When our baby boomers were living off of wealth their parents built and banging anything that walks, their baby boomers were trying to not die of starvation in the great leap forward. Between 15 and 50 million people died (up to about 10% of the population at the time), and then those people had kids and raised those kids.
The spectre of death on that scale changes your worldview. Morality stops being about just being prosocial and "nice". It becomes about whatever is perceived as literally stopping you and your family from dying immediately.
Something that a lot of people are shocked by when they go to China is the fact that Chinese people will just tell the truth of what they see in front of them. "Look at the fat man" they'll say to someone who's fat, because the idea of pretending that a fat man isn't fat just to not appear to be judging them is absurd given that history.
Americans were like that until relatively recently. Life on the American frontier was brutal, and death was a very real option. For that reason, you had to confront reality directly rather than pretending it wasn't true because if a bear is attacking you, there are no magic words that are going to make that not true.
The spectre of death on that scale changes your worldview. Morality stops being about just being prosocial and "nice". It becomes about whatever is perceived as literally stopping you and your family from dying immediately.
Something that a lot of people are shocked by when they go to China is the fact that Chinese people will just tell the truth of what they see in front of them. "Look at the fat man" they'll say to someone who's fat, because the idea of pretending that a fat man isn't fat just to not appear to be judging them is absurd given that history.
Americans were like that until relatively recently. Life on the American frontier was brutal, and death was a very real option. For that reason, you had to confront reality directly rather than pretending it wasn't true because if a bear is attacking you, there are no magic words that are going to make that not true.
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