America Runs on People Who Talk Big Without Real Expertise
This is a reprint of a past post
The other day, an acquaintance of mine here posted something on Twitter to the effect of:
“When multiple arguments — differing greatly in quality and kind — get tangled together, people just say whatever they want based on pure intuition,”
lamenting that this is deplorable, or maybe calling it a symptom of Westernization,
and it got me thinking a bit.
I want to write down what occurred to me from the phrase “a culture of saying whatever you want.”
Japanese people tend to assume “Americans are good at discussion.”
But I’d say: that’s true on the surface, and fundamentally wrong underneath.
Americans aren’t mainly skilled at discussion itself.
What they’re skilled at is steering the conversation toward the conclusion they want, and shifting the point of the argument to talk only about what’s convenient for them.
That’s the basic pattern, at least.
Of course plenty of people play fair.
They listen to what you have to say, extract the real issues, offer counterproposals, weigh each option, and guide everyone to a correct conclusion they can all agree on, with proper reasoning laid out.
But this isn’t what people mean when they say someone is “good at discussion” —
these people are simply “smart people.”
If I could, I’d spend my life associating only with the latter kind. Unfortunately the former type is far more common, and America has a prevailing atmosphere that treats living as the former type as the “correct” way to be.
Call “intelligence” basic physical fitness — a sound body.
“Strength in discussion” is more like a sharp knife.
Having both is obviously best, since you can survive any situation, but most people only have the knife.
This isn’t unique to America.
Japan too has adults who honed their bodies and forged fine blades when young, only to find their bodies weakened and their blades unwieldy later on, and who now just hurt people at every opportunity.
But American society runs on this, and in many respects has achieved remarkable development because of it.
Why is that? This was one of my big interests early on after moving to America.
Take technical discussions.
Everyone speaks with total confidence, as if each were a professional in the field, but most of them are basically amateurs, saying whatever they want based on fragmentary information and sheer intuition.
This is a situation that would make a Japanese person go pale, and it genuinely happens all the time.
So how does a discussion actually get resolved in the end? That question interested me early on in America, and
I’ve recently started to see, somewhat vaguely, a self-cleansing mechanism at work:
everyone says whatever they want → unfortunately, whoever is loudest or best at behind-the-scenes maneuvering wins → some kind of trouble occurs → it comes back to bite that person, who lacks the ability to resolve it → they lose trust, and nobody listens to what they say anymore → they get pushed out of the organization
This works, I’ve come to feel, because American culture combines harsh evaluation with an unhesitating willingness to ostracize people who are no good.
In other words, it’s risk-taking.
Whoever controls that risk survives; whoever handles it badly stumbles somewhere along the way.
Attacking someone, ostracizing them, ignoring them —
these won’t easily take root in Japan as legitimate acts.
Now suppose this self-cleansing mechanism fails:
everyone says whatever they want → unfortunately, whoever is loudest or best at behind-the-scenes maneuvering wins → some kind of trouble occurs → what should come back to bite that person instead gets glossed over, depending on the situation → that person is never made to take responsibility and just keeps repeating the same behavior → the person who’s merely loud somehow ends up looking like the central, important figure → they get promoted, and you end up with an incompetent boss surrounded by yes-men on the surface while being badmouthed behind their back
It’s the makings of a world that looks like one we’ve seen somewhere before.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2014/04/338/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.