For several days, I have been binge-watching the Netflix series The Bridge. It’s a crime series, including a culture clash between the Danes and the Swedes. Other Nordic series also caught my attention on such culture clashes: Rita (Denmark) and Lilyhammer (Norway). These series made me wonder about the impact of highly regulated societies on its cohesion.
The documented relationship between both is unclear. A Slovak government website states: “The Government [] believes that cohesion of Slovak citizens is central to maintaining the stability and improving the quality of their lives. Social cohesion is conditional on the coherence of all classes of society and on combining a balanced economic policy with a social policy.”
In general, there seems to be a regression line from the bottom-left (inequality and freedom) to the top-right (equality and suffocation).
Initially, I had added territories to the bottom-left (eg, Africa, China, Russia, UK, USA) and to the top-right (eg, Europe). This diagram feels more neutral without. Feel free to picture your country name into this diagram.
There are some outliers above this regression line, with a mix of Inequality and Suffocation (eg, North Korea). In general, such a situation seems unstainable. In the (alleged) words of Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Remarkably, China appears to move into a similar direction: from freedom to suffocation. For an explanation, I refer to my 2017 blog: China from Hukou to Social Credit, my 2017 blog: Power dimensions and danger zones, my 2018 blog: A future view on the 7 Belief systems, and the 2018 blog: Cashless in China (Bloomberg).
The Economist recently concluded that “the country’s politics have taken another turn for the worse“. “It reveals that, at a time when the ruling Communist Party is presenting China to the world as a modern, reliable and responsible state, capable of defending globalisation, the internal political system that the party monopolises is premodern, treacherous, inward-looking and brutal.”
There are still some cohesive societies with a balance of Equality and Freedom. I’m lucky to live in such an example: The Netherlands (eg, my 2016 blog, my 2017 blog).
Cohesion (2013) by Scylit a.k.a. Matt Tallman – artist, video
Note: all bold and italic markings by LO unless stated otherwise
0 Comments