Ask Lemmy

I'll copy my comment from the other question:

I should preface my comment that community orientation, respect, and ethnicity/respect for your heritage are big parts of the area i'm from.

I’ve worked in Western Europe. I don’t know why but there seems to be a lot of taxes for everything. You have to get govt permission for everything. People seem to rely on the govt to provide things rather than have some agencies fill niches that aren’t filled by the govt (for example I saw signs like don’t help homeless people, the govt is helping them).

I’m from an Asian country, we don’t have much tax, we don’t rely on the govt for anything (we can’t), and we have many NGOs. I think it’s similar in America.

As an Asian, there are a few things I can note about Europeans.

Europeans seem to have lost their sense of traditions, to me as an Asian it doesn’t make sense since keeping our traditions and values is a huge part of our culture and society. Americans do this too but at least they seem to retain some notion of their ethnicity like they recognize their heritage is Irish or German or Chinese or Native or whatever.

Europeans also accept blame for bad things they did in the past (which is a good thing) but I think they can go overboard to compensate for that (to their detriment). I don’t think accepting blame for things in the past is a thing that’s done in Asia; we rewrite history instead. It would help if we acknowledged what we did and can have better relations with others moving forward.

Europeans identify more with nationality than ethnicity. For example, someone from Czech Republic moving to France is considered French. In North America I think they would be considered Czech-French. In Asia they would be considered to be a Czech expat living in France. Our ethnicity matters a lot.

In North America and Europe for some reason people refer to elders by their first name? We would never in 1000 years think of doing something like that, it's considered extremely rude. We either use their surname (like Mr.X) or Uncle/Auntie.

In terms of politics, both US and Europe seem quite extreme to me. Europe seems very liberal, you can do what you want, there doesn't seem to be any boundaries and people will tolerate anything. In the US people are extremely polarized with politics, both left and right. I've never heard of many other countries where there seem to be so many people per capita with conspiracy theories or violence with protests or lack of support for people (like old people or mental health issues, there's no community support, there's so much individualism). People seem to just accept things that seem unthinkable in a developed country (like texas not giving water to workers in heat).