It’s interesting how different cultures determine mental health and illness, it really is, because it indicates the layers of variation among groups.
For example, in Korea, both North and South, they have a culture based on Shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Catholicism from the early colonial days. The impact of these influences, especially shamanism, brings about acceptance of high levels of expression of anger and violence as being quite normal and beneficial. You can see that in the North & South’s strident and nasty rhetoric about each other, and then there’s a lull of missing each other.
There’s real love and hate between the two ‘brothers’. Violence between the North and South and between people within both societies is quite normal. Aggression is seen as a very positive trait. These are both relatively modern nations, especially the South, but they are quite different to, for example, Australia.
I’ve noticed that in Australia where violence is reasonably unacceptable, although we are happy to send soldiers overseas to butcher people we decide are bad guys, or more honestly, bad children running around with scissors, but, in-country Australia, that there is an enormous proportion of the population on anti depressant therapy and on all types of sometimes quite significant pain-analgesia therapy. That’s no hard to see just by interacting with people from Customs officers to shop keepers to taxi drivers to professionals and workers and business folk.
You just don’t see that layer of ‘anti-freeze’ in Asian cultures; nor do you sense the paranoia that grips so many Australians regarding foreign folk, terrorism etc. Fear and loathing is part of the Australian character to a more perhaps stylized extent than you see in Asia. Also Australians are much older, heavier, wider and more constrained by cultural laws and idioms than folk in other countries in the region. Most folk in the region don’t live as long as Australians but they seem to have a far more lively life and do a lot more and interact with larger numbers of ‘others’ from everywhere than is the experience in Australia. It’s fine for Australians who say “well, that’s the way we like it’ because it is certainly the way it’s going to be here. It’s an island continent, significantly isolated, it just doesn’t have the neighbours or the real abiding attractions of so many people. it's damn lonely in comparison. That has its benefits...a very low population is useful in the long term, as long as there is sufficient social diversity.
I noticed that in China it is quite normal to have volatile arguments in public. These happen regularly between family members, in reaction to other families, and between strangers. Sometimes these fights, that can and sometimes do become physical, continue for hours and draw an interested crowd...but is still seen as normal behaviour. When you consider the volume of people in China, obviously there is always push & shove, and that’s normal too. It’s not something that is medicated away.
What the Chinese add to this is an enormous capacity for intellectual argument. Many TV shows are simply argument-forms often in comedic scenarios that we don’t quite understand , but still, the intellectual capacity of Chinese people is something that is actively stimulated throughout the life span on a daily basis the forms of high and sharp humour are hard to grasp but are well worth the effort.
In China I was quizzed on my thoughts regarding Tibet and I answered that Tibet is an issue for China not for me. The Chinese make no suggestions to Australia regarding impoverished indigenous communities with many social problems, and I offer the Chinese the same space.
An old Red Guard was telling me that he’d studied both Buddhism and Christianity at length and said that they differed in that Buddhism centred on self-liberation whereas Christianity centred on doing good for others so in comparing the two, he felt Christianity was far more a collective effort and had more merit although both Buddhism and Christianity, in comparison with Confucian human systems were very primitive and mostly made of bullshit, with some interesting intellectual attributes. I agree.
He had also studied British Labour Unions philosophy and actions and thought they were the only way to really introduce worker rights. He had put this notion in a newspaper to the Government in China when Mao was in charge and then spent a decade in prison for his efforts.
Still, he respected Mao as a great military strategist which he most surely was. He doesn’t dislike the government in China. They pay his pension and he remains an active businessman at 75. He has no desire to go to the West at all. His understanding of democratic forms is very advanced and his thoughts are lucid. It’s not a good idea for China. If the China Govt continues to reject the notion of democracy, then he’s quite happy to support them.
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