Cultural Stereotypes and Pathocratic Holdovers

Soft propaganda.

In conversation the other day, I made the bold claim that the degree to which you get defensive about outsiders pointing out your country or culture’s very obvious flaws is directly proportional to the degree to which your culture is pathological. In other words, the worse your culture, the more offended you will be when someone accurately portrays it in a bad light. I don’t know if the relationship is precisely “directly proportional,” but I think I have a point.

First, as

John Carter

wrote recently:

Stereotypes are the result of extended contact between groups, and amount in practice to the boiled down residue of the averaged experience of the members of one group with the representatives of another. Far from being misleading, they are almost invariably highly accurate as regards the means of group traits and behaviours. Stereotype accuracy is one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences, which stands in stark repudiation to the mandatory superstition that stereotypes are wrong. This is the real stereotype threat.

At least one ingredient that goes into the mix of “means of group traits and behaviours” is what Lobaczewski called the “quantitative and qualitative structure” of any given group’s psychopathological minority; in other words, the proportion of the population with various personality disorders, and the relative frequencies of those disorders within the group. This unique mixture “influences the entire psychological and moral climate of the country in question.”

For example, a higher proportion of antisocial personality disorder will increase the likelihood that a group will be perceived as more criminal, violent, and impulsive than a group where the proportion of antisocial personality disorder is not as high. Groups with a high percentage of Machiavellian psychopaths will be perceived as scheming and manipulative, influencing other groups to achieve their own goals. Groups with a high percentage of obsessive-compulsive (or anankastic) personality disorder will come across as anal workaholics obsessed with rules to a degree that others find slavish. Groups with a high number of schizoids will be perceived as highly intelligent but arrogant and misanthropic, distrustful, paying little attention to the feelings of other groups, eager to retaliate for minor offenses, and tending to assume extreme, moralizing positions. A group with significant numbers of multiple disorders will similarly acquire a blend of their respective features, e.g. perhaps being perceived as both emotionally reactive and manipulative.

Those traits and behaviors will not simply give the rest of the group a bad image; they will filter out to the more normal members of the group, affecting their worldviews and behaviors. On the whole these traits probably will not surpass the level of an annoying personality quirk. But if the numbers are high, the chance is greater that the traits will approach the level of actual personality dysfunction in a larger proportion of the population. I asked Grok to provide a list of some stereotypes by country. Please comment on their accuracy:

• Russians: Cold, stoic, and aggressive drunks who love vodka and are prone to authoritarianism. Often seen as cunning but untrustworthy, with a penchant for organized crime and hacking. Stereotyped as living in a bleak, corrupt society where everyone’s a spy or oligarch.

• Chinese: Ruthless workaholics obsessed with money and academic success. Viewed as robotic conformists who eat anything that moves (dogs, bats, etc.) and live under a repressive regime. Often accused of being sneaky, manipulative, and flooding markets with cheap, low-quality goods.

• Japanese: Overly polite but emotionally repressed workaholics who fetishize tradition and technology. Seen as socially awkward, obsessed with anime, and prone to extreme behaviors like suicide or bizarre fetishes. Sometimes viewed as insular and xenophobic.

• Israelis: Arrogant, aggressive, and overly nationalistic. Stereotyped as manipulative and overly influential in global affairs, often tied to conspiracy theories about Jewish control. Seen as militaristic and unyielding in conflicts, with a chip on their shoulder.

• Americans: Loud, obese, and ignorant, obsessed with guns, fast food, and consumerism. Viewed as culturally shallow, overly patriotic, and prone to meddling in other countries’ affairs while being clueless about the world. Often seen as hypocritical about freedom and democracy.

• French: Snobbish, lazy, and cowardly, always surrendering in wars. Stereotyped as chain-smoking, wine-guzzling romantics who are rude to foreigners and obsessed with their fading cultural glory. Seen as overly intellectual and pretentious.

• Germans: Humorless, rigid, and overly disciplined, with a lingering Nazi stigma. Viewed as cold, efficient machines who love order, bureaucracy, and sausage. Sometimes accused of being secretly racist or domineering in European affairs.

• Italians: Chaotic, corrupt, and lazy, spending all day eating pasta and gesticulating wildly. Stereotyped as mafia-affiliated, untrustworthy, and overly emotional, with a knack for dodging responsibility and living in a crumbling, picturesque mess.

• British: Stuffy, tea-obsessed snobs with bad teeth and worse food. Seen as emotionally repressed, overly polite but passive-aggressive, and clinging to a delusional sense of imperial greatness. Often mocked for their weather and bland culture.

• Indians: Overpopulated, dirty, and overly focused on academic success or tech jobs. Stereotyped as call-center workers or curry-slurping street vendors who live in chaotic, superstitious societies with caste oppression and cow worship.

• Brazilians: Party-obsessed, hyper-sexualized beach bums who live for carnival and soccer. Viewed as lazy, crime-ridden, and uneducated, with a knack for samba and slums. Often reduced to tropical stereotypes of looseness and violence.

• Africans (broadly): Poor, tribal, and backward, living in huts and plagued by disease, corruption, and war. Stereotyped as lazy or criminal, with large families they can’t support, and overly reliant on Western aid.

• Mexicans: Lazy, uneducated manual laborers (e.g., maids, fruit pickers) who love tacos and tequila. Seen as prone to crime, drug cartels, and illegal immigration, with a chaotic, corrupt homeland that’s always a mess.

• Arabs/Middle Easterners: Terrorist-prone religious fanatics who oppress women and live in desert wastelands. Stereotyped as angry, bearded zealots or oil-rich sheikhs with backward, violent cultures.

• Australians: Drunken, uncouth surfers or outback rednecks who wrestle crocodiles and barbecue everything. Seen as laid-back to the point of stupidity, with a convict heritage and a chip on their shoulder about being ignored globally.

Lobaczewski’s description of Americans was similar to Grok’s: arrogant, “hyper-irritable and hypo-critical,” incapable of understanding other people and nations, and socio-occupationally maladjusted (i.e. dumb people elevated to important positions, smart ones working at McDonald’s). He considered America to have a relatively high pathological population, due in part to “the immigration of difficult people.”

The only other national character he commented on specifically was Jews, who have the highest proportion of schizoids: “due to the exceptional tenacity and persistent nature” of schizoidia, “it marks their whole civilization, worldview, and activity.”

[NB: When writing this, I neglected the following passage, which comments on Slavs:

“For our purposes, we should also draw attention to a type with deviant features [i.e. skirtoids] which was isolated long ago by E. Brzezicki and accepted by Ernst Kretschmer as characteristic of Eastern and Central Europe in particular. ... If we wish to understand the history of Russia, as well as Poland to a lesser extent, we should take into consideration a certain mark which this anomaly imprints onto the character of the peoples of this region of the world.”

And here is the full quote where the bit above about America comes from, which also mentions Poland and Norway:

“The quantitative and qualitative composition of this biopsychologically deficient fraction of the population certainly varies in time and space on our planet. This may be represented by a single-digit percentage in some nations, in the teens in others. Poland had a relatively low burden, but this share has grown alarmingly; Scandinavian countries, especially Norway, have the lowest burden in Europe; in the U.S., a nation built on the immigration of difficult people, this share is relatively high.”]

There’s another factor to consider when we look around the world at various cultures of varying quality. A history of pathocracy has deforming effects on the traits and behaviors of the people forced to live in it. Even if a country ceases to be a pathocracy and “depathologizes” (to use Lobaczewski’s word for what happened after the dissolution of the USSR), its citizens will retain the psychological adaptations they acquired during the pathocratic years. This is evident in a country like Russia. From my conversations with Russians, I’ve noticed some of these pathocratic holdovers. Here are a couple:

1. “Potemkin Villagitis”: Some city dwellers might observe that particular streets have been professionally cleaned with soapy water recently. They wonder which foreign dignitary must be showing up. (Why else would they be washing the roads?)

2. “X-Fileophilia”: Trust no one. Literally. Russians are notorious for not trusting authorities. Authority-questioning westerners might see this as admirable, healthy skepticism, but a non-negligible number of the population are paranoid to a degree that even Western conspiracy theorists would find wild. (Though American conspiratards are approaching these levels. I’m thinking of Russian conspiracy theories such as Putin having been replaced by a double, and literally every action coming out of the Kremlin being kayfabe—a cultural appropriation and expansion of old-school Western Kremlinology.)

China, which in my opinion never really depathologized despite its economic reforms, has its psychological adaptations too, perhaps largely on account of Mao’s cultural devolution and great leap backward. Anything that isn’t tied down is considered “free” by a certain demographic, and Chinese grandmas will steal it—public toilet paper, soap in the soap dispensers, product samples. Pathocratic subjects learn to break the law in ways necessary to survive—whether by forging documents, lying to the “feds,” selling and buying on the black market, stealing when necessary, and generally “hustling” in order to get by. This can persevere, manifesting as a persistent tendency to skirt the rules, e.g., engaging in “dishonest” business practices.

So, back to my initial proposition. Which cultures get the most bent out of shape when criticized by others? Which ones attack you mercilessly for criticizing them, and which laugh it off and join in on the fun? Which ones put the most effort into presenting themselves as something they’re not? Which ones don’t have anything to prove?

The idea that psychological demographics affect national character implies that individual psychology scales. Those who engage in the most impression management are those who have the most to hide. Those who fly off the handle at accurate criticism are those most deserving of criticism, and prove the point by flying off the handle.

No one enjoys having his flaws pointed out, but the more mature you are, the better you’re able to handle it—even to admit that the criticism is fair. One of the features of psychopathology is the inability to admit such “self-critical associations,” as Lobaczewski calls them.

Pathological egotism derives from repressing from one’s field of consciousness any objectionable, self-critical associations referring to one’s own nature or normality. Dramatic questions such as “who is abnormal here, me or this world of people who feel and think differently?” are answered in the world’s disfavor. Such egotism is always linked to a dissimulative attitude [i.e., impression management], with a Cleckley mask over some pathological quality being hidden from consciousness—both one’s own and that of other people.

Anyone expressing such observations is met with various forms of attack, including accusations of being morally reprehensible, often in the form of various paramoralistic epithets (e.g., racist, “super-racist,” antisemite) and comparisons to historical demons (there’s still really only one today: Hitler). Commenting on this tendency, Lobaczewski writes:

If we analyze the reasons why some people frequently overuse such emotionally loaded and suggestive interpretations, often indignantly rejecting a more correct interpretation, we shall of course also discover pathological factors acting within them. Intensification of this tendency in such cases is caused by repressing from the field of consciousness any self-critical concepts concerning their own behavior and its internal reasons. The influence of such people causes this tendency to intensify in others.

Elsewhere, Lobaczewski notes that such projection “can be a nightmare in periods of increased societal hystericization,” such as that which occurs when a country is at war or going through a political crisis. He provides a definition and an example: “Someone attributes his own qualities, intentions, or deeds to another person, people, or even nations. … ‘He is vindictive, sadistic, a criminal, an imperialist, etc., not me.’”

This tactic works because it generates so much confusion. The human mind reels when a vindictive sadist claims his victims are vindictive sadists. And because the psychopath is often more persuasive than the normie, many will tend to believe the psychopath. Then, when the victim lashes out in an exaggerated manner, perhaps violently, this is taken as confirmation that he was indeed a vindictive sadist, and the predator is just a victim of unprovoked hatred and senseless violence.

Now, imagine that the person doing the projecting then accuses the one calling out this projection of being the one actually doing the projecting. It’s “I know you are but what am I” on steroids. The human mind is not made for such things.

All of that is just to say: cultural relativism is for fools. I will go so far as to say that most cultures have at least some positives, but that doesn’t mean that some aren’t objectively worse than others. Not just “different”—different in a way that is worse. Identifying the reasons why they are worse is the first step in making them better.