One of the failures of imagination I see most often is the inability to understand that things were, actually, different in the past and that they are different in other places.

I live in Canada. In the West. Our leaders are all functionally psychopaths. They’re all corrupt and they all lie like they breathe. They have zero interest in anything but making their donors happy, and have spent over 50 years destroying the egalitarian society built by FDR and his successors, in order to give more money to the rich.

Many people think this is universal behaviour. It isn’t.

Different places and times are different.

Someone like Trump could not have become president even 30 years ago. Impossible.

These days the children of elites don’t fight in wars. In WWI and WWII they did, even FDRs sons went to war and the carnage in the British ruling class in WWI was epic because they personally lead the charges right into machine guns.

Different times are different.

Right into the early 90s it was possible to walk into almost every government and private building in Canada. No security guard would stop you. Not just walk into, take the elevator to pretty much any floor. You might have trouble getting to a few people, because they had secretarial or receptionist gates, but you could definitely get right up to that receptionist and if you insisted you could walk right past her.

Oh, and you could go into almost every building and use the bathroom.

I remember when there were no food banks because they weren’t needed.

For decades inequality decreased, not increased. This was a choice and the political elites were mostly onside with it. Even a lot of business elites were (though definitely not all.) When John Kenneth Galbraith investigated why corporate leaders in the 60s didn’t earn more he came to the conclusion it was cultural: they didn’t believe in paying more and anyone who tried was shut down hard by that consensus.

Even small things can be very different. We go on and on about female breasts and attractiveness, but traditional Japanese society did not find breasts sexy, and bound them tight: they associated them with child raising. They even didn’t like bright white smiles, this was considered “showing your bones” and disgusting, so women often blackened their teeth.

Anthropological studies show that in hunter-gatherer bands leadership is often chosen from people who are slow to anger and not aggressive. When testosterone was studied carefully, it turned out that high-normal testosterone isn’t actually about violence, it’s about status behaviour. Put a male with high T in a society that favors hugging and being empathetic and that doesn’t like aggressiveness and suddenly they’re the big huggers and empathizers.

Chinese leadership is not the same was Western leadership. They have different goals, incentives and values. They don’t act or think like us. This is also true of Russian leadership.

All of these things are contingent: they change over time based on circumstances. People have biology, but they also have vast amounts of conditioning based on what their society is like which forms their personalities. Leaders are chosen and promoted in different ways, emphasizing different morals and personalities at different times. Western leaders right now are mostly soulless psychopaths, but that hasn’t always been the case and even when it was, the morally neutral virtues they valued were different. (Courage, for example. Think what you want of 19th century British elites. They were scum. They were not cowards and intensely shamed cowards and people who didn’t do their duty.)

Humans are always humans, but the details change with the society and the time. If you over-generalize from your own time and experience you will make serious mistakes when you try and understand outside your time and society. This often becomes clear to people as they get older: I can assure you that the culture and the type of person was quite different back in the 70s and even 80s from now. I remember people who grew up in the Great Depression and they were not like Boomers, let alone like Zoomers. Nor would they have put up with someone like Trump.

Time change. People change. Different places are different and produce different types of people.

This shouldn’t need saying, but it is evident that it does.

 

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