Culture Creates Choices

Two questions were asked in a city in mainland China by the Chinese University of Hong Kong-

“Do you want to be raised or live in a corrupt society?”

“No.”

But when asked:

“Would you pay a small sum of money to a doctor if he or she gave you or your family preferential treatment?”

“Yes. People in China do it all the time. If one does not pay the doctor, we will suffer, and someone else will get good medicine.”

The irony is completely lost on them.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Little did the child know that the villagers already determined the shape of their brains before they were even born. A Villages core values mark the members of the tribe according to the sense of self or communal unit.

In between painting bouts I have been reading these books all summer. The first two books are my favorite, but I think they are a nice fiction story of change, culture ideas, and how you grow up can effect your life.

The possibility for variety within the Villages culture is endless. However, there seems to be a stereotypical two, which most subset identifiable culture categories which most cultures fall. The first is more community as a whole minded, and the second is independent and self-focused. The self-focused village will revere independence and are typically capitalist. The unit minded villager will be interdependent and put more stalk in sacred values. Both kinds of thinking will change this child’s brain activity. This, in turn, will determine the choices that the child will think are actual options for the duration of their life.

We can even see this in the kinds of art made around the world. How we teach our children to draw or how we perceive things as simple as how we view the facts of a picture. Is it a shape that has form? Or a line that carries the artists artistic reasons for making the picture?

Example you ask?

Ask a Western raised mind set person and a Eastern mind set person to draw a face. The Western mindset person will nearly always draw the outlines, that is the outer lines of the face their drawing. Constantly emphasising the fact that solid individual things live in a space.

But Eastern mindset person will always be more focused on the essence of the thing, or the gestural quality of the person in their drawing more so then the actual likeness. They look more the overall picture, not its individual parts.