Are "Western" values objectively good? An argument from the perspective of SDT

[Carl-Richard]

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theory that presents three factors that create optimal motivation in an organism.

SDT in a nutshell:

Quote

Competence: you like to do things you're good at, because that is fun, pleasurable and enjoyable. It's who you truly are.

Autonomy: you like to do things by your own choosing, and if you're allowed to choose, you will tend to do the things you're good at.

Belonging: you like to be in an environment that supports your competence and respects your autonomy.

These three factors reflect deep biological truths and can be applied to all organisms, but here I will apply them to humans. I will also claim that "motivation" in this sense is synonymous with "health" and "well-being". In other words, SDT describes the factors that create optimal health and well-being. For a more in-depth explanation of SDT, I recommend this thread.

So, how does SDT relate to Western values (or so-called "Western" values)? What is so special about the West? Why are Western values considered so precious? And more controversially: is it true that Western values are "objectively" good?

I will claim that if SDT can be treated as an objective measurement of health and well-being, which you could argue is the case when you consider how it reflects deep biological truths, then you can possibly make the case that Western values are "objectively" good.

(I put "objectively" in quotation marks because I acknowledge that I've chosen an arbitrary standard for objectivity. However, like I said, the standard can be argued on biological lines and applies to all organisms. So if it's not objectively good, it's at least based on something that applies to all organisms, and it has to do with health and well-being).

 

Individualism

The West champions the right to be the maker of your own destiny, that you can pursue whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt others (which is relativistic, but we won't go there), and generally that you're free to be who you want to be.

This coincides nicely with "autonomy" and "competence" (you're free to be who you truly are and who you want to be), but also "belonging" in the sense that the surrounding culture promotes and supports your right to be yourself, and that you belong there. It's also a two-way street in the sense that you need to factor in other people and their autonomy (you can't hurt them), creating the space of belonging for them.

 

Freedom of speech

You should be able to say what you want, to make your case, to have your voice heard, again, as long as it doesn't hurt others. In a sense, it's individualism in the realm of verbal and intellectual self-expression, and it has practically the same relation to SDT as above.

 

Democracy

You should be able to have a say in how your society is governed. This ensures "belonging" in the sense that your competencies and need for self-expression is reflected in your environment, i.e. that you belong to that environment. The state also protects you from other people taking away your autonomy by being the monopoly of violence, again creating the space for belonging.

 

So in summary, it seems like SDT coincides nicely with the Western values of individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. Does that mean the West is perfect? Does that mean authoritarianism doesn't have a point? Not necessarily.

With respect to the West not being perfect, the West often goes too far with individualism, in a way that erodes the need for belonging, for example by the tiny size of families ("the nuclear family"), ideas like having to move out from your parents, buying your own house or living on your own, overdoing sayings like "going it on your own" with respect to career, intellectual pursuits or "spirituality" (the fallacy of autodidactism).

With respect to authoritarianism having a point, if you wanted to pull in a model like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, authoritarianism could be good if the need for safety is threatened by anarchy and violence (people who do not respect your autonomy), effectively creating a relative space of belonging. But once your safety is secured, once you live in a society where other people relatively respect your autonomy, what else do you need as an organism? Or rather, what "is" an organism? How does an organism function on a fundamental level? What makes an organism healthy? That, is what SDT tries to describe.

Edited March 5 by Carl-Richard

[Danioover9000]

@Carl-Richard

54 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theory that presents three factors that create optimal motivation in an organism.

SDT in a nutshell:

These three factors reflect deep biological truths and can be applied to all organisms, but here I will apply them to humans. I will also claim that "motivation" in this sense is synonymous with "health" and "well-being". In other words, SDT describes the factors that create optimal health and well-being. For a more in-depth explanation of SDT, I recommend this thread.

So, how does SDT relate to Western values? What is so special about the West? Why are Western values considered so precious? And more controversially: is it true that Western values are "objectively" good?

I will claim that if SDT can be treated as an objective measurement of health and well-being, which you could argue is the case when you consider how it reflects deep biological truths, then you can possibly make the case that Western values are "objectively" good.

(I put "objectively" in quotation marks because I acknowledge that I've chosen an arbitrary standard for objectivity. However, like I said, the standard can be argued on biological lines and applies to all organisms. So if it's not objectively good, it's at least based on something that applies to all organisms, and it has to do with health and well-being).

 

Individualism

The West champions the right to be the maker of your own destiny, that you can pursue whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt others (which is relativistic, but we won't go there), and generally that you're free to be who you want to be.

This coincides nicely with "autonomy" and "competence" (you're free to be who you truly are and who you want to be), but also "belonging" in the sense that the surrounding culture promotes and supports your right to be yourself, and that you belong there. It's also a two-way street in the sense that you need to factor in other people and their autonomy (you can't hurt them), creating the space of belonging for them.

 

Freedom of speech

You should be able to say what you want, to make your case, to have your voice heard, again, as long as it doesn't hurt others. In a sense, it's individualism in the realm of verbal and intellectual self-expression, and it has practically the same relation to SDT as above.

 

Democracy

You should be able to have a say in how your society is governed. This ensures "belonging" in the sense that your competencies and need for self-expression is reflected in your environment, i.e. that you belong to that environment. The state also protects you from other people taking away your autonomy by being the monopoly of violence, again creating the space for belonging.

 

So in summary, it seems like SDT coincides nicely with the Western values of individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. Does that mean the West is perfect? Does that mean authoritarianism doesn't have a point? Not necessarily.

With respect to the West not being perfect, the West often goes too far with individualism, in a way that erodes the need for belonging, for example by the tiny size of families ("the nuclear family"), ideas like having to move out from your parents, buying your own house or living on your own, overdoing sayings like "going it on your own" with respect to career, intellectual pursuits or "spirituality" (the fallacy of autodidactism).

With respect to authoritarianism having a point, if you wanted to pull in a model like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, authoritarianism could be good if the need for safety is threatened by anarchy and violence (people who do not respect your autonomy), effectively creating a relative space of belonging. But once your safety is secured, once you live in a society where other people relatively respect your autonomy, what else do you need as an organism? Or rather, what "is" an organism? How do organisms function on a fundamental level? What makes an organism healthy? That, is what SDT tries to describe.

   To know whether western values are objectively good or bad we'll have to factor in more developmental factors as well, not just only SDT. Ever since the rise of secularism, modernism, egalitarianism and feminism, there's also a decrease in birthrates in most westernized 1st world countries that it's not reaching the threshold of replacement numbers per society, due to the following:

1. High divorce rates, which are correlated to more females on average being more careers orientated due to feminism, and hyper capitalism, as well as the destruction of the family unit and nuclear family which is sourced from theocratic religions.

2. Secularism and atheism, which cannot make their own moral codes and ethical standards, so they still source from say a Christian theocratic worldview, and they don't even acknowledge that the constitution is inspired by the religious moral frameworks. However secularists and atheists fail to start marriages and raise families successfully because family is a deep national and religious aspect of humanity, and they demonize religious orders and theocracy, and given that marriage and family are so integral to religious orders and to a stage blue society they demonize the hell out of healthy family units and instead end up subconsciously creating more single parent households and dysfunctional family units that traumatizes young children, to then later on in life repeat that same mistake if they don't overcome that.

3. Birthrate declines in most westernized secular countries, like the USA, Canada, UK, EU, Russia and China, especially South Korea which has adopted western values and culture, like multiculturalism, egalitarianism and feminism despite the capitalism which is higher than the USA or UK version, as their work culture is a bit more toxic, same with Japan work culture is too demanding, western values, and not to mention the West especially USA bullied Japan into a surrender via nukes, then transported their ideology onto the Japanese's organized theocracy/imperialism, which made them have to adapt to a more westernized culture or face more penalty from America.

The biggest blind spot to most westernized 1st world countries is they all assume egalitarianism, feminism and multiculturalism is a given and that every society around the world should be liberal and screw theocracies. Well that doesn't produce good outcomes because see egalitarianism is itself abstract and needs enforcement mechanisms by the state like law and order to maintain such ideologies, which on average mostly men do. Without law and order and enforcement egalitarianism would have extinct a long time ago. Same with Feminism and even the suffrage movement, they still needed enforcement arms and mechanisms like this, largely provided by men as MEN have created those rules and rights in the first place and defended such abstract rights from civil unrest and civil wars to regional and global wars between countries seeking to dominate and subjugate another society. Same with multiculturalism, can't go multiculturalism and skip all them developmental factors, can't skip over religion and theocracies, you got to live through some kind of stage red/blue values first before going stage orange or even green. Oh also the native decline of birthrates in westernized countries will pressure those countries in the future to increase migration of peoples of 3rd world countries that are producing, sometimes above threshold replacement numbers, from what? Theocratic societies! So if secularists, humanists and atheists want to remedy this problem, they have to integrate more stage blue nationalism and religion into their ideological movements, or keep failing.

Now briefly I'll address those 3 points you brought up:

Individualism: Nope, there is such a thing as too much individualism. The right to be who you are is highly dependent on many social factors, which individualism raised only after the divorce of state and religion. I'd argue that we're having too much individualism and we need to tone it down a bit. You as an individual depends on which society you are raised in, and the collective programming and the cognitive and moral development. Ideally we should now pursue a more limited form of democracy, you can still be individualism, just that too much hyper individualism can lead to things like human indecency and moral degradation.

Freedom of speech: Again moral degradation and human indecency. We need more human decency laws and we need to salvage whatever remains of our humanity and moral system we have, thanks to Tik Tok, social media sites, Neo capitalism and these hyper liberalist ideologies these have rotten the brains of our youths in this age of information.

Democracy: As I stated more limited democracy, maybe even a hybrid form of authoritarianism and democracy like in the Roman empire. Reason why we need to simplify down democracy is because we have WAY TOO MANY VOICES! Western countries are becoming more and more schizophrenic and are having to adjust and accommodate to many representations and too many cultures that we end up losing overtime what made that country originally very good to begin with. We end up having too complex metanarratives to tell and indoctrinate future children, if we ever have any to begin with AKA birthrate decline, then stories overtime become too many, and we end up confusing ourselves with too much information.

 

[Leo Gura]

Argument could be made that the West is very sick, not healthy. And then that sickness could be attributed to the very Western values you cherish.

Edited March 4 by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

50 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Argument could be made that the West is very sick, not healthy. And then that sickness could be attributed to the very Western values you cherish.

The Western values get you sick when you approach them in an unbalanced, inflexible and naive way, which I gave a few examples of. That's when understanding deeper mechanisms like competence, autonomy and belonging comes in (and the hundreds of other frameworks that try to encapsulate health, wisdom, well-being), and of course just life experience. The deeper problem is essentially a lack of wisdom. Latching on to a limited set of values alone is really not sufficient, but still, from a certain "wise" perspective, these values have a place.

Edited March 4 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

I find this whole notion that "the West" has a special set of values quite childish and silly.

"The West" and its purported "values" are a shallow social construction and gross generalization, so spending much time analyzing them is a waste of time. You're not gonna get high quality insight from this line of reasoning. There are complex trade-offs between individualism and collectivism which go far beyond East or West.

Edited March 4 by Leo Gura

[Buck Edwards]

I agree with Leo here. The whole concept of the great West is a silly illusion. The West is a huge pile of shit and a moral narcissistic decrepit tooting it's horn. 

[Rafael Thundercat]

Wikipedia 

The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in the regions of Australasia,[a] Western Europe, and Northern America; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America[c] also constitute the West. The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). The West is considered an evolving concept; made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members. Definitions of "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives.

[Carl-Richard]

23 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I find this whole notion that "the West" has a special set of values quite childish and silly.

"The West" and its purported "values" are a shallow social construction and gross generalization, so spending much time analyzing them is a waste of time. You're not gonna get high quality insight from this line of reasoning. There are complex trade-offs between individualism and collectivism which go far beyond East or West.

I just referred to it that way because that is how it's usually talked about (and maybe a little because I wanted a spicy title). I could've just dropped calling it "the West" and just have presented the three specific values. But I didn't.

I could also have flipped it on its head and made the topic about "is authoritarianism objectively good?" and given the pros and cons there from the perspective of SDT, and the answer would essentially be the same as I alluded to just now: at the end of the day, you have to be nuanced. It's not either freedom or tyranny: it's wisdom. Still, this is what popped up in my mind, and I share it for what it's worth.

Any time you utter something, you're giving a partial perspective. If you generally have a wider perspective, essentially all we're doing when we're talking with each other is to play a game of refreshing our memories about earlier things we've learned that is a part of the puzzle but not the whole puzzle. And that's ok. We can't really do anything else.

Edited March 5 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

I could've just dropped calling it "the West" and just have presented the three specific values.

Then that would have been a different (and better) sort of point.

A great point could always be made. They key is to make it

Edited March 5 by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Then that would have been a different (and better) sort of point.

Welp.

That might be true, but as I said above in my most recent edit, even then it's still just a partial perspective (which is of course obvious, but sometimes it needs to be said, which in itself echoes the very point I'm referencing). We haven't unravelled the whole jarn yet; we cannot. There is always something you can pick at ("that's inaccurate!", "that's overly simplified!"). Maybe my use of "the West" was a bit too pragmatic for most people's taste, but if you really want to turn the skepticism microscope to full use, no utterance is safe. And again, that's ok.

Edited March 5 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

19 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

but if you really want to turn the skepticism microscope to full use, no utterance is safe.

Don't be so melodramatic.

The gist of your whole topic was linking up the notion of "the West" with those other concepts. And it is perfectly legitmate for me to question the validity of such a linking. That is not a case of some absolute skepticism on my part.

Edited March 5 by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

20 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Don't be so melodramatic.

The gist of your whole topic was linking up the notion of "the West" with those other concepts. And it is perfectly legitmate for me to question the validity of such a linking. That is not a case of some absolute skepticism on my part.

The gist, or my intention, was to link the three "Western" values to the three factors in SDT. Calling it "Western" was merely pragmatic (and edgy) on my part, but you're right to call it out the way you did, because it could come off like I'm some alt-right nazi if the context I'm currently giving does not exist in the person's mind reading this. Maybe I'll think twice about being lax in my language and making clickbait titles in the future.

Melodramatic, more like late night ramble mood 😝

I've now added some quotation marks around "Western" to clarify

Edited March 5 by Carl-Richard

[Danioover9000]

@Rafael Thundercat

1 hour ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

Wikipedia 

The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in the regions of Australasia,[a] Western Europe, and Northern America; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America[c] also constitute the West. The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). The West is considered an evolving concept; made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members. Definitions of "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives.

   Great post I acknowledge it's goodness, as nobody is engaging with mine means I'm telling the truth.

[Danioover9000]

@Carl-Richard

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

I just referred to it that way because that is how it's usually talked about (and maybe a little because I wanted a spicy title). I could've just dropped calling it "the West" and just have presented the three specific values. But I didn't.

I could also have flipped it on its head and made the topic about "is authoritarianism objectively good?" and given the pros and cons there from the perspective of SDT, and the answer would essentially be the same as I alluded to just now: at the end of the day, you have to be nuanced. It's not either freedom or tyranny: it's wisdom. Still, this is what popped up in my mind, and I share it for what it's worth.

Any time you utter something, you're giving a partial perspective. If you generally have a wider perspective, essentially all we're doing when we're talking with each other is to play a game of refreshing our memories about earlier things we've learned that is a part of the puzzle but not the whole puzzle. And that's ok. We can't really do anything else.

   Well, if you consider the whole of humanity authoritarianism has existed the longest of them all, this leader-follower structure, so on average it's actually a more robust system that has withstood time that I say is mostly healthy for SURVIVAL. Now in comparison to say a totalitarian regime? that too is second to third chunk of human history right there, which is a more extreme version of authoritarianism..

[Danioover9000]

@Rafael Thundercat  A simple and good example of when there's too much individualism, democracy, and free speech:

   You end up like that woman, who says a lot of talking points but can't back up those talking points with facts, evidence, or anecdotes to show Jesse a real world example of white privilege. That's the more extreme end of liberalism, feminism, and victim mentality.

[Carl-Richard]

21 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Carl-Richard

   Well, if you consider the whole of humanity authoritarianism has existed the longest of them all, this leader-follower structure, so on average it's actually a more robust system that has withstood time that I say is mostly healthy for SURVIVAL. Now in comparison to say a totalitarian regime? that too is second to third chunk of human history right there, which is a more extreme version of authoritarianism..

The need for an organism to express their abilities in line with their drive for survival ("competence") and to feel like they're able to do so freely ("autonomy") and that their environment resonates with these needs ("belonging") precedes any human system of government by 3.5 billion years. And generally, these needs favor values like individualism, freedom of speech and democracy.

https://actionforhappiness.org/happiness-and-democracy

Edited March 5 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

Nice graph.

[Extreme Z7]

I like how Full Democracy is the only one without glaring inequality.

[bebotalk]

Objective truth doesn't exist, or it's difficult to discern such.

However, it can be strongly said that Western values lead to the greatest outcome for the widest amount of people. 

[Danioover9000]

@Carl-Richard

14 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The need for an organism to express their abilities in line with their drive for survival ("competence") and to feel like they're able to do so freely ("autonomy") and that their environment resonates with these needs ("belonging") precedes any human system of government by 3.5 billion years. And generally, these needs favor values like individualism, freedom of speech and democracy.

https://actionforhappiness.org/happiness-and-democracy

   And? It's generally proving my point a bit more though, as stated most of human history it's been authoritarian regimes and hybrid regimes, mostly patriarchic rulership with exceptions here and there. When orthodox religion, and organized religion came about is around the flawed democracy part