The Wilsonians and their neoconservative brethren presume that all humans want “freedom”, “democracy” and “choice”. It is their mission, they say, to “spread” those over the world. Their conviction is related to the “all men are created equal” myth that was, by hypocritical slave owners, enshrined in the declaration of independence.
The modern equality view was formed at the time of the first nukes, the first computers and game theory when, as Adam Curtis explains in The Trap, all science strove to be like physics with a sound theoretical base and deterministic laws that could be identified and then used to make predictions and to create policies.
In economics the “all man are equal” view was the believe in a homo economicus as the rational actor in all things economics and thereby in a world full of similar rational, self-interested, labor-averse individuals. But man are not rational actors and economic preferences are driven by many other factors than just greed and labor avoidance. This base onto which much of the economic science was build on was shattered by studies in behavioral economics and the finding that man make weird choices and are not even able to rationally evaluate the risk of their choices.
But while behavioral economics may describe human economic decision making better than the rational actor theories it still sees man as somewhat universal in their behavior. But this, like the homo economicus, is a wrong assumption.
Man may be equal with regards to a few universal rights but they are not equal in their social and cultural upbringing. That has, as new anthropological research finds, much more influence on them as is usually assumed:
Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.
Psychological experiments, when repeated in various societies and cultures, find large sociological differences in behavior, perception and cognition. Those are not hardwired but are part and product of the specific culture we experience in our upbringing and in which we are living:
The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind’s capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do—the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like—but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception.
The assumption of rationality of man in economic studies has proven to be wrong. But to replace that with behavioral economics is only a small step. The psychology research underlying behavioral economics and other theories assumes, physics like, a hardwired human brain that does not exists. The results of psychological experiments done in the U.S. are not universal results but specific to the U.S. culture. They already differ quite a lot within that culture.
One can thereby not derive policies and preferences for other societies from one’s own. Understanding of what is a good or bad decision, what is a god or bad form of government, of dignity and values, widely differs between cultures and societies. Individualism may be valued in the “west” but other societies find it abhorrent.
This explains why not all people want to be, as Wilsonians and neoconservatives assume, like “us”, but may make very different choices with regard to their lives and their societies. “Democracy”, “freedom” and “choice” may be alien concepts to them that do not fit what they perceive as their social values. If we consider that people have a right to chose their system of government we also have to allow authoritarianism or religion based systems as a possible culture based outcome. Democracy crusaders, who want to remake other societies in the image of their own, can not admit that because they still hold to their physics like understanding of societies and minds.
