The other day at work I was having a conversation with a coworker about one of those sensible topics we are working on to become a better society.
A few months ago, I was working in a project with a fellow Project Manager from a foreign country. We had several meetings and conference calls, and I was amazed on how poorly he treated the people who were under his title, regardless if the person worked for his, mine or anyone else’s company.
I shared this with a friend over a few drinks one night, and my friend -who used to work for someone of the same nationality of the PM- said to me: -“Oh yes, that’s the way they are. They are very into hierarchy. They behave one way if you have a title that’s under theirs, and they behave in a completely different way if they are under you. It’s just the way they are. They respect hierarchy and that’s the way it works for them.” A similar example was brought to my attention when a friend who lived in a certain country where the people are very into punctuality, told me: “It’s part of their culture. It’s the way they are.”
All of this makes me wonder: in this new era of globalization and equality -something I’m all in favor of- where do we stand when it comes to qualities like this that appear to be intrinsic to a group of people who share a particular behavior in common?
Am I wrong in saying that people from country “X” are nut about punctuality? Am I offending anyone if I say it is common for a certain nationality to thrive for respect and hierarchy? I would like to say no, because otherwise, why would we have all the articles:
20 things to know before moving to Sweden
7 useful culture shock preventing facts about austrian culture
That brings me to my next question: is it fair to associate a group people with a certain behavior in common, regardless if it is positive or negative?
The prologue of my book -written by my best friend Dr. Lorne Lopez-, states that my book is uses “the old-school free speech some of us today long for”. As an analysis of a society done by a foreigner, something that I wanted to clear up from the very beginning of my book, is the resource of generalization and how I wanted to avoid it as most as I could. In the end, I will generalize just like when my friend would say “oh yes, people from that country are very into hierarchy”, or like when my other friend would say: “people from that country are very into punctuality”. This is because when I see certain patterns recurrently occur in a group of people who have something in common, I cannot help but to state that maybe there is a chance that someone who belongs to that group, will also have the same characteristics.
In my book, I will state that Venezuela’s society was filled with flaws and cracks that contributed to initiate the debacle of the country that has led to its current collapsed state. The thing is that, society is not an omnipresent, omnipotent invisible entity being that surrounds us and which we can’t interact with.
Society is made by people, and in Venezuela’s case, people with a lot of similar characteristics in common.
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