Europeans and the East

It used to be easy for a European to come back from the Far East convinced of the superiority of our ways.

So easy and so common that most still do, without understanding that everything changes, also the economic world.

Maybe the Europeans in some ways are still better partly because they are better suited to the rotten, automated, money-grabbing society they have built.

But their undeniable predominance in many fields was due mostly to historic and climatic factors, including luck, but in any case was only temporary.

Between West and East I see the difference between an old country and a new one.

In the East something is happening : a new culture, a new way of life is being superimposed on the old one. An alien culture is being superimposed on the the indigenous. But this process, far from being traumatic, is slowly producing its effects.

If the people in the East have a genius for anything, it is for imitating others AND improving in their way.

The people in the East are complicated, but also very simple - almost primitive - in one respect: they idolize success.
What succeeds is good, what fails is worthless.
Success is what achieves immediate and tangible results, success is the accomplishment of an aimed-at end.
Success is fame, status, riches.

They regard western systems as closed and final until they are disproved.
They don't take notice of what is happening in front of their eyes; they believe what they have been taught.

To criticize, to try to improve, and thus to question the validity and wisdom of the accepted creed would go against their deep and inbred respect for authority.

They can think for others, they can think for the community, but they are not very good at thinking for themselves. That makes the strength of their economic world.
The individual doesn't exist for himself, only for the community. His life is his job and his job is his country. But that is also going to be their limit. Once they will have nothing anymore to copy or to imitate, will they be able as individual to think and to produce something individually new ?