one myth which we do need to look at and hopefully overcome is this kind of myth of the autonomous

individual kind of disconnected from their society and their culture and their race and their

opportunities and their class and all the rest.

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Contribute tab at BestOfAleft.com. Now welcome to the award winning BestOfAleft podcast with

clips today from ThinkAgain. This is how ideas from the CBC and excerpt from Mark Twain's

a Connecticut Yankee and King Are Here's Court and you are not so smart podcast.

In a general kind of way I think that we Westerners are in a bubble, right? And that bubble is

individualism because we're in this bubble we have certain ways of looking at the world

which seem completely natural to us. So natural that it really does not occur to us that maybe

other people see things differently and I do mean very differently. The premise of this book is

that very broadly speaking and I know I am speaking this is an incredible generalization

but very broadly speaking the my premise is that in the West we value the self very very highly

and we prioritize the self and its needs in a way which is very unlike the rest of the world.

That is to say that you know if we if we might imagine that here in the West we have a self that

looks a lot like an avocado with a very large pit and we are very interested in developing that

pit where you're interested in making sure that pit is able to express itself and most other places

in the world and I do mean most other places in the world and very strikingly in Asia and this

is not at all the case in Asia the self that dominates and again you know I know this is a broad

generalization but the self that dominates is a self which prizes flexibility. In the West we

people the ideal is to be a soloist like if you were a musician right? Well in the East the

...