The issue I have with posts like these is that when you compare and contrast anglo/american culture with "other" cultures, you handwave away specific examples of "others".
"The majority of people" is a pretty broad group here, from Portugal to the Russian far east, Namibia to Papua New Guinea, Chile to Mexico. So when you say:
The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
Does that really apply to all non-anglo/american cultures? You would have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable of near thousands of human cultures to know this.
it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
It'd be a challenge to claim that the "prole/posh divide" in Imperial Britain was anywhere near as strong as some of its contemporaries - say the Qing Dynasty or Ottoman Empire.
"The majority of people" is a pretty broad group here, from Portugal to the Russian far east, Namibia to Papua New Guinea, Chile to Mexico. So when you say:
The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
Does that really apply to all non-anglo/american cultures? You would have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable of near thousands of human cultures to know this.
it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
It'd be a challenge to claim that the "prole/posh divide" in Imperial Britain was anywhere near as strong as some of its contemporaries - say the Qing Dynasty or Ottoman Empire.