Link:
* Steve Sailer quotes Iranians Firoozeh Dumas and Dayi Hamid on the Persian concept of ‘zerangi’:
… When we first came to America in 1972, my father was amazed at the way Americans waited in line at Disneyland. No complaints, no cutting. In Iran, we have zerangi, a concept that loosely means “cleverness.”
… Most, if not all the time in Iranian culture and society, a zerang person is seen in a positive light … For example, a person who knows how the American legal system works and is able to work it to his or her advantage is zerang. A person who is resourceful in business and has made something of himself is zerang. … It does not stop here; a person who is able to wittingly cheat people, companies, businesses, governments of money is zerang and an idol for many Iranians. …We Iranians, although outwardly criticize corruption, internally glorify it and wish to master it.
* David Lamb, after three years in Cairo:
But here’s the curious thing: While Egyptians are content to live in filthy, battered buildings, the insides of their homes are always immaculate. … When I asked friends if anyone had ever considered a neighborhood block association or an owners’ association to clean up common areas, they would chuckle and say “Oh, THAT would never work here.” No doubt it wouldn’t. My friends did not feel that their responsibility extended beyond their own boundaries.
* David Pryce-Jones, who lived many years among the Arabs:
‘Public welfare’ is a concept without meaningful application [in the Arab world]; there is no common good. Generosity is suspect as a ploy for advantage. Idealism and sincerity are penalized. Self-sacrifice is akin to lunacy or martyrdom.
* Brazilian social anthropologist Roberto DaMatta has observed the stark contrasts between his countrymen’s behavior within the family circle and without. In sum:
If I am buying from or selling to a relative, I neither seek profit nor concern myself with money. The same can happen in a transaction with a friend. But, if I am dealing with a stranger, then there are no rules, other than the one of exploiting him to the utmost.
* Lawrence Harrison, who spent decades working in Latin America, has identified what he calls the ‘attitude system typical of Hispanic America’:
[…] a limited radius of social identification resulting in a lack of concern for the interests and well-being of people outside the family, and for the society as a whole; the generalized absence of trust throughout the society; absence of due process, […] low incidence of organized group solutions to common problems; nepotism and corruption; tax evasion; absence of philanthropy.
He cites Argentine Mariano Grondona, who claims familism can chip away at ‘the lesser virtues,’ or
‘daily small antisocial acts such as the indiscriminate disposal of trash in vacant lots and gutters.’
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset says ‘the most widespread and dangerous characteristic of modern Spanish life’ is called ‘particularism’:
Among normal [sic] nations, a class that desires something for itself tries to get it by agreement with the other classes. . . . But a class attacked by particularism feels humiliated when it realizes that in order to achieve its desires it must resort to these organs of the common will.
* Chronicler of Spanish mores Fernando Diaz-Plaja once spoke of a encounter in Madrid with a young boy cutting in line at a bus stop to reserve spots for him and his mother:
The fault wasn’t [the boy’s]. His parents, his older brothers, his uncles had taught him that society is a jungle and that you don’t get anywhere unless you think only of yourself.
* In stark contrast to the above, NW Europeans–and first and foremost the English–are famous for their notion of ‘fair-play’. Salvador de Madariaga, in his Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards (1929):
…the English sensitiveness to the ‘laws of things’–the law of the road, the law of the sea, the law of the hunting field. … the English are the teachers of the world, not merely in their quickness to perceive these natural laws, but in their cordial and sincere obedience to the restrictions which they impose upon each individual for the good of the whole.
Each Englishman is his own regulator. … The need of outside safeguards or guarantees of any kind is therefore less urgently felt than in other countries. The average level of honesty in English civil life is singularly high, as is shown in the usual disregard for detailed precautions against fraud or deceit.
… No bureaucracy in the world can vie with the English Civil Service in its devotion to the interests of the country. … it owes much also to that instinct for co-operation, that objectivity, that absence of self-seeking, of vanity and of personal passion which are typical of the whole race.
