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Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

> It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual.

I associate "harmony" with voluntary cooperation and joy, not machines preemptively gagging people. A good exercise is to imagine what this would look like transplanted into non-tech terms: it is illegal to operate a bar, restaurant, book shop, art studio, or even to gather in medium-to-large groups of people, without a government assigned censor empowered to listen in and silence people.

Does that still look "harmonious"?

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You are thinking in Western terms. In East Asian Confucian societies, "harmony" means following the rules to keep the social hierarchy in place. Staying quiet and not disrupting the status quo is more important than your sense of personal freedom.

From our Western point of view, it is very much not voluntary and joyful.

> You are thinking in Western terms.

Because that is what the English word means. The correct term to use would have been 'order'.

Actually a Greek word. Look, I didn't create the word. I live in Japan, the native word used here is 和 ("wa") that usually gets translated as "harmony": https://jisho.org/search/%E5%92%8C

If you don't agree with it, you can complaint to centuries of translators and dictionary makers.

It's possible the Japanese/Korean/Chinese terms are also misused, to make the oppression more palatable. So the misuse is faithfully translated. That doesn't mean we should go along with it. Things should be named correctly.

What's "correct" in this context? From the State's perspective it _is_ harmony, regardless of the restriction on personal freedom.

A western-context example of the same phenomenon might be the American notion of freedom. Americans often frame freedom as an absence of government restriction, but that leaves you open to exploitation (or restriction) from private entities. The same definitional dissonance exists, but it depends on which line of the emotional divide you're sitting on.

How do you handle translating that into a language used largely in a context that doesn't have that history?

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