America Runs On People Who Argue Well But Know Little
This is a reprint of a past post = backNumber
An acquaintance of mine here posted something along these lines the other day:
“A situation where multiple, wildly different kinds and qualities of arguments get tangled together, and people just say whatever they want based purely on gut feeling”
is lamentable, or maybe it’s the path toward Westernization.
That was roughly the gist of the tweet, and it got me thinking.
I want to write down what came to mind from the phrase “culture of saying whatever you want.”
“Americans are good at discussion” — that’s how Japanese people tend to see it.
But what I want to say is: “That’s true on the surface, but underneath it’s something completely different.”
They’re not primarily good at discussion.
What they’re good at is steering the conversation toward whatever conclusion they want and shifting the point of the argument to talk only about what’s convenient for them.
That’s the basic pattern, anyway.
Of course plenty of fair-minded people exist too.
People who listen to what you have to say, properly extract the issues, offer counterproposals, weigh each option, and in the end arrive at a well-reasoned conclusion everyone can agree on.
But these people aren’t what’s commonly recognized as “good at discussion.”
They’re simply smart people.
If I could, I’d want to spend my life associating only with the latter type, but unfortunately there are more of the former, and America has a prevailing atmosphere that living as the former type is the “right” way to be — I have to say that much.
You could put it this way: intelligence is basic physical fitness and a healthy body.
Discussion strength is a sharp knife.
Having both would obviously be best, letting you survive any situation, but most people only have the knife.
This itself might not be limited to America.
I think there are adults in Japan too who trained their bodies hard when young and picked up a fine sword, only to find, before they knew it, that their body had weakened and they could no longer wield the sword properly, and now they just keep hurting people every chance they get.
But American society runs on this, and in many respects has achieved remarkable development.
Why is that? That question was one of my major interests from the moment I moved to America.
For example:
In technical discussions, everyone speaks with total confidence as if they were a professional in the field, but most of them are basically amateurs, just saying whatever they want based on a bit of cherry-picked information and pure gut feeling.
This kind of situation, one that would make a Japanese person go pale, genuinely happens all the time.
So how does the discussion ever get resolved? That was one thing I wondered about early on in my time in America.
Everyone says whatever they want
→ Unfortunately, whoever has the loudest voice or is best at lobbying behind the scenes wins
→ Some trouble occurs
→ It comes back on that person, but they have no ability to resolve it
→ They lose trust and nobody listens to them anymore
→ They get pushed out of the organization
I’ve recently started to see that this kind of self-cleansing mechanism exists.
I’ve come to feel it works because there’s harsh evaluation and a culture that unhesitatingly ostracizes people who are no good.
In other words, it’s risk-taking.
Whoever is good at controlling that survives, and whoever is bad at it stumbles somewhere along the way.
Criticizing, ostracizing, ignoring.
None of these will easily take root in Japan as legitimate practices.
Suppose this self-cleansing mechanism doesn’t work.
Everyone says whatever they want
→ Unfortunately, whoever has the loudest voice or is best at lobbying behind the scenes wins
→ Some trouble occurs
→ It should come back on that person, but depending on the circumstances it just gets glossed over
→ That person is never made to take responsibility and just keeps repeating the same thing
→ Somehow the person who’s merely loud ends up looking like the important central figure
→ They get promoted, surrounded by yes-men on the surface while being badmouthed behind their back, a fully-formed incompetent superior.
A world that looks like something you’ve seen somewhere before, all put together.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2014/04/338/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.