And that’s how I outsmarted myself, changing our lives forever.
Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything.
Everything I’ve ever done that’s valuable is something I was afraid to try.
The Chinese mom is not the helicopter mom. I would never do their homework for them. It’s all about: Take responsibility, don’t blame others. Be self-reliant. Never blame the teacher.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty-lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.
Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams, fraternities, family. Almost no one is a hermit. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude.
America’s continued existence as a super-group is under tremendous strain today. America is beginning to display destructive political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: ethnonationalist movements; backlash by elites against the masses; popular backlash against both “the establishment” and “outsider minorities” viewed as disproportionately powerful; and, above all, the transformation of democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.
Group identification can powerfully reinforce these conformity effects. In experiments similar to Asch’s landmark study, subjects have been found to conform much more when presented with judgments said to come from members of an in-group, and much less when judgments are said to come from out-group members. And it’s not just that people tend to think what their fellow tribe members think. They will do what their fellow tribe members do – even to the point of savagery.
That’s why I liked the Suzuki method of teaching piano. There are seven books, and everybody has to start with Book One. Each book includes ten to fifteen songs, and you have to go in order. Kids who practice hard get assigned new songs each week, whereas kids who don’t practice get stuck on the same song for weeks, even months, and sometimes just quit because they’re bored out of their minds.
Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery. Those are people who crossed an ocean to come to this country.
Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for future.
Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition – pure political tribalism.
America’s elites today, especially progressive ones, often don’t realize how judgmental they are. They disdain tacky things, and, not coincidentally, those tacky things – fake tans, big hair, pro wrestling, chrome bull testicles hanging from the back of a big truck – are usually associated with lower-income Americans.
You can tell who the Chinese are because they’re the ones with the longest last names. That’s because they felt that they had to ‘out-Thai’ the Thai and because the Chinese weren’t allowed to take on Thai surnames that already existed.
Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. This.
Liberals have cried wolf too many times. If everything is racist and sexist, nothing is. When Trump, the real wolf, came along, no one listened.
The United States spent over $1 trillion on the war in Iraq; some 4,500 American lives were lost. Yet fourteen years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran’s power is ascendant, with Tehran now wielding more influence over Baghdad than Washington.
The Left believes that right-wing tribalism – bigotry, racism – is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism – identity politics, political correctness – is tearing the country apart. They are both right.
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and.
The great Enlightenment principles of modernity – liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets – do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave and have always craved. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.