Free to choose?

The more I travel about, the more I suspect that peoples have a more active hand in the choosing of political systems and philosophies, as opposed to simply having those systems or philosophies foisted upon them. I don’t claim this as any sort of original insight, but it’s been driven home to me these past few months. Yes, of course: No one in North Korea (no one anywhere actually) would choose to live under the thumb of some megalomaniacal totalitarian. And surely the yoke of Communism in, say, post-WWII Poland was just that. But if you spend time in Vietnam, and Sweden, and the United States, as I have in the past four months, you begin to see that certain peoples are drawn to systems that speak to them, or were created by them, for specific, long-standing cultural reasons. Take the Swedes. I think that lingering American Cold War attitudes sort of take for granted that the Swedes were duped or bullied somehow into the socialism that pervades their culture still today. But the Swedes love socialism; it comes naturally to them. And it makes sense that a sparse population living in the freaking tundra is probably obliged to act collectively to stay alive; this became clear to them long ago and this ethic has filtered down to the modern day. In the 20th century, when peoples first had a choice about their systems of government, the Swedes naturally gravitated toward socialism.

Here in Vietnam, where strict Communism has given way to a sort of one-party market socialism, you see that it’s a very short and logical segue from the highly bureaucratic, top-down, authoritarian, Confucian culture that pervaded here for a thousand years to the highly bureaucratic, top-down, authoritarian, Communistic nationalism instituted by Ho Chi Minh — in the north after 1954, and everywhere else after 1975. It was a perfect fit. The Vietnamese love a system where authority is wielded and followed. You may have read Sharon’s blog post re. the clerk in Gloria Jeans — there is very little freelancing here, and they prefer it that way. This hurts them when it comes to entrepreneurial innovation, but it helps when you have to mobilize a population to resist/oust a colonial occupier. I learned last week of a client here that has instituted a LEAN program, whereby individual workers are empowered to make more decisions on their own, thereby making the overall operation more efficient, productive and less wasteful of resources. That’s the theory anyway, and it’s antithetical to the Vietnamese ethos. But the idea that it’s working here (and apparently, it is in this one case) shows there are limitations to the stereotype.

What about the States? Well, let’s see… Americans are, if nothing else, born exceptionalists who hate to be told what to do, whose initial idea of themselves was formed in response to what they saw as an oppressive government and state church, who see the individual accumulation of wealth as more vital to the national ethos than anything the state or we as a people might attempt collectively… Is it any surprise that we’re a bunch of gun-toting evangelicals whose government features the lowest tax burden of any industrialized country, the most meager social safety net and a legislative process completely controlled by corporate interests?