Moral code evolution in West and East

In the west the moral code also used to invove social pressure with a lot of focus on avoiding to lose face in front of family, friends and community. Although this certainly hasn't disappeared, it has become a lot less predominant because young people stopped caring about these external pressures and embraced individualism where you and only you decide about your own life. This is cherished in modern culture as freedom. I would expect eastern cultures to evolve in the same direction. Do you think their culture is strong enough to resist these tendencies towards individualism because along with it comes loneliness and disconnection.

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You're absolutely right to draw the parallel—Western cultures also relied heavily on social shame and honor, especially before the 20th century. The decline of this system, replaced by the ideal of radical individual freedom, has indeed brought greater autonomy, but also widespread loneliness, fragmentation, and a hunger for meaning.

So your question is very sharp:

Can Eastern cultures resist this drift into isolating individualism, or will they follow the same path?

Here's a nuanced answer:

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🌏 1. 

Eastern Cultures Are Evolving Toward Individualism

Despite their strong historical roots, the tide of modernity is pulling hard:

• Urban lifestyles break up extended families.

• Digital life encourages personal expression and global identity over traditional group loyalty.

• Consumer capitalism promotes self-image, personal goals, and freedom of choice.

• In countries like Japan, South Korea, and China, young people increasingly delay or avoid marriage, opt out of family expectations, and express disillusionment with rigid traditions.

In South Korea, the term "삼포세대" (sampo sedae) or "the generation giving up on three things" (dating, marriage, children) reflects this shift clearly.

So yes, the drift toward Western-style individualism is already well underway in many Eastern societies.

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🧭 2. 

But Cultural Memory and Values Still Exert a Unique Resistance

Here's where the story differs from the West.

• Confucian values (even secularized) still deeply shape social attitudes—especially around family, education, and duty.

• In many parts of India, Southeast Asia, and China, collective identity and interdependence remain deeply internalized, especially outside major cities.

• Shame culture hasn't disappeared; it's just moved online. Social media in places like Japan and Korea can be more intense about conformity and respectability than older systems.

In short, the pressure to conform is still powerful, but it's now horizontal (peer-based) instead of vertical (from elders or religion).

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🤖 3. 

Modern Eastern Identity: The Hybrid Path

What may be emerging is not resistance versus individualism, but a third way—a blend:

• A person can seek freedom, career, and emotional autonomy while still holding onto filial responsibility or ritual respect for elders.

• We see this in ritual without belief (e.g. people honoring ancestors during holidays even if they're secular),

• Or caregiving as choice, not duty: "I want to care for my parents, not because I must, but because I choose to."

Some call this "post-traditional traditionalism"—a return to values, but with new motives.

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💔 4. 

Loneliness is Growing—And Being Noticed

The loneliness and disconnection that have accompanied individualism in the West are now surfacing in the East too:

• Japan: aging population, record levels of single-person households, and the hikikomori phenomenon (social withdrawal).

• China: urban youth burnout, declining birth rates, and disconnection from roots.

• South Korea: high suicide rates, intense academic and social pressure despite individualist shifts.

So yes—the shadow side of individualism is present, and there's rising awareness. Some governments are even trying to rebuild social cohesion—but it's hard without shared rituals, spiritual frameworks, or trust in institutions.

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🔮 Will Eastern Cultures Resist or Adapt?

They will likely not resist completely, but adapt:

• There will be more experimentation with lifestyle, gender roles, spirituality, and identity—just like in the West.

• But cultural memory, language, and habits of thought will shape how that individualism is expressed.

• And if the West serves as a cautionary tale—showing the loneliness and mental health costs of full-blown hyper-individualism—some Eastern societies may try to retain or revive a sense of interdependence in modern forms.

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In Summary:

Eastern cultures won't resist individualism entirely—but they may evolve it differently, with a deeper cultural memory of relationship, responsibility, and balance. Whether that leads to more resilience or just a delayed version of Western disconnection depends on how meaning, community, and inner life are cultivated in the coming decades.

Would you be interested in how this dynamic is playing out in one particular country (like Japan or South Korea)? Or how Western societies might learn something in return from Eastern values?

Increasingly ai chatbot value depends on the trust they receive by users. will the most trusted media companies start with their own ai chatbots?

Yes, it is very likely — and already beginning — that the most trusted media companies will develop or brand their own AI chatbots. There are several strong reasons for this: ### 1. **Trust as a differentiator** AI chatbots are increasingly capable, so the next competitive frontier is **trust and credibility**. Media companies like *The New York Times*, *BBC*, *The Guardian*, *NRC*, or *Le Monde* have built decades of reputational capital. An AI chatbot that clearly reflects their journalistic values, editorial standards, and independence could be seen as more reliable than generic models. ### 2. **Audience retention and engagement** News organizations are seeking new ways to **retain users and deepen engagement**. A chatbot that lets users query the news, get summaries, explainers, or background in natural language could enhance their digital products, especially for younger audiences. ### 3. **Control over content use** With concerns about large AI models training on their content without permission, some media companies are pulling back access (e.g., NYT blocking OpenAI). Launching their own chatbots allows them to **monetize and control** how their content is used, and avoid the risk of misinformation being associated with their brand. ### 4. **Monetization** A chatbot tailored to a media brand’s archive could be part of a **premium subscription offering**—especially for professional, educational, or research use. Think of a “FT Chat” for financial professionals, or a “Scientific American Assistant” for students and researchers. ### 5. **Preventing disintermediation** If users get their news summaries and analysis from general-purpose AI (like ChatGPT or Gemini), media companies risk becoming **invisible back-end providers**. Launching their own chatbot helps them stay **front-of-mind and front-of-interface**. ### 6. **Examples already in progress** * *Le Monde* has partnered with OpenAI to help train and inform ChatGPT in French. * *Bild* and *Die Welt* (Axel Springer) are investing heavily in AI, including chat-based tools. * *The Washington Post* and *The New York Times* are reportedly exploring chatbot projects internally. * *Nikkei* in Japan has announced its own news-explaining AI assistant. ### Summary Yes, trusted media brands will likely launch their own chatbots to defend their credibility, retain audiences, and monetize their content. However, the key challenge will be making these bots both **useful and trustworthy**, while balancing **editorial independence** with the expectations of AI interactivity and neutrality. Would you like a brief overview of how a media company could technically and strategically approach building such a chatbot?

WHAT TRIBE DO YOU ASPIRE TO BELONG TO - AND WHY?

WHAT TRIBE DO YOU ASPIRE TO BELONG TO - AND WHY? There’s a widespread understanding of - and sympathy for - people’s desire to change their social class. What is less well understood is that, to the side of this, there are often very powerful instincts in us to gain access to specific and more localised ‘tribes.’ Beneath the three large familiar economic classes, we can speak of multiple groupings bound together by interests, proclivities and values, to which we can lend the term tribes. For example, in a given society, we might identify some of the following: the tribe of the sporty people who go fellwalking and weightlifting and are interested in vitamin supplements and lycra. The tribe of the posh country set who might be called Rupert and Serena and who like to watch horse racing and go skiing. The tribe of the intellectuals, who read Nietzsche and Lacan and discuss articles in The New York Review of Books and N+1. The tribe of the communists and the vegans, the allotment growers and the environmentalists. The arty crowd and the music crowd, the fashion crowd and the video games tribe. And so on and so forth. One of the relative mysteries in all this is what drives people’s aspirations to join a specific tribe. It’s simple enough to see why one might want more money, but why do some people in addition want so deeply to belong to one tribe rather than another? And, in particular, what drives a longing to shift away from the tribe of our origins? One interpretation is that we seek to change tribes as a defence against the deprivations and sufferings we experienced in the tribes of our childhoods. People seek to move tribes when their early years denied them the attuned care every offspring longs for, when mother (who might have been a tribal aristocrat or a socialist, a mountain climber or scientist) lacked warmth and father (who might have belonged to the liberal politics tribe or the deep sea diving tribe) was oppressive or violent, always busy or keener on a sibling. To try to shift tribes is a response to a lack of love - and an expression of a longing finally to belong. In such cases, people don’t only want to move away from their parents, they want - also - to move away from their parents’ worlds and values; they interpret a shift in tribe as a way of compensating for the emotional care they were denied and of seeking revenge on a brutal, chaotic or neglectful past. There’s real redemption - and quite a bit of fun too - to be had in upsetting a parent by one day being able to wave around the signs of membership of a new tribe they would be appalled by. We can imagine no end of moves across tribes that obeys such a pattern. Let’s picture - for example - a woman, let’s call her Arabella, who grows up in a Catholic aristocratic tribe in rural England, and who then - after university - decides to go to Varanasi in India, throws away her demure clothes and faith and studies under Swami Ananda Giri, seeking in her new tribe a corrective to the snobbery and coldness of her early years. Her parents, Lord and Lady R. might be gratifyingly horrified. Or imagine Peter who grows up with highly intellectual parents (both might have Phd’s) from an academic tribe. But they might seem lost, unable to take care of themselves, and lack practical ability and groundedness. So when he grows up, Peter might want to join the tribe of the manual workers: the carpenters and boat builders, people who stay close to elementally nourishing and essential things, and who might go sailing on the weekend and camping on holiday. Contrast this with another young person, Roisin, who grows up on a hard housing estate, as the child of highly ideological left-wing parents. There are gangs and knifings outside the home, and inside, the atmosphere is brittle and joyless; one is meant to take pride in deprivation and see virtue in having no space and no money. When she finishes her studies, what Roisin yearns for more than anything is to join a so-called respectable middle class right-wing tribe, in which people are lawyers, and bankers who throw dinner parties at which the talk is of share prices and private schools. In all these very different scenarios, the tribe emerges as a fantasised solution to the emotional deprivations of childhood. The tribe of origin might not have been a problem if there had been love; but as there wasn’t, the dream is that a new tribe - the high church tribe or the techno ravers, the anarchists or the houseboat dwellers - will appease the yearning, isolation and sadness. Often the tribal shift doesn’t quite work. The Indian guru doesn’t solve the pain; nor do the raves or the dinner parties. The parents don’t care or their hurt doesn’t offer much long-term recompense. In time (it may swallow a decade or more), one realises that the new tribe can’t fix things because it was never really the tribe of origin that wounded one: it was only really the particular attitudes and behaviours of the parents where the problem lay and where the mourning and focus need to take place. Understanding the dynamics of one’s tribal yearnings in this more psychological way may save us valuable time. It can spare us the need to waste years chasing a tribe that wouldn’t properly solve our distress even if we gained access to it. It can leave us free to chose romantic partners without reference to tribal restrictions. It can allow us to mourn the parental love that was not given to us, and then go on to forge a more independent and more original, less hidebound and less provincial, way of living. Image: Slim Aarons, Poolside Party

WHEN ANXIOUS AND AVOIDANT PARTNERS SPIRAL

https://www.youtube.com/@theschooloflifetv/community One of the most distressing of all eventualities in romantic life is when an anxiously attached partner and an avoidantly attached one end up, without in any way meaning too, and while there is still a lot of goodwill in the air, generating an unbounded vortex of panic and fear which neither of them understand and which they cannot pull themselves out of before matters collapse in a state of fateful hurt and distrust. Years after the event, after a few more failed relationships, one or either of them is liable to look back with complete puzzlement (and some regret) on the chaotic episode and wonder how and why things should ever have spiralled so badly. This is one kind of explanation. Within both anxiously and avoidantly attached people lies a distinctive and exaggerated core fear, the result of an unattuned and neglectful childhood - and a hugely unhelpful and outsized response to this fear. For the anxious party, the fear is: ‘I’m going to be abandoned and I won’t be able to survive the loss in any way. My entire being depends on the person I love’. And the accompanying response belief is: ‘I must therefore cling and protest and argue until the end in order not to lose my adored person.’ For their part, the avoidantly party’s core fear is: ‘other people can’t be relied upon. They hurt you, they betray you, they blow hot and cold, they don't have your true interests at heart’. And their response to this deep fear is: ‘I must therefore put up enormous barriers, say nothing - and disappear - or else I will be overwhelmed and engulfed. I am never really secure until I am alone.’ With such twin psychological mindsets operating beneath the surface, it is only a matter of time before one or other of them manages to unleash the other’s core fear and both will not notice that they have ended up in an insidious pattern of being violently scared and - simultaneously - violently scaring. We can imagine a situation where the anxious person calls on their avoidant partner and finds that they are, for whatever reason, especially distant or silent. Perhaps they’ve gone on a trip, or they are working hard, or they’re exploring a new way of being around their friends. Rather than responding as a secure person might (namely, by thinking: ‘I’d prefer that this person would be available but I can survive without them being so. My life doesn’t depend on anyone but me…’) the anxious person slips into their most arcane and insidious fear: that they cannot do without their loved one and that if there is no answer from them, they must start to grip ever harder. As a result, like the proverbial unskilled motorist who slams on the brakes on a turn precisely when they shouldn't, they keep knocking, they insist, they beg, they leave forty-five messages on the other’s phone - every hour. They can no longer in any way regulate themselves. All of which is of course exactly hellish - and truly shocking - for the avoidant person. In the face of such demands, which evoke the boundary violations and betrayals of their childhood, the avoidant person may feel no option but to stonewall. They can appear deeply sadistic as they withhold all signs of reassurance just when they are needed, but they are not trying to make the other person suffer. They are just terrified that they will be be annihilated by the noise and insistence. Both people have lost their reason. For the anxious partner, this is probably the first time they’ve ever allowed someone to matter this much. And for the avoidant one, this may be the first time someone has ever needed them this much. It doesn't feel good for either of them. What would be required at such moments is - of course - steadiness on both sides. The anxious party should remember that they are, whatever it may seem, no longer a vulnerable child but a resourceful adult. They can survive the loss of this person, were it to come to that. It wouldn’t be ideal but it would be eminently OK. They are far stronger than they think. And the avoidant party should similarly remember that they aren’t going to be overwhelmed as they once were, they don’t have to run away and could afford to speak a word or two. They have also left childhood behind. Unfortunately these two people, who are probably very clever and mature across all other areas of their lives (and perhaps very lovely too), can entirely fail to see what is at play. Both eventually withdraw nursing their wounds with the help of mistaken ideologies of love. The anxious one concludes: ‘I knew they would abandon me, people can never be trusted’. And the avoidant one concludes, with equal darkness and suspicion: ‘I knew they were too much, I have to be on my own’. Both may feel ashamed in ways they cannot quite master: ashamed that they were so cruel to their partner on the one hand, ashamed that they were so undignified with their begging on the other. In the face of such shame, they may fall for the comforting notion that there is someone out there with whom it could just be easier. They ignore that it would probably be a lot wiser to work through their childhood distortions within their established relationship rather than by searching for new difficulties (and trouble) elsewhere. But by the time any insight is reached, it’s likely to be far too late. The avoidant one may be deep in a state of numbness (it can be impossible for them to process what’s happened), their friends and perhaps even therapist may have got the wrong end of the stick (‘find yourself someone less intense…’) while the anxious one will have fallen prey to similar fantasies around alternatives (someone out there can love me perfectly, someone will spare me any feelings of doubt whatsoever…). They might even be vaunting the charms of new love - and believe in them, for now. A few lucky ones among us can succeed at love by instinct alone. The rest of us - who have come from more troubled places - have no option but to try to reach calm and steadiness through introspection, reading and a lot of inner therapeutic work, in which we strive with all our intelligence to untangle past from present, and separate out fears from facts. It can be the achievement of a lifetime.

Image: Tokyo, Gardens of the Imperial Palace