Posted on 11/22/2025 7:01:19 AM PST by Starman417
I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “ethnocentric”, but I remember the context. I was in some history class and we were studying a primitive South American tribe. They lived essentially the exact same way their ancestors had thousands of years ago. Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric”, which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.
The truth is, when we were first admonished about this I remember thinking something wasn’t quite right about it, but as a kid in school, who was I to argue with the teacher? It was only years later that I would realize that teachers weren’t all knowing and that that little piece of wisdom was anything but.
Of course almost no one uses the phrase ethnocentric anymore. No, it’s been replaced by the ubiquitous and multifunctional moniker “racist”. Different word, but it means basically the same thing, everything white or western is bad and anything else, whether color or culture, is good.
Whatever the name, the lesson was: Every society is equal.
But is that true? No. While common sense suggests it’s wrong, how does one really know? Who decides? Well, if we left it to academia and western elites to decide, we’d all be wearing dashikis, praying towards Mecca five times a day, eating out of a communal plate with our hands and then wiping our posteriors with those same hands. Not that the elites themselves would be doing any of that, but they coerce the unwashed masses into following such diverse practices.
As for deciding, the majority have already decided. Are there millions of people risking their lives every year to illegally migrate to Africa or South America or South Asia? No. Where do the millions of people seeking to flee conflicts in Syria or Libya or anywhere else in the Muslim world go? Do they go to any one of the 50 plus Muslim majority nations? Other than passing through Turkey on their way to Greece, the answer is largely no. Where do those seeking to escape economic malaise throughout much of the southern hemisphere go? Mexico City or Timbuktu? Unlikely. Where do CCP or Hamas or banana republic leaders send their kids to be educated and live? Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Burkina Faso or Vietnam? No, they send their kids to Paris, London and New York.
But the history! For example, India has a history going back thousands of years. We’re told that British rule decimated the Indian GDP, taking it from 23% of the world’s GDP in the mid-18th century to less than 4% today. That’s obviously a story of western civilization destroying a superior civilization, right? Not so much. While the Brits did bring substantial and sometimes negative changes to the Indian subcontinent, the reality is, India’s share of GDP shrank largely because western advances grew world GDP at an extraordinary rate never before seen. To put that in perspective, between 1750 – about the time Britain took control over India – and 1990 the GDP of the entire 3rd world grew by about 15 times. During that same period, Britain and the developed world grew GDP by 123 times. India didn’t lose it’s economic powerhouse status because Britain destroyed its economy, it lost its status because the west became an economic juggernaut, powered by the advances of the Industrial Revolution building on those of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, all of which were western.
So, why is it that for half a century elites have been telling us that westerners are not allowed to take pride in the advances of their civilizations or celebrate the forces that brought about unprecedented freedom and prosperity?
Because they are spoiled, entitled brats who are ashamed of the prosperity their forebearers created. P.J. O'Rourke perhaps put it best. “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”
Like the children of so many successful entrepreneurs, those boomer elites (the fount of today’s liberalism) found it hard to live up to the achievements of their progenitors. In the century before 1970 western civilization literally revolutionized the world. Automobiles. Telephony. Radio. Television. Movies. The structure of DNA. Flight. Heart transplants. Microchips. Nuclear power. The electric light bulb. And much more. They even put a man on the moon and brought him back safely! Since then? Not so much a revolution as changing the curtains. Sure, the PC, the Internet the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook have impacted our lives, but nothing revolutionary on the scale of many of those from the previous century. No time travel. No teleportation. No cure for cancer. Not even roads without potholes!
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
The people who claim all cultures are equal ignore those fleeing one culture to live, protected, within another.
All religions are definitely NOT equal. But that was not the original author’s point. He seems to have a more materialistic, secular-capitalist understanding of Western prowess.
Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric”, which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.
——-
It’s absurd. Some ideas are so stupid, only an Intellectual could believe them. Even a modicum of thought will prove this is a false assertion, because it necessarily follows that if no culture is objectively better than any other, then none is any worse.
Academia has this weird strain where there is an assertion there is no objective truth, no reality, no right or wrong, people are just interchangeable meat sticks, and no thing is better or worse than anything else.
It’s an anti-humanist, marxist perhaps form of indoctrination intended to tear things apart, maybe a subset of deconstruction or critical theory.
They are destroying higher learning, Science, Math, and so many of the hard disciplines in favor of fairy tales, superstition, and Lysenkoist twaddle. I did not have this on my Bingo card. I truly thought genuine academics was immune to this. I was wrong.
And then there are the sub-cultures within our general culture.
This is nothing new. Morons are stupid. That's what they are.
Another lie—women and men are the "same".
Only men should be allowed to work as "beat cops". Naturally, women are a better fit to be nurses.
It used to be "common sense" but we've had propaganda for decades now so this is no longer the case.
That skid needs to be steered into. Women should be drafted to be beat cops. Let them get their equality right up close and personal. It would help put an end to all this nonsense parroted by pampered women who believe television and movies.
He seems to have a more materialistic, secular-capitalist understanding of Western prowess.
It’s not just cultures that are not equal, it’s people.
It’s obvious that everyone perceives the world through values and perceptions rooted in their own experience, at least initially. Being self-aware of that is useful when studying or trying to deal with cultures not your own.
Value judgments about the relative cultural superiority, etc., are a related but different matter. I can “understand” that honor killing is a common and morally acceptable practice in some muslim cultures, yet vehemently disapprove. Those who sell a bill of goods that fear of “ethnocentrism” should paralyze our moral agency can ESAD.
Slowly, then suddenly...
Bravo to you ! One cannot say it better 🙂
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.