On Indians and Niggerdom
The more I think about my reasoning about
the honesty virtue to explain the subcontinental peoples, the more striking it becomes when comparing that against non-Indians.
Remember the India Streetview Challenge?
I want you to try that same challenge with this country: Suriname. Try anywhere, but there's only two city-sized developments in the country, one near the mouth of the western river that makes up the country's border, and the capital: Paramaribo.
Notice anything? The country is poor, but spotless. The country is solid rainforst and you can dump trash anywhere and it will disappear behind the foliage, but people don't feel inclined to litter everywhere they go like Indians do.
This country was settled by the Dutch and African slaves were brought in, many fled into the rainforest to escape their masters via the country's shallow stepped river system. So, it's a poor black country. That's kept up nicer than India.
But black people are not the only population in Suriname. There's people descended from native tribes, and descendents of Chinese and yes... even Indians showed up there. Why Indians? They turned up as replacements for the fleeing slaves.
What makes Suriname interesting is that it became multi-culti and because of the slave revolts and runaways, the Dutch imported people from wherever they could find willing+bored people, and got Asians into this place. Protestantism is one dominant religion as a direct consequence of being a Dutch possession, but because of Indo-China and Indians, Suriname has its own Hindu base, as well as mosques, and further transfer of nearby French nationals added Catholics into this mix.
What makes Suriname so different? Nothing is dominant. No ethnicity is dominant, no religion is dominant, but everyone living there made a choice: "yeah, the Dutch traders sucked, but we'll keep the Dutch language, Dutch customs, and Dutch ethos". In that package deal, they kept the Protestant work ethic and the high honesty virtue intrinsic to 19th century Dutch culture.
Guess what country is not that far away, has the same modern history as Suriname, but decided to make the worst decisions every step of the way and is plagued with a basement-level honesty virtue?
In fact, every single black-dominant country in the entire Caribbean made better decisions on what to do with themselves than Haiti has consisently done. The only country that's about the same level of anguish as Haiti is Monserrat, but they have a good excuse: a volcano wiped out most of their island and nuked all the agriculture and ability to grow any food.
Haitians had bountiful forests. Chopped all that to the ground for cooking with no care to observe that a crucial resource was disappearing. The whole nation is a breakwater port and safe harbor: can't be bothered to set up an international trading empire vis-a-vis Singapore. They could have ditched the French language from the outset and opted to switch to Spanish to congeal with all of its neighbors and facilitate more trade. Nope.
Oh yeah: their people are desi-brained voodoo fucks who throw every event in their lives up to fate/cosmic justifications and mysticism. Which is what Hindus also do.
The thing about the honesty virtue is that this feature in society is so important for modern human progress. As much as you hate communism and communistic lingo: this is individual personal virtue whose primary benefit is for the collective.
Honesty virtue goes far beyond "thou shalt not lie." The whole reason for the virtue is that this is the origin of selflessness. It's a concern for strangers, not yourself. That's what honesty ultimately means. If you've ever mislead someone and had pangs of guilt or regret about it: thats your personal honesty virtue kicking in. This is a powerful self control tool that reaches outside your body and touches others.
The side-effects I mention before with high-trust societies rests on top of this single virtue: the main benefit is that high honesty optimizes human communication at scale, through all aspects of life because of the Butterfly Effect it creates.
When you don't have this virtue common in the society, people are moving about their lives in a constant, never-ending game of negotiations. Diplomatic thinking wastes creativity and brainpower. It also doesn't imbue the kind of selflessness you need at scale for things like trustworthy infrastructure, clean water, less trash, and higher IQ scores.
Sadly, creating the honesty virtue to move a society to high trust is rarely something that can be brought down to the people with some nationalization campaign. This kind of change is personal: to the individual. For the desi-brained negotiator who thinks diplomatically, this can only be fixed through a "re-awakening" event. A profound philosopher or churchman, or in the case of China: massive state reprogramming and in Japan: the Imperial Era and the Shinto religion.
India as a whole may never reach this event, even though it contains some tiny provinces (Nagaland being the most cited one) where the people have adopted the better mindset to have (Nagaland has India's largest Christian population and is far more east-Asian in orientation). Their problem, and this is a problem for the Muslim Indians in the Kolkata region as well, they're just absolutely swamped by the desi-brainlessness of the dominant Hindu populations, and that all of India's neighbors except one has also shitted up their priorities just as much as every Indian has.
Don't you feel that the erosion of trust, the brazen lying in media, the denial of he obvious and unmistakable: this is the work of undermining the Honesty Virtue.
Where do you think our progress as Western nations go with this pillar knocked out?
It's setting us up for a new Dark Ages; a long expanse of time with little to show for it.
Little Suriname may be poor, and may be ignored and you never heard of it because its poor and they speak Dutch.
But I can tell you that they're living happier lives. They care enough about where they live to not spew mountains of trash everywhere they breathe. And they can do all this with foreign populations dropped into it from random places on the globe.
They decided the Dutch value system was the best thing to work with for the poker hand they had, and they were right.
And in our New Dark Ages we will be wishing we had the ethos Suriname found valuable enough to keep from the Dutch while we let our own slip through our fingers.