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Comment by sumeetjain | Hacker News Reader

> There is a very strong individualist streak in American culture and a very strong taboo against lending friends or family members money

I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family. I might call an unwillingness to help others (assuming one can afford to do so) selfishness -- not individualism. But what I have seen in American is, as you said, individualism: People are prideful and want to create wealth without help.

An interesting clarification: People will more readily accept help from strangers -- e.g. a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.

There's talk elsewhere in this article's comments here about the "killer feature" that these Indian Americans have. I would argue that the true killer feature is not even access to zero-interest capital. It's a culture that actively fights against pride and individualism.

There are surely tradeoffs, but it's hard to deny the power that can come from children and adults alike all looking to family for help... and seeing that help not as something which diminishes their power but rather as something that bolsters it.

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> a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.

I don't think it's about pride at all. I think it's about face (something most Americans don't even have a word for, but which is very relevant in this case.)

Americans don't want to give face to anyone, ever. They don't want anyone to have social power over them. When an individual loans you money—or, even worse, gifts you money—you're giving them a ton of face in exchange. Americans find that idea horrifying. It's like signing up for indentured servitude, except—since it's a social rather than legal obligation—you can't even get out of it by declaring bankruptcy! (See: the way "favours" are portrayed in The Godfather movies, for an image of the American mindset on what owing someone a favour / being in someone's debt is like.)

Bank loans and VC investments are better precisely because they're legal rather than social obligations, so you can get out of them (or, say, sell them off to someone else along with the business.) And Kickstarter is better because no single individual is responsible for enough of the loan to actually attain much social-obligatory power over you in exchange. You're maybe beholden to your Kickstarter backers as a class, but you aren't scared to talk to any individual one of them for thought of what they might ask of you.

> See: the way "favours" are portrayed in The Godfather movies, for an image of the American mindset on what owing someone a favour / being in someone's debt is like.

Maybe not that extreme, but yeah, it's too easy to get guilted into something because you've become socially indebted by something large.

It's not even about being able to get out of it, like you mention afterwards with a legal exchange, it's about the exchange being forced to continue out of a mixture of guilt, politeness, and social pressure in general, simply because you don't want to accidentally kill the personal relationship.

More to the point, you can never get out of the debt you incur, no matter what you do for the rest of your life. It's not just about the debt one incurs, it's about the one providing the debt and what they expect, lifelong admiration, respect, and deference. I've had insane requests and expectations demanded by family members for really small "gifts" before. Because of that I'd say that the social interest costs are too high for many Americans to be able to accept anything.

> I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family. I might call an unwillingness to help others (assuming one can afford to do so) selfishness -- not individualism.

It's not just practicing individualism, but insisting on it. People don't help others partly because they tell themselves that the person needs to make their own way. It is ultimately a justification for selfishness, but the justification is individualism. And I suspect many people who would otherwise not be too proud to ask for help still won't because they perceive that this is a prominent idea in American culture.

> An interesting clarification: People will more readily accept help from strangers -- e.g. a Kickstarter campaign, bank loan, or VC investment doesn't diminish one's pride in the way that the same support from someone's parents might.

I think that goes back to the same point. Those routes are branded as entrepreneurship, which is like +10 individualism points. If I asked my rich uncle for a loan, he (and many other people) would perceive this as dependency and therefore vaguely shameful. If I took out a bank loan, even though it's technically the same action, those same people would perceive it as an admirable show of entrepreneurial initiative.

While I completely see your point about the negative side of individualism, I think this attitude is also partly based on a very culturally healthy distaste for nepotism.

When you ask your rich uncle for a loan, it's hard for both him and you to really know whether it's being given because he believes in you, or because there is perceived to be an obligation. And where there is an obligation to give loans/favors just based on familial ties, it's a slippery slope to a culture of nepotism and corruption where your name matters more than your skills and accomplishments.

I'm not saying that relatives shouldn't help each other, but perhaps it's not such a bad thing that people seek out other avenues first in non-emergency situations. It's a delicate balance to be sure.

I think it's much deeper than "individualist streak in American culture".

Western Europe in the last 1000 years or so has been a very unusual place... one aspect of which is having nuclear families not extended ones. Because (crudely speaking) the catholic church wished to diminish alternative power structures, such as clans. This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.

But it has some costs, too. Like not having tight connections for bootstrapping motels in a foreign land.

I never connected the decline of extended families to the church, but that sounds fascinating. Any recommended reading?

I'm struggling to think of a good source right now, sorry. But a link I've posted before looking the other way, at how the other half of the Roman empire turned out: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cousin-marr... also more recent discussion https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/ma...

It's because it's not. Literally all the cultures in which Catholicism thrives are those in which the extended family is paramount. My very large very Catholic very Indian family actively rails against the individualism of secular American culture. As do my Philipino friends who also have very close families. As do my Hispanic family and friends who also have very close families. As do my African friends who also have close extended families.

Literally the biggest group embracing individualism from my perspective are secular white people and mainstream protestants.

I'll stop now, but my church claim was only that the medieval church had a hand in changing the culture, in places which are now mostly protestant or atheist. The places which the post-reformation catholic church has thrived are indeed pretty different.

The dogma of Catholicism did not destroy the clan structure in Europe, though it was certainly used by those who did. It was the humans running the church, who had particular political objectives relevant to the time and place which are not necessarily anything like the political objectives of the people involved with the church these days.

No one here is making the argument that Catholicism cannot exist alongside close extended families, so your objection to the argument that is being made falls completely flat.

Unless you have some references, I'd call this a "nice theory" (to be read with a British accent).

Spontaneously:

* South America appeared to be more catholic than any Western European or US-American place I've visited, but family and extended family are still a big thing.

* Calvinists seem to be much more "open" than catholics to me.

* Damn, I want the secret recipe that lets me set a policy and enforce it in vast areas (at times without any reliable messenger system) and across many generations, even if my successor comes from a different faction within the catholic church.

> the secret recipe that lets me set a policy and enforce it in vast area

Prioritize the targeting of clan leaders?

The fairly solid part here is that the west is different, and my understanding is that the divergence in things like family/clan structures dates to early medieval times, in a zone something like London-to-Milan, core europe. Something changed, long before 1500.

The peripheral was different, e.g. Scotland had strong clans until they got kicked out (to Ulster, and thence Appalachia...). And Spain wasn't even christian at this point in time.

That the church did it is less clear, I agree. There are economic arguments too. I guess I'm persuaded that things like suppressing cousin marriage had something to do with it. I'm certainly not suggesting that there's some essential magic attached to the pope! It was core europe that invented Protestantism too... at the same time as Cortez & co were taking the reconquistia to the Incas, with the pope's blessing but a very different culture.

By Calvinists I assume you are referring to Protestants? Or are you actually referring to Calvinistic Protestants? Just curious, outside of Christian circles and history I don't think I have ever seen someone reference Calvinists.

Calvinists get plentifully referenced in general circles when you grow up in Geneva ;)

I received a protestant education and as such Calvinism is part of the curriculum.

Might be different in the US, in Europe it's not too uncommon to talk about calvinists, particularly in certain countries like the Netherlands it's a well-established term (which is even used there to describe Dutch behavioral culture, because it's deemed to be so fitting), and separate from other forms of protestantism.

Extended family may be a thing in Western Europe and derived cultural areas but clans are not. Descent based political groupings are for backwoods peasants at best, not the commanding heights of the polity, unlike every other meta cultural grouping.

The recipe for setting and enforcing a policy over vast areas of time and space is incentive compatibility. It is always in the interest of one powerful political group to make coordinated action against it more difficult. The Catholic Church had a strong incentive to break up extended kin groups and they did. It was possible to get dispensations for royalty and the peasantry mostly did whatever it wanted. Keeping up the same policy for over a thousand years was enough to make Western Europe and especially Northwestern Europe uniquely atomised in human history.

If you want an academic source look below. Frost basically took what blogger hbdchick had been writing about for years, did a review article on it and didn’t cite her. http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe Peter Frost

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

He would have tipped his hand as a purveyor of speculative, just-so, white-supremacist garbage, if he'd cited her. Also, there is nothing in that paper to support your claim about the policies of the Catholic Church.

If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.

If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

On the Church banning marrying relatives

> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.

The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.

> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".

As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

Thanks for the info. I'm not that Alex.

> Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified.

If it's not verifiable even in principle, it's useless from a scientific perspective. And it just happens to be a theory telling white people why they're genetically disposed to morally superiority, which is highly suspicious, coming from a white guy.

> Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

You're not taking the enormous hypothesis space into account. This is not a compelling fit, by any means.

I’m neither a behaviour geneticist nor an evolutionary psychologist, merely an interested amateur so if I can think up ways to test these hypotheses I’m sure actual experts can do better.

We’re learning more and more about the genetic underpinnings of personality traits and getting betterat extracting ancient DNA. It’s also trivial to compute indices of relatedness between two people if you have either a full genotype or just SNPs. If the personality traits associated with WEIRD populations are highly correlated with declines in inbreeding it’s not proof of the hypothesis but it makes it more likely. We don’t have proof outside of Math anyway, Science is about more or less likely.

If you want to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology the Oxford Handbook is excellent and it’s on libgen.io. The introduction is only about 60 pages and addresses the most common and uncommon criticisms ably.

If you think that being unusually individualistic and unfamilistic is morally superior that’s a personal preference you are of course free to indulge.

Dude, I've written papers on population genetics. I know exactly how hard what he's trying to do is. He's full of it.

Check out:

The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, which has a pretty long section about how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe worked really hard to break up the power of clans. (It is one reason why they forced priests to become celebate.)

Along the same lines see History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church by Henry Lea.

South America's conversion to Catholicism came long after this period was largely over.

Family & extended family in Western Europe and the US is nothing like it is in some other places in the world. Do you -- and 50 other descendents -- take a plane trip every year to go to your grandfather's grave 1,000 miles away to pray to him on the anniversary of the day he died for good luck? We do that here.

> Because (crudely speaking) the catholic church wished to diminish alternative power structures, such as clans. This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.

Oh please... Indian Catholic families still act in extended structures. I mean, three of my uncles are priests and one is a bishop. We've been Christian for thousands of years. We're still part of an overbearing, very close, very extended Indian family.

The ruining of European culture can be traced solely back to issues in European culture. Let's stop blaming the church for things that Europe brought upon itself.

To be clear, my claim above is that the church, as a centralising power structure in "christaindom" circa 1000AD, played some role in pushing the culture there towards openness, or in making extended families less important.

Claiming that christianity always and everywhere does this would be pretty obviously wrong, and I did not say this. And indeed even within europe today, catholic-ness is anti-correlated with this kind of "openness" -- because the core relevant for this has long since gone protestant or atheist.

I hold this claim weakly. There are other arguments for what happened. But regardless of why, my main point was that Europe (and especially a core area) was an outlier on this universalist/clannish scale. And that both ends have advantages, depending on the situation.

But still this doesn't make sense, as Latin America was converted in the 1500s, well after the 1000 AD change that you claim occurred. Latin America, despite having 500 years for Catholicism to settle in, is still really big into the extended family.

I think a better explanation is the Protestant reformation weakened the idea that any person should subjugate their own personal individual desires for the greater good, with its emphasis on an individual quest for truth, an idea which has now permeated western culture. This makes sense with what I've experienced of non-European Catholicism, which mostly just finds Protestantism bizzare and confusing.

>despite having 500 years for Catholicism to settle in, is still really big into the extended family.

And? The people running the catholic church around 1000 AD were not running the catholic church in Latin America in 1500 AD.

> "We've been Christian for thousands of years."

LOL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians

Yeah, LOL...

There are several things wrong with this line of thinking (as others have pointed out), but I'd like to draw attention to a less salient point you made:

> This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher levels of trust among strangers.

It's interesting that you're portraying the openness of European society in a strongly positive light, given the high levels of abject loneliness prevalent primarily in the west.

Communal living has been a staple for much of human existence, the level of isolation most people in western Europe and North America (and now, much of east Asia) face is a direct result of European "openness" (which spread through east Asia via the British originally, and destabilization + American media later).

The biggest risk to the future of the West is the lack of strong families. That's where India, above all others, shines.

Well this is fun, see other answers.

I agree that the extreme individualist end of the spectrum has downsides, for sure. Suicide rates make horrifying reading. But I think you can argue it's part of what made the west successful -- in HN terms, being forced to learn to deal with strangers, a lot, set you up to scale well.

Isn't the flip side of being on the other end of this scale -- tight happy families, or clans, maybe even castes -- something close to nepotism? Stagnation because once you've employed all your nephews then you can't grow, who would you trust?

Of course there are a million other factors etc too... anyway.

This is true. Since the article talks about Patels. Back in India after holding powerful position in politics, administration etc for long time in Gujarat, Patels are lately agitating violently to be declared "backward caste". So that they can be entitled for more government support in jobs, education etc.

I think of the nuclear family more as an invention of 20th century ad campaigns. It’s a lot harder to sell mom cooking and cleaning products when she has help from an extended family.

Many people thought this, e.g. it was assumed in Victorian England that the past looked a lot like the present of less-developed countries, like Russia.

But it's not true, we have data. The quite readable book on this is Laslett, "The World We Have Lost". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La...

> I think the individualist streak in American culture is better shown by people being unwilling to seek help from friends/family.

And our families are, cross-culturally, unusually small. I talk to my parents every few weeks. Not so much my aunts and uncles. I have a few cousins who I see every fifth Christmas or so, and anyone more distant than that may as well be unrelated. This seems to be common within American culture, but it leads to weak social networks - unless you go to the right college and can network there.

I think dispersion plays into this. I could hardly live farther from my aunts/uncles/cousins if I tried (living within this country) and the same could be said for a large number of them. It's a lot harder to stay in touch at a distance. I guess given social media you might say it's easier to stay in touch when close.

Agreed.

Generally my American friends and family never ask for money to fund good ideas. The people asking for money are people who are asking me to throw money at things that won't produce more money(i.e. they don't have a plan for spending it wisely, have shown poor financial judgement in the past, etc).

My friend and his wife just had one of their cars stop working and they both need cars to make money. They are in debt and need to work. There's no way my friend will ask, but I will probably find a way to help them. My niece has no problem hitting up my parents for money for her latest crazy investment scheme after demonstrating several poor choices and a lack of business and financial judgement.

> There is a very strong individualist streak in American culture and a very strong taboo against lending friends or family members money for any reason.

I agree with the individualist streak, but the second part is pretty much untrue of anyone I've met in the upper plain states. Helping to bootstrap you friends and family is part of the culture.

> There's talk elsewhere in this article's comments here about the "killer feature" that these Indian Americans have. I would argue that the true killer feature is not even access to zero-interest capital. It's a culture that actively fights against pride and individualism.

I think the true killer app is family cooperation as a unit in conjunction with a deep network of relatives. My father built his business with the help of his parents, his aunt, and two other cousins who lent him money. Without their help, he couldn't have built the business as fast and as big as he did. His brother also worked for him a bit as well as some of the cousins when he was building his first shop. My mother helped him and once she had me and my brother stayed at home and took care fo the home front even though she had a masters degree. And it appears his generation along with my mothers was the last hurrah of big family ties and help as everyone in my generation up and left. I have no cousins, uncles or aunts who are close. They all did their own thing, went to school and moved away. I see them from time to time, maybe once or twice a year and that's it. Hell, even my mother has all sorts of stories about how here massive Irish family (grandma was one of 12 kids) pulled together to help each other with everything.

Contrast that with my Guyanese friend who has a seemingly never ending supply of helpful family members all in the same neighborhood. His father built himself a small real estate empire of about a dozen rental properties and most of his generation are college educated. His father started out doing handyman and light construction work with his brothers. They all chipped in and worked. Some even had a day job and came to the properties at night to work on them. One by one they fixed and flipped homes using money and labor they pooled together. Then they started buying, fixing and renting. They acted as a small family army, cooperatively building each others future.

The American family has been here long enough to thin and die whereas these foreign families are still "fresh" to America and working hard to make a good life. But they too will one day suffer the same fate. Subsequent generations won't have to work as hard as they are already comfortable. Little by little they will spread out, move away, and their once mighty army is no more. From my perspective as a true 3rd gen American (all G-Grandparents came from Europe around the same time) is that by the third generation, there are no more cultural roots. And family is culture so family dissolves as well. My mother and father were the last to really care and my father was very meh about his Polish heritage. My mother was adamant, keeping traditions alive for as long as possible but the local family thinned out as the rest moved away. She is probably the last to really care about family and cultural roots which bound the early immigrants, and their children.

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