The Discovery of Civilization
The Biden regime is importing millions of illegal alien invaders who have negligible exposure to America's principles of Constitutional government and cohesive societal trust. They come here for economic gain and for taxpayer-paid freebies. Unless mass immigration is halted and invaders are deported, America will be quickly transformed into a low-trust, amoral, low-functioning society. The following article describes the difficulty of someone coming from a low-trust society (India) earnestly attempting to assimilate into a high-trust society (England).
The Discovery of Civilization, by Jayant Bhandari, Lew Rockwell, 1 February 2024. Excerpts follow:
I landed in London in late 1991 to pursue my MBA, using it to obtain a British visa and depart from India... I was filled with curiosity, eager to understand what contributed to the West’s success and why the world held it in such a high regard...
The only way to get any work done in India was by fooling or bribing the bureaucrats.
I was transitioning from a society built on distrust to one characterized by trust, though I wasn’t aware of these concepts then...
In India, we lacked the concept of material conveniences. Cooking oil was in short supply, requiring us to secure it through personal connections...
Our money couldn’t accomplish much...
What looks relatively innocent carries profound significance and is reflected in all social and economic transactions in India: making money from a transaction is insufficient. At the very least, a small part must be earned through cheating, even if it’s a symbolic fraction of a penny. You could pay an employee as much as you wanted, pay the businessman what he asked for, or enter into a contract favorable to the other party, but you knew you would be shortchanged and contracts reneged. There is no shame or guilt associated with cheating...
In the ultimate analysis, India was a no-trust, atomized, amoral society. Envy, greed, and absence of fairness ran unrestrained and wild, for virtues and sins were foreign concepts. People praised your street smartness if you cheated on someone and got away with it... The virtues implanted by colonizers were wearing thin...
Westerners who believe that the virtues and sins they are familiar with are fixed elements of the firmament or part of the natural law may not realize that they think that way merely because they grew up with them in their culture, which is a product of several millennia of intertwining classical western philosophy, Christianity and the honor system. Without that cultural fabric... there would be no guilt or shame associated with what is known as sinful behavior...
It would take me a year after my arrival in the UK to realize that people might speak the truth for the sake of speaking it... It would set a decades-long process to readjust my thinking and decision-making...
The above article describes the incredible difficulty of someone willingly attempting to transition from a low-trust society to a high-functioning, high-trust society. Contrast that with mass immigration of those from low-trust societies who don't aspire to fully assimilate.
For example: one of the illegal aliens released without bail after being charged in the mob beating of two NYPD officers in Times Square over the weekend (photo).