The Normalcy of Cultism within Collectivistic Society

It is human nature to join anything; hands, thread, food. It is in our DNA to become one with most things we find, with other people. Human bodies are built to accommodate another, wombs sustain lives as faces fit in necks as waists are meant to be held. Bread, known as the staff of life, is the result of joining many ingredients with one another, as are carpets, garments and most creations. The earth itself was once one, as Pangea; the amalgamation of the continents that we have now. The biggest religion in the world, Christianity, believes God who is one, to be the unity of three, known as the Holy Trinity. In other words, humans were made to be one, all together.

It is the belief of many cultures worldwide that safety lies in numbers. Many societies are collectivist with the overwhelming majority of those being 3rd world societies, where loyalty to family is placed above individual self-actualization and identity. According to Triandis (1995), 70% of the world was collectivist at the end of the 20th century, and it is generally agreed upon that poor societies tend to be collectivistic, then grow into a more individualistic nature upon economical growth, as safety in numbers indicates. However, it is individualism that festers growth much more than collectivism, as individualistic societies encourage self-discovery and pursuits of personal positive experience that individuals deem as the meaning of life, while collectivistic societies find meaning of life in social relations with one another and contributing to the shared interest of the masses. Collectivistic societies emphasize on keeping the status quo, rejecting individual autonomy and maintaining the order of the group, while their counterparts consider each individual as an autonomous entity, free to pursue their own ideas and preferences. Gorodnichenko and Roland (2011) found that individualism had a much more positive effect on a country’s GDP, with a 60-87% increase in income, as well as high indications of innovative spirit in workers. Guth, et al. (1982) in their experiment asked pairs of subjects to play an “ultimatum game” in which one subject proposed a division of a fixed sum of money between the two players, and the second either accepted, and both received the proposed shares, or rejected, and both received nothing. Although an individualistic respondent would accept any positive offers,14 respondents in this experiment tended to refuse offers when their shares were much below 40 percent of the sum to be divided. This willingness to forgo a material reward in order to obstruct an inequitable outcome implies that respondents were motivated by feelings of fairness or equity, typically implemented in collectivist societies where the emphasis is on values and the “greater good”. Therefore, we can conclude that while individualistic societies are materially motivated, collectivistic societies are morally motivated, putting much more importance on non-tangible concepts such as equity, honor, justice, harmony and such.

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