises that in the new world, it must be as open to learning from the East and adopting from the East as it is in culturally converting it.
