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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-089
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Trump:
Palestine:
Iran:
China:
Germany:
War of Terror:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Highly individualistic societies cannot understand people from societies that actually (not performatively) care about one another. This post is partially inspired by my reply to WMG but isn’t entirely related to it, which is why I separated it out.
American imagination is filled with survivalist fantasies. They have their bug out bags ready for when the impending collapse of civilization comes. They’re all too ready to hide in a bunker in the middle of nowhere. It’s all zombie fiction where everyone is out for themselves and any large organization is portrayed as oppressive and untrustworthy.
This mentality extends even to the elite in the West. They all have bunkers in New Zealand where they hope to ride out the apocalypse in comfort, but they neglect to account for the fact that their comfort is enabled by the army of servants attending to their every whim and need. In a post-apocalyptic world where laws, norms and conventional media of exchange have been wiped away, why would these servants defer to the authority of their “wealthy” master? Just because the master claims ownership over the resources?
Absent from the modern Western imagination is the positive portrayal of people who band together to solve problems.
China, in contrast, imagines a future where humanity works and thrives together. One of the more recent and well-known Chinese fiction (in the West) is 2019’s The Wandering Earth. Unlike typical Western fiction where tiny ark ships are sent away from Earth to colonize distant stars in the face of an impending apocalypse while the remaining majority on Earth are left to their fates, the Chinese imagine dragging their entire home – Earth – to a distant solar system so that as many people as possible can be saved. It’s not a solo effort from China. Every nation on Earth is involved.
Whether the author of The Wandering Earth realizes it or not, real-life events from Chinese history undoubtedly served as inspiration for The Wandering Earth, notable recent ones being the 2022 Chongqing fire and the 2025 earthquake in Tibet where Chinese people from all levels of society worked together to combat the disaster (Global Times editorial: Why does Chongqing’s ‘heroic spirit’ resonate so strongly? and What should the West see from rescue efforts in Xizang earthquake?: Global Times editorial). When the CPC speaks of the “nationwide system” 举国体制, which is the ability to mobilize the entire nation towards a goal, it is not an empty boast, as evidence of such mobilization ability exists abundantly. Remember the concept of the “nationwide system” for when I talk about biology later.
The Wandering Earth also contains 2 little details about the protagonist that is worth remembering for when I talk about Yu the Great later. First detail: the protagonist consigned his terminally ill wife to death so that he could secure a place in the shelters for his son and also his father-in-law. The protagonist then left his son to be cared for by his father-in-law so that he could serve onboard the scout/guide ship responsible for navigating the Earth. This perceived abandonment of his wife and his son earned him resentment from his son. Second detail: the protagonist also adopted a non-biologically related daughter. Her biological mother thrust her into the father-in-law’s arms to save her from the floods that resulted from rising sea levels.
The difference in mindset for handling crises is not just present in imagination (forward-looking), it can be found in ancient mythology as well (backward-looking).
Many cultures around the world have their own flood mythology. In China, there is the Yu the Great, who is a mortal worshipped as a God because he tamed the floods in China. One prevailing legend concerning Yu is 三过家门而不入, which said that during Yu’s flood engineering efforts, he passed by his own home 3 times, and in those 3 times he never entered his own home. The first time, his child was just a baby crying in his wife’s arms. The second time, his child has already learned to wave at him. The third time, the child was old enough to run to his side to embrace him. Every single time, Yu did not tarry to bond with his child and wife, not because he didn’t love his family, but because he loved his family too much. Yu recognized the floods to be the principal contradiction and the lack of family time to be a secondary contradiction that is a product of the principal contradiction. Only by resolving the principal contradiction can the secondary contradiction be resolved.
Yu the Great also didn’t go around saying that those who did not believe or participate in his decades-long flood engineering effort should drown. Benefits were shared by all (okay, I admit that India’s vindictive and unjustified cutting off of Pakistan’s water supply might have subconsciously influenced me in recounting Yu the Great’s myth).
Contrast the Chinese flood mythology with Western flood mythologies. The most prominent one is from the Abrahamic religions and features the figure named Noah, who built an ark to save mating pairs of all animals and only his family. Unbelievers are justified in being drowned due to their lack of faith. Noah’s love for his own family was so narrow that it’s incestuous. You can see shades of Noah’s ark-building strategy in dealing with floods in modern day oligarchs’ bunker-building strategy in dealing with the collapse of capitalistic society.
Yu the Great’s myth also shows the difference in how affection is shown between individualistic and communally-minded societies. Asian parents, including Chinese, are often stereotyped as being cold, uncaring or stoic – very much in the mold of Yu the Great’s 三过家门而不入 legend. In contrast, Westerners are very liberal with saying “I love you” to show affection, just like how Trump is very liberal in professing friendship with Xi (his exact words: “I like President Xi a lot, he was a very good friend of mine during my term”). However, in action, Trump displays a complete lack of friendliness, even outright hostility towards China. The Westerners’ displays of affection are ultimately devoid of substance.
Having covered individualism and communalism from the perspective of culture, which you are free to argue are on shaky grounds, I’ll move onto something more concrete: biology.
Are you aware of the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms? Have you ever wondered why you close your eyes or raise your arms to shield your face when you detect imminent danger approaching your face? Shouldn’t the cells in the eyelid or arm prioritize their own interests/survival first? If endless competition is the best thing ever, why isn’t there “free market” competition between individual cells? How could multicellular organisms have come into existence if they’re so inefficient and wasteful, destined to be outcompeted by unicellular organisms? Survival of the fittest, right?
Probe these questions deeper and you’ll start to understand why individualistic societies struggle to understand communalistic societies.
From the perspective of the unicellular organism (not that such life is capable of cognition), individuals banding together in a “nationwide system”, even at a cost to their own lives, to further a greater goal is an alien concept. Why would an arm shield the head/brain from damage?
It all comes down to working together in groups being a better survival strategy than toughing it out alone. This strategy was so successful that different types of organisms independently figured out their own way to become multicellular. Even a single cell itself is a team. The mitochondria in our cells are widely believed to be endosymbiotic, meaning that they are foreign objects that were gradually incorporated into our cells.
Materialist natural science provides ample evidence that greater complexity – and ultimately sapience – is a product of things working together instead of in opposition with each other. Viruses (technically not cells) and bacteria still exist, and infections can certainly bring down the mightiest multicellular organisms, but these unicellular organisms can never reach the heights that multicellular humans have.
“Community with a shared future for mankind” is not just a propaganda slogan from the CPC, it’s its sincere belief. The words on the giant placard hung on Tiananmen, “Long Live the Great Solidarity of the World’s Peoples” 世界人民大团结万岁, still holds true today as it did in Mao’s time.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Apr 27 2025 23:48 utc | 53
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