Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.
Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.
In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.
A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.
You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.
Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.
I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.
> The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.
At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation".
Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.
> Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.
This sounds like a classic sort of "those were the bad old times, but now we live in modern times" argument. How should I know when facing a problem whether we live in the modern times when solutions are well mapped and I should copy someone else's, or the bad old times (relative to that problem) when solutions are poorly understood and/or implemented and I'm better off with gradually exploring the possibilities myself?
You could just as easily argue that it was the Baltics that took the slow and steady approach. They built up a civil society to support the economic changes.
At least from the outside, it looks like the bigger country to the east just handed out private ownership to the upper echelon, because surely that's what made west economically successful.
Not sure how accurate that description is, of course. Their economies were vastly different from the start. The Baltic region also has historical and cultural ties to the Nordic region. But at least there are different viewpoints here.
>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.
You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.
Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.
In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.
A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.
You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.
Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.
I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.