Lyn:
Hm. Point. ... Possibly the EU, if it went so far as to become a nation, itself? And went, somehow, very libertarian and very ergonomics-friendly all at once?
Vikarion:
Ah, how to highlight this....
As you might or might not already know, my wife and I worked as English teachers in Korea for a year. The worthy gent who ran the academy we worked at was a Samsung executive, and highly successful in essentially all aspects of his life except for ... the academy. It had been his wife's, originally, and he had taken over her successful school when she had a nervous breakdown. He was slowly running it into the ground. He tended to take his life-lessons from his time at Samsung and assume that they applied equally well to an educational setting, rendering him essentially a Korean PHB (pointy-haired boss, ala "Dilbert").
I was head teacher there for several months, which meant nightly meetings with the boss-- and a regular earful of his questions and opinions.
One of the things I most remember about the boss was how much he hated working with English-speaking Westerners. American, Canadian, British, Aussie, Kiwi, didn't matter: he really didn't get us at all. To him, we were cold and mercenary to the point of treachery; we did the job, and only the job, and resented anything that asked us to go above and beyond the call (especially, anything we weren't "on the clock" for). He felt that our employment should produce a bond of loyalty, that we should be delighted to come to his mandatory Christmas party (on Christmas morning-- actually it turned out to be quite an event to remember, so we only really resented it ahead of time), that we should be inspired to throw our very souls into our work. It was what we were, what we'd signed on not only to do, but to be: teachers at his school.
He viewed a couple of teachers who bailed out on us (via plane ticket home) as flat-out traitors; their names became bywords for treason, along the lines of "Quisling" or "Hnolku." I'd have found this understandable for the first month or two, maybe, but the boss dwelled on it, still holding it as a personal affront months after the fact.
To us, he was a petty tyrant who thought our employment contracts extended to pretty much all aspects of our lives. The Korean teachers, however, pretty much took it in stride (though some of his lousy management decisions were another matter).
A good indicator of the difference in attitude was on the subject of morale. The boss considered morale essentially irrelevant. Text of actual conversation from a time when even the best of our teachers were refusing to do any substantial out-of-classroom work (leaving me, as head teacher, holding the bag) and treating the administration with scathing contempt:
Me: "[Boss], we've got a problem with morale."
Boss: "Eeeh. All my time at Samsung, I have seen this. Sixty percent always discontented. If they want to go, they can go."
Me: "Well, what about one hundred percent?"
Boss: "One hundred percent always discontented about something."
... and he would hear no more of it.
That's probably a better guide to the attitudes of a successful Korean businessman failing at being an educator than to the attitudes of successful Korean educators, of course.
On the other hand, he was also running a charitable foundation, trying to ease some of the suffering in North Korea. He was having serious trouble getting donations from other Koreans, and he found the more charitable habits of Americans very confusing considering that he thought we were a pack of mercenaries. A lot of his questions focused on that.
Vikarion, I do recognize that Americans are hard workers and will often set aside personal qualms, etc., to be good members of the team-- but I tend to attribute that mostly to not wanting to get stuck looking for work. Middle and working class wages haven't been stagnating with the consent of the middle and working class; they've been stagnating regardless of worker complaints, and the middle and working class have lacked the leverage to reverse the trend. It's service to a group for the sake of the individual versus service to a group, for the sake of the group, which then looks after the individual.
The difference I'm pointing to is a bone-deep cultural distinction. It goes beyond my old boss's miserable managerial style as applied to a school; this is stuff his wife, also, had to struggle with. It's a basic difference in the framework behind all sorts of moral or category judgments. It's cultural, and it's difficult to overestimate how deep it goes.
The U.S. and Gallente Federations are two different nations (and one is fictitious), but the Gallente essentially share values we recognize (rights, separation of powers, yadda yadda). Dial back that desperate American productivity a bit, and you've got something pretty consistent with our cultural principles-- up to and including getting up in the business of more authoritarian sorts.
The Caldari function more like an East Asian mulligan (with European faces) wholly ruled by a coalition of zaibatsu.
The U.S. may see corporate power on the rise, but we broadly recognize that as a corruption of our system and society. The Caldari, on the other hand, trust a group of corporations to have their best interests at heart.
There's a shortage of sane Americans who will do any such thing, and for good reason: we understand our corporations to be profit-seeking financial ventures first and last, to which we generally owe no more than we are paid for. The Caldari corporation-as-custodian (or nation, or even family) thing is alien to us.
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Topic: Feds and Heth downfall? (Read 10785 times)