Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeburdell | Hacker News Reader

You’re going back and forth between two concepts: society and its people. Look at the Covid lockdowns for evidence of how much China (or other Chinese for that matter) care about individuals.

View on HN

That's the point. In a situation like a pandemic the rational choice is to act collectively, even if that means some inconvenience for individuals.

Ideally it means a population which is educated, rational, and mature enough to rise to the challenge with minimal prompting and direction. But if that fails, stronger persuasion becomes necessary - which may mean sanctions and enforcement.

US (and UK) individualism struggles with this, which creates a weaker, less resilient, and more dangerous low-trust high-paranoia society for everyone.

The Chinese are more used to 吃苦, which is an alien concept in the US.

You can take that too far - and arguably China has - where there's a complete lack of concern for individuals.

The ideal is a balance, and I'm not sure either culture has it.

The more a person can sense others’ situations and emotions, the easier it is for them to blend into a group, embrace its values, and even help shape shared ones. In China, people grow up with Confucius’ teaching: “Don’t impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”

I have read a book called "Chinese Characteristics" written by Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary, who also mentioned a similar idea: "How delightful it would be if people could combine the essence of both East and West, and walk peacefully on the narrow, thorny path of the golden mean."

Based on my own experience, Chinese society contains traditional thoughts from the feudal era, collective thoughts from the socialist period, and utilitarian thoughts brought by capitalist development, but it uniquely lacks individualism.

Lockdowns backed by force of arms were absolutely the right thing for people at the time. The New Zealand lockdowns were extremely strict and enormously successful until the government buckled and the plague ships came back in.

For some metric of successful. We only delayed the inevitable, and at the end of th day only rank in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita. Far behind many countries with much less strict lockdowns.

NZ lockdowns were not extremely strict. The government told us to stay inside and gave us guidelines and 99% of us followed them willingly. Punishment for not following was fines or a slap on the wrist. We were never forced to stay in our homes we could walk around outside. The guidelines were to avoid places where you would get in contact with people like a workplace or store.

This is so different to China welding people into their homes.

It was not the lockdowns, it was the good fortune of being an island nation coupled with a border control regime so strict it was later found to violate basic human rights.[0]

Australia went down a similar path to similar effect until the proverbial dyke burst and suddenly nobody cared about quarantine any more. The lesson here is that human nature being what it is, you can throw citizens overseas under the bus to appease the majority until they get tired of being locked in.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/new-zealand-high-...

That shows exactly how much they care about their people. They are not willing to let individuals be selfish and ruin their society with regards to Covid.

I fully support what they did.

This is exactly the "the idea is so good that it has to be forced" meme

The ruling group think they are enlighten more than everyone else and justified to use force/coercion to apply their will on other people (or just an excuse/scam to abuse power)

That's literally the moral justification for the Thiel/Musk/Yarvin Dark Enlightenment, and the basis of cult dynamics in general.

The idea actually works if, and only if, the ruling group has empathy for the population as a whole. Which - in spite of anti-government propaganda in the US - is at least partially possible.

It's catastrophic when the ruling ethic is narcissism and supremacism.

Then you are by definition a collectivist, which is your right to be but puts you completely at odds with western society and the foundation of the progress humanity has made over the last 500+ years.

To summarize, you're on the wrong side.

Zero-COVID lockdown policy as was implemented was absolutely not supported by the majority of the Chinese population. And it was more about saving face than caring about people.

The initial COVID response in 2019 was to punish doctors reporting it. Such solidarity. Much caring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com