Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Whatifalthist"
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He got it about right I'd say, but he's a bit too optimistic about mutual secession being the way it would go, rather than Ottawa simply becoming a truly authoritarian regime, and privileging the secret police within its power structure to maintain order. Given the death of Canada as a nation since the 1960s, thanks to the collapse of common civic values, and the absence of any dominant ethnic group since forever - the FNs were sixty separate ethnicities prior to colonization, then none of the genocides were full-scale, with the exception of ethnically cleansing the Acadians out of Nova Scotia, and the Beothuks dying of smallpox - which the Prime Minister acknowledged in 2015 as "the postnational state," nothing will stand against geographical determinism, and taken as a unit, Confederation is closest among other countries to Russia, being population centres dispersed along linear infrastructure in a bad temperate climate. All they'd have to do is set up an oprichniki and fiddle the elections just a little bit more each year. Canada lost the War on Terror the worst out of any member of the American alliance structure.
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@ShimobeSama Malaysia on the source material I know for a fact he used - the guilt shame fear cultural motivations website - is an interesting anomaly in being a majority Muslim country that is primarily guilt motivated. While there might be a "Coming of Age in Samoa" effect - the Samoans were joking in the interviews they gave to Margaret Meade, and Margaret Meade took them literally and then published their jokes as though they were a serious description of Samoan life, which the Samoans found embarrassing after the fact - the fact is that that is the way Malaysia shows up on that website. I feel like unless the explanation is that it was seen as a joke, then there must be something in Malay culture which means they are in fact guilt motivated.
Malaysia was coincidentally the only place the British ever decolonized properly, though they accidentally had the one-off resource of an army of veteran jungle fighters, thanks to the campaign in Burma twelve years earlier, which meant the problems a communist insurgency could have left the young country were completely avoided. It is also the inspiration for the pretend society of Naboo in Star Wars, in that it has an elected monarchy, selected from among the aristocratic families who settle the archipelago before colonziation, and was between about three and one year ago a darling of live and invest abroad social media.
(I remember Korea is another one of the guilt motivated societies in the Western Pacific, but Korea is a Protestant country. Hardly anybody is majority fear motivated, and the strongest shame motivation is in the belt of African countries immediately south of the Sahara. The only guilt motivated African countries showed up as Zimbabwe and South Africa. Latin America and eastern Europe are a blend of mild guilt motivation and mild shame motivation. Russia on that website came out with a mild shame motivation. Japan and most of the rest of the world showed up with a mild shame motivation, except for the rest of the traditional developed world, who were all either mildly or strongly guilt motivated. I'm not sure if the website itself is one hundred percent accurate, but it was for a while the most accessible illustration of the guilt shame split.)
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@ShimobeSama yeah it seems intuitive that Christianity is the key element in guilt motivation.
I'd have to check SoKo's wiki entry my perception had been that the Proddies were the prominent set of denominations there.
Guilt motivation was a thing I remember came up in the one Freud I read where he argues that in child development terms - Freud had a lot of kids and has been allowed to be as wrong as he was about his theories because they were all based in watching his own kids develop - children at first show no reaction to doing anything bad except when they are caught, and then they begin to internalize it into a sense of guilt for doing something they have been taught is bad.
(I have a strong memory one time of having got in trouble because as a preteen my parents thought I punched my preteen brother in the gut, then he recovered and said that our developmentally disabled elementary school aged sister had used her Sesame Street toddler sized broom like a halberd to hit him in the face with full leverage as I distracted him, she was completely happy with everything up until she got confronted by an authority figure, when her mood shifted instantly. My brain always calls up that memory when I bring up that argument from Freud.)
The difference with Islam is that while Islam also makes requirements for conformity to objective moral standards based on the idea that man is made in the image of God, Christianity obsesses over repentance, and there is probably an element of reinforcing repentance in culturally Christian childrearing.
Guilt-motivation if it does provide a society-wide advantage would be that individual people are more prone to police themselves, and therefore a higher degree of trust between strangers is possible, with people who do not have a guilt reaction considered to have a personality disorder. Guilt motivation I would suspect acts like vaccination - in the old sense, infection with a weaker disease that provides immunity and intransmissibility against a worse disease, not this lIfE sAvInG vAcCiNeS crap - in that at a certain level of buy-in, people really do trust strangers.
(However, this doesn't account for ultra high trust mildly shame based societies such as Japan who have always been if anything even better at that stuff than anywhere with a guilt motivation - though Japan has extremely high emphasis on consultation and conscientiousness.)
(Further, when one gets into the spread of different motivations in shame based societies, the question of "shame in what?" poses itself. A society which says that the highest callings are craftsmanship for craftsmanship's sake and to put always the interests of ones actual community first is going to put a mountain of shame pressure on people for some behaviours, and none at all on other. A society which says that it is always permissible to lie about anything at all and that the object is always to be able to posture as though one has the highest stature will pressure people in quite different ways than the craftsman society.)
I find persuasive the argument that some of these movements were engineered language viruses designed specifically to weaken guilt-motivated cultures by paralyzing people into indecision.
Past a certain point, though, if one is in one of these guilt overloaded systems, the guilt motivation weakens as the sense of a person's impact on a culture vanishes to zero, and one becomes driven by guilt only insofar as one does things which affect people one actually knows, and by fear with respect to a crumbling ruin of a power structure no longer capable of producing anything of value.
Which is to say, in the sense that the nation is an imagined community, if this is the case, then pushing the guilt reflex to the point of breaking it is in fact an ingenious means of breaking any nation whose civic values include any appeal to the ability of the unpoliced individual to do the right thing at any point ever.
As far as "the West" goes, you know, I'm personally good with the old civilization having had its moment.
Something else will will take its place and mutate out of some of the cultural attributes it used to possess, in the same way as Buddhism ceased to be a civilizationally dominant force in the continent of India by the turn of the second millennium after Christ, but dispersed as an influence through China Proper and into the Western Pacific.
No doubt what societies in different chunks of it take forward with them will be as divergent as what the diadochic kingdoms took with them out of the slow collapse of Hellenistic civilization.
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naw this was damned to happen since the 1960s.
The old majoritarian Protestantism lost its self-confidence when decolonization kicked off outside of India and Ireland. Every bit of pull Canada ever had where it punched above its weight class comes from the point in history when it was, by default, the most important British possession in the British Empire. Had majoritarian Protestants had their self-confidence, it wouldn't have been known as the Quiet Revolution, it would have been known as the Quebec Emergency, and it would have gone as well for Jean Lesage and his faction as the Malayan Emergency went for the chicoms.
It was never going to be an ethnostate, because the Gascon-Breton-Norman admixies never got fully genocided by the British in 1763, and there was never enough admixture between the second and third waves of migration and the sixty or so FN groups.
For a while in the 18th century, there was a chance that enough of what is now Canada would have ended up like Mexico, everybody would be on a common continuum of Amerindian-settler admixture, but that never happened.
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