Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Where do these differences come from? The standard explanations for American individualism include (a) not only are we a nation of immigrants (as of 2017, ~37 percent immigrants or children of), but it’s not random who emigrates; instead, immigrating is a filtering process selecting for people willing to leave their world and culture behind, sustain an arduous journey to a place with barriers impeding their entry, and labor at the most shit jobs when granted admission; and (b) most of American history has been spent with an expanding western border settled by similarly tough, individualist pioneers. Meanwhile, the standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is ecology dictating the means of production—ten millennia of rice farming, which demands massive amounts of collective labor to turn mountains into terraced rice paddies, collective planting and harvesting of each person’s crops in sequence, collective construction and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems.[*],[51] A fascinating exception that proves the rule concerns parts of northern China where the ecosystem precludes rice growing, producing millennia of the much more individualistic process of wheat farming. Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners.