Why the Bushido culture is destroying Japan from inside
This article is a social critique and response to the following video:
Let’s begin
If it wasn’t for the western influence in Japan, the country would be like China today, at its best it would be like Singapore, meaning that it would be a dictatorship. Even today, Japan’s very same Oda period’s collectivism is still prejudicing the country as a whole. To think in terms of group, or should I say, to think about the clan, like the middle age Irish did and what is proposed by the Bushido culture, is very important for increasing the chances of survival of a group, but people are still individuals, and individuals obviously have individual needs, something that’s not well seen by the Bushido culture.
The greatest inventions in the world were made by individualists like Tesla and Turing, imagine if they had limited themselves to the will of the group, we probably wouldn’t be here today interacting with people from all over the world, and in real time, instantly. Do we have to bring the best for our groups, such as our family and community? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is collectivism, that’s just something we’re doing for survival reasons.
The “natural disasters” excuse (as mentioned in the video) is not enough to prove that the collective needs can be put above the individuals needs. Even on Shogo’s channel there’s another video talking about what Japanese people think about rich people and how in the feudalist period the rulers created this concept that “Rich people are bad because they’re greedy”, just to control the people, this way they might be the only rich people around with money and power in hands. It makes absolutely no sense to say that “Japanese are collectivist because of natural disasters”, why? Because Japan is not the only country in the world affected by high-magnitude natural disasters. Countries like the United States of America are also affected by the same magnitude natural disasters as Japan is affected and for a long period the US was considered one of the most individualistic countries in the planet.
Collectivism in the Japanese culture is the very same thing as in every other culture, it has nothing to do with natural disasters, it is about making people believe that it’s OK to institutionalize envy. Look at the United States today, for example, what once was probably the country with the richest people on the globe, today it’s not even in the TOP 10 countries with the richest people in the world anymore, and I’m not talking about GDP, as GDP is not enough to prove if the individuals of a country are, in fact, rich, since it also considers government expenses and businesses expenses as a key factor to wealth. I’m talking about a rich population, not a tax cluster. The US is deeply immerged in debt today and look how the collectivist mindset grew tremendously in the last 20 years, yet people in the United States are more selfish, more egocentric than ever, while they’re getting economically poorer due to the increase of taxes and bureaucracy, and yet people are as mean as ever. In Japan, people don’t care about doing things like helping each other, because they’re more worried about their personal image more than anything else, while in the US things are becoming just like Japan, a lot of people are afraid to exercise their individually, and if they do, guess what? They’ll get cancelled.
In individualism even when one is helping others with the solely purpose of self promotion, when he’s just doing that for greedy reasons, for his own personal agenda, he’s still helping others, he’s still serving as an example of what’s the right thing to do, so even if he’s morally wrong to some, his deeds are still good as long as he’s not stealing or doing any harm to people. When one acts out of collectivism, what he’s doing is reinforcing the appearances of a group only, he’s not doing anything good at all, in fact he’s killing himself from the inside. So to conclude, Japanese aren’t really caring about the collective when they act as collectivists, actually they’re being individualists, but toxic individualists: being greedy, because they’re too worried about keeping the things that they have, like money and status. So, in the end, even the collectivist is a type of individualist, it’s just that his being egocentric. In the end we all act for selfish reasons, and being selfish is not wrong, for example, even when you do charity, you’re still being selfish because you’re doing it for your own agenda, perhaps you want to please your ego or…. God? But you’re still being a good person. The problem is not being selfish, the problem is being greedy, and having an entire culture based on collectivism is what true greediness is, thus, this could be used to explain why the suicide rate is so high in Japan.
Por Matheus Lopes