Nealithi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:19 pm*snip for length*
Politeness
Look, we can't just label politeness we like "simple politeness" and politeness we don't like "political correctness" . That creates a tautological truth. Also, much of what you listed is pretty geographic specific. For instance, holding doors. I lived in New York City at one point. If I held a door for people in the mornings to my office building, I'd have been there for half an hour. So culturally, in NYC, you generally don't hold doors unless someone is disabled/wheelchair bound/etc. Similarly, when you're close to other people you ignore them. That gives them some personal space in a crush situation where there might not be much personal space.
So this is more rural (or suburban)/urban versus white/black, but given the color disparities between the two areas, it wouldn't be surprising for a black person who grew up in NYC to simply not realize you're "supposed" to hold a door open for someone who is fully physically able and capable of opening a door on their own. Are they rude? Or is it simply culture?
(I'll follow your lead and not dive into the waters of political correctness, political "incorrectness" and the various things assholes do in the name of "not being politically correct")
Barbie
You can't look at that Fox News picture and tell me everything's okay there. This is every blonde on Fox News:
You'll notice three guys. Blonde people are 8% of the population, that it makes perfect sense that three guys are blonde. That's about statistically what you'd expect (more or less). Now... what's going on with the women?
This is not normal. This is not okay.
Work before play
Sure, definitely can be a healthy mentality. Can also be an unhealthy one. We've already discussed overwork, but also why does work have to be unfun? There's a definite attitude out there of "work is not play, and it is not fun" and the people with that attitude generally inflict suffering on their employees. A healthy work/life balance is important. You might not understand someone who wants every other friday off during the summer to travel for rock climbing, but does that make them a bad worker?
We have very skewed attitudes about this as a country. And it definitely leads to workers being exploited.
If you didn't meet your goals, you didn't work hard enough... The point being that you drop a potential good right by a potential bad and make it seem like the list is fair is a bit confusing.
Both are potentially good and bad. Certainly to some degree if you didn't succeed, you might have had things you could have done to succeed, and that'd be worth evaluating. Maybe you did need to work harder. Or differently. Or combine different ways of working with fixing other things (like broken delivery schedules).
The point is that the entire list isn't particularly good or bad. Even "barbie" is bad more as a beauty standard than as an evaluation of someone. If someone does happen to look like and be proportioned similar to Barbie that's not their fault or particularly bad (even if it's a wildly unlikely body type verging on the freak of nature/impossible).
You're reading it that way because you went into it reading it that way, but here's a thought for the future: when you read something one way and it doesn't make sense, try destroying a preconceived notion and reading it again. Possibly it might make more sense. If you think something fits a mold, but evidence suggests it doesn't, follow the evidence.
The section on Status, Power & Authority. I can agree that there is some society commitment to these four items. But I think the first two are bad and I see good in the latter two.
As someone who inclines libertarian, I've always believed that "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law " is a surprisingly insightful mantra, once you look into it. When you learn "the Law" refers to moral law, it starts to make sense. It doesn't absolve you from the consequences of your actions, it's a simple acknowledgment that your morality is yours and yours alone, and that any authority is an abrogation of moral responsibility.
A lot of simply awful things have come from "respect authority".
Putting heavy value on the ownership of goods... lets have fun and invert that. Suppose having a whole pile of stuff that you don't share is seen as greedy. What then? What are your new values if "having lots of stuff that you don't share around" is seen as a negative thing, a mark of personal failure of character? What are the good and bad parts of that value?
This would be the opposite, where that value (high importance on personal ownership and stockpiling of goods and wealth) is seen as negative. And there are good and bad parts to that value as well! And not only that, there's a dozen other positions you could take.
Just take one of the values, and try to construct positive alternate values. Interesting exercise, is it not? Very fun for writing science fiction cultures, if nothing else, but each and every one of those values has adjacent, opposite, rotated values that you can see other cultures having also as a positive.
Lets rotate "
Respect Authority". What if we have a culture where instead of authority, we
Respect Experience? Now we have a culture where the ones who have been working the longest somewhere are the most respected. They're the ones who other people look up to and emulate, and even the authority listens to the experienced. Hmmm. Definitely more traditionalist, more "this is the way we've always done it", but less vulnerable to "the new guy comes in and changes everything without understanding it." Tradeoffs. What if it is
Challenge Authority? Well now authority has to spend a lot of time proving itself, but it definitely doesn't get complacent, does it? What if it's
Collective Decision Making? Well, that's definitely slower than single "authorities", but it has a lot of advantages too, doesn't it?
See? We could go on. You will tend to see the values your culture has as the best, but that's to be expected. All cultures start with that bias.
