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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

> No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.

It's not about you, it's about others around you. If they do not have a "high income" (or, in other words, materially comfortable life), you cannot expect them to be comfortable enough to be compassionate or have self-esteem. And then, if they don't, but you do, it's an easy recipe for your compassion to be exploited and your self-esteem to be perceived as danger. It's a self-leveling system.

It's not an individual matter, but a social one. Always has been.

And it's not specific to China - I see it in Poland, a relatively "we've been damn poor forty years ago" country as well.

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This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.

Maybe it's bias because I'm an "exotic" white guy in many areas and not just a random down on their luck average guy from their own region.

I've also been offered generosity by rich people, as well, but, I will generalize, that mainly came after I demonstrated some proof that I didn't actually need their generosity

Maybe it's country dependent. I have seen what you describe in countries where christianity is the dominant religion and most people in those countries something like 70 to 80 percent identify with it. And religion in those places is most prevalent among the poor, so much so there is a direct relationship between poverty and religion, the more religious, the poorer.

In my personal experience, religiosity correlates with the appearance of kindness but not the actual act of kindness.

100% spot on.

Everyone who downvoted you are the type to step into another pile of dog shit the moment they finish scraping their shoes. Regressing into spirituality doesn't fix this. High trust paired with opportunity does.

not one person has called you out for consistently sounding like AI so I'll be that guy and cop the downvotes, in case a human is involved in the loop I will also respectfully provide an actual response - did you have a way or some evidence to back the possible insights contained in your strangely metaphored comment?

Hah, that's pretty funny. I expect to be downvoted on HN half the time, but since you asked I'll do you a favor and confirm I'm not AI. You might want to take a break.

Right back at you, I'm not sure what the deal is lately with some comments insisting on quotes or citations or "proof" of anything. To me, they seem like gambits by paid trolls. I'm just making observations from experience.

Something to ask yourself is where the honest truth is supposed to come from if it's always borrowed from somewhere else. People are free to make up their own minds.

Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.

Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.

Yeah, but older rural people in China are often exactly like the post you're responding to, anyways.

There are definitely SOME aspects of generosity tied to abundance and some not. Some might offer you the cup of cleanest rainwater found in their plot of rubble and others might chase you away using the stolen phaser gun tucked under their clothing. Or maybe it's more influenced by inequality within the society rather than absolute material abundance.

> This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.

orrrr maybe poor people you've encountered are poor exactly because they are generous in competitive environment - and non-generous became rich and successful

The "white" privilege is pretty much all of it.

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