We were afraid that they were going to out-compete us by just being smarter and better at the capitalism game.
They were another western-ish liberal Democracy, like us. But they were going to be better than us at it.
The fear of China is different. It's is ideological, far mode.
Like, it isn't just that they'll win on the merits, but they'll win with (because of?) their evil system.
It's not just a material threat, but also a spiritual threat to American ideals.
We could learn and copy Japaneses systems and methods, but we can't copy Chinese systems and methods, because the latter are bound up in ideological commitments that are anti-American.
If we looked close at what works in China, we would have to face up to the practical tradeoffs of democracy and freedom of speech. We might notice that they have costs.
But, we're really proud of those institutions. We feel that we're better than the likes of China because of them.
So if we looked close at China, we would feel the fear of needing to face up to how maybe we aren't God-blessed for our Democracy. Maybe we're not enlightened. Maybe the American ideal doesn't work as well as we thought, and maybe other things work better.
This is an ego-threat.
(An "ego" is the story that an entity tells about itself to maintain coherence, so that it can act predictably to itself, despite being complex and multi-faceted.)
A FULL cultural realization of even the _possibility_ of America's ideals not ultimately prevailing, would prompt a crisis of faith, or if you prefer, a cultural ego-death.
That's some heavy shit. You need to have a paradigm shift sometimes, but it is destructive. You don't want to do that all willy-nilly.
I posit America has a collective blind-spot around China because we can tell, from our "peripheral vision", that the existence of China _maybe_ undermines our organizing faith that democracy, freedom, etc. is the best system.
It would be critically bad (for our cultural suppositions), if what China is doing WORKS for building and having a good society. And we kind of suspect that it MIGHT work.
So we're carefully, if unconsciously, not looking.
Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time?
Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease?
I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how "mazy" an organization is.
I considered the metric of "how much output for each input", but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn't help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes.
I hadn't realized this, but it seems like a crucial insight.
Systems incorporate the powerful effects of the things that they're exposed to, so that there are diminishing marginal returns to those powerful effects.
"Powerful" in this sense is relative to a time and place.
Is it possible to train people to be good rulers? So that the people with privilege are good social stewards instead of assholes?
I don't know. The historical record is not great on this point. It seems like trying to be a social steward tends to morph into thinking that you're better than everyone else, and deserve the best stuff at the expense of everyone else.
Example 1: "It's low status to sleep in your car."
I can totally believe that this is code for "'the authorities' don't want you to sleep in your car."
It seems like this kind of thing is punished waayyy out of proportion to the the cost to society (which is basically non-existent, as near as I can tell).
But this is one way to escape from high rents and therefore wage slavery. Thus, punished, and censured as low status.
Thread, responding to @silencenbetween, on my current guesses about why an emphasis on virtue seems notably absent in our society, compared to my imagining / understanding of other societies in history.
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