Steven Dutch argues that the primitive “honor” ethic — which he calls thar, the Arabic term for “blood vengeance” — is The World’s Most Toxic Value System. The elements of the thar mentality:
- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult
- Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing
- Obsessive male dominance
- Paranoia over female sexual infidelity
- Primacy of family rights over individual rights
Some examples of its toxicity:
- When Western firms first started doing business in Saudi Arabia, they encountered a cultural roadblock. Men would eagerly learn how to do technical tasks, but at first refused to clean things — parts, tools, work areas — because cleaning things was “womens’ work.”
- After my civil affairs unit had been in Kuwait a month in 1991, we began to sense that something was wrong: the recovery was far too slow. Kuwait was not that badly damaged in the Gulf War, apart from the burning oil wells. It was certainly not as badly damaged as an American city would have been by an earthquake or hurricane. The prevailing attitude everywhere was “where can we hire people to clean up? This attitude, that local people are managers and the actual hands-on work is done by hired help, is pervasive in the Persian Gulf and is very similar to the attitude of ancient Rome. In ancient Rome the attitude was that if citizens needed technical help, they could always buy an educated slave.
- In many societies, the low-status jobs are first taken by foreigners who either don’t share their neighbors’ disdain for the jobs, or who are more interested in profit than status. However, when the low-status jobs turn out to be critical, often the locals find that they have been bypassed on the ladder to success. Worse yet, the rungs above them are occupied. In many African nations, shopkeeping and clerical jobs were left to Asian immigrants because they were considered too lowly for the warrior and herding classes. As time went by and it became obvious that trade and government were the routes to prosperity, that there really weren’t all that many jobs for traditional warriors and that killing lions with a spear was not a skill in high demand, the immigrants who took the former low-status jobs found themselves targets of resentment. In Idi Amin’s Uganda in the late 1960′s, Asian shopkeepers were simply expelled, but at least they were spared the agony of living in the society that Amin proceeded to create.
- Immigrant families from thar-dominated societies to the United States often strongly resisted public education because it was seen as a threat to the authority of the family.
- It’s very common to read accounts of entrepreneurs in Third World countries who could easily achieve even greater success but deliberately refrain because if they did, they would be inundated by extended family members. Could there be a more effective mechanism for keeping a society poor?
- For sheer, bottom-of-the-barrel depravity, it’s hard to top this. A recent newspaper account of the plight of AIDS orphans in Africa described how they would often be left utterly destitute because their parents’ relatives would swoop in and take all their property. No doubt these are the same relatives who would expect the orphans to support them if they became successful.