Category: I went over to a friend’s house earlier this evening. A group of people had gathered to, again, celebrate Advent – Swedish style.
I love these small parties. The hosts had prepared gingerbread cookies, saffron buns, and Swedish quiche, which is basically the same as regular quiche, only you have to mutter “hurdy hurgy gurdy” while you eat it. Better yet, we each had a 1.5L bottle of glögg to finish before the end of the evening.
And finally, the pièce de résistance, we each got to build our own gingerbread house using what I can only assume were pre-fabricated IKEA gingerbread boards and decorate it with little gingerbread people and imagine that they were all living perfectly happy gingerbread lives in socialist gingerbread heaven.
This all would have gone into the books as just another evening with too much alcohol and not enough canoodling (ask Niklas what this means), but just before the gingerbread build-off I was in an inappropriately deep conversation with another friend of mine who’s currently working for a German NGO which aims to open up Chinese minds to the realities of human rights and civil liberties.
So, while installing my little gingerbread friend in front of his little gingerbread fence, I was inclined to ask him “How much gingerbread taxes do you pay? How many gingerbread holidays do you take a year? Does your gingerbread boss actually pay you a decent amount to do your gingerbread job? Does the gingerbread government foot the bill for your gingerbread education and your gingerbread healthcare?”
Unfortunately, I bit off his head before I could ask those questions.
That untimely gingerbread fatality notwithstanding, the issues there were relevant enough to warrant a short visit to Wikipedia and find the proper pop-psych term that I would have used as a rebuttal for my German NGO friend, had I been able to remember it during the conversation.
The term: Fundamental Attribution Error.
I think we tackled this in Managerial Effectiveness. This is basically when you use just a small slice of a person’s behavior and, forgetting the importance of situational context, use that small slice as a representation of that person’s overall personality. So yeah, it’s a pop-psych way of explaining why first impressions are important, or why context is doubly so.
I find it very interesting just how diplomats, speakers, authors and other members of Western Intelligencia can ascribe a number of good, yet ultimately incorrect, guesses with regards to the fundamental attributes and by extension the needs of 3rd World Countries – simply by picking on “apparent” issues like free speech, labor laws, and general health.
In particular, I feel that a scarily large number of well intentioned UN, WB-IMF and WHO policies have, at best, not worked out and, at worst, backfired because policy makers have focused on (Dare I say it?) cultural disconnects.
Just to take the German NGO in China example a step further, what do you suppose would happen when all the goodwill brought in by these Europeans actually takes root and people in this country start hankering for the immediate implementation of democracy and voting rights? Mayhem, I reckon.
The fundamental error in this case would be that democracy = better living, if you don’t have democracy in your country like we do in ours, then your people are not living lives as good as ours.
Not necessarily. No disrespect to our friends in the Sub-Continent, but despite being the world’s largest democracy, on a whole lot of levels India’s not better than China. Not economically. Not socially. 1.6 billion votes, no holds barred. Run that through your Crystal Ball simulation and smoke it.
I really hope that this issue is dealt with in further detail sometime during the next 4 terms. I think it would be an invaluable management skill to be able to determine the best course of action using imperfect information, but still be conscious and aware that you don’t sally forth with half-a$$ed assumptions. It’s ok to play with and murder gingerbread people, but you can’t just be in a position of power and make biased, half-random policy choices that will affect the lives of millions if not billions.
But hey, maybe the world actually does work like that. Maybe in real life we all might as well be gingerbread men.
good points, but i'd be unconvinced if i wasn't on the same side of the wall. using india as an example for democracy doesn't exactly bolster your case. this is the country whose lower classes used marxism as a hammer against the upper classes, not really fully understanding what marx was actually saying. democracy works - given the right political context, history, and governing body. which is to say it won't work for countries like the philippines, china, or india. the social and economical strings just aren't in place for that kind of thing to work ideally. which means that introducing democracy to china right now just won't work. you'll end up with the philippines, only on a grander, more directionless scale.
not that i know of any country where democracy works as it should, ideally.
of course i don't mean to say that democracy = better living. i'm saying it works for certain people. just as socialism = better living for some people, feudalism for others, and so on. democracy isn't for china, i agree. right now i'd say their current government works out for them. i think what your friend actually wants for china's people is to let them be "free thinkers" or something as stupid as that, and he just concluded that democracy would be the best way to introduce this concept to them. just as spreading christianity is a means to spread love (but is misappropriated as a reason for war, which appropriately proves my point.)
anyway, that's all i have to say about that.
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