Quote:
Originally Posted by InChristAlone
For the Asian mind, a leader has an indisputable authority, be it family, business or politics. But it is always people who give him this authority. A ruler like Mao or Stalin is impossible in the US. Nobody will give him so much power.
In my opinion, political system is a reflection of people's mindset. If people tend to be submissive and lacking initiative, with the need of a strong head to organize them, they will always end up with the leader and political system that represent their character best.
We can also see the same mind-set in Asian business. Paternalistic leadership is the prevalent leadership style in Chinese and Japanese business organizations. And again -- this business style is just a reflection of the Asian mind-set.
I never said that WL was pedaling the "Asian mind-set". He was pedaling his doctrines. But as a Chinese man, I believe he had the Asian mind-set. His paternalism (in the bad sense of the word) towards saints manifested itself in the way how he treated them. And he treated them as if they were foolish children who were not equal to him. (Well, any dictator or cult leader has a similar leadership style, so we can't blame only the Asian mindset).
Why did Americans buy WL's mindset? If my previous post did not sound true to you, then I don't have the answer. I believe the saints didn't even notice how the change happened in their minds. One day they just became a part of the system. "When in Rome do as the Romans do". And they did.
Anyway, I don’t want to say that I know everything about the Asian mind-set or that I understand why American saints bought WL’s mind-set. I just share my viewpoint which can be mistaken.
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I appreciate your comments and admission that you could be wrong. Me too. I think the closer we stick to observed behavior, the closer we will get to propositions about people that can be verified or falsified. Until we can record what is going on in the brain of people under discussion with an fMRI or similar device, what is going on in other people's minds is always no more than an inference. Only the individual we are postulating about can verify or falsify our inference and even they might be lying. I can describe behavior that I observed when I was in the church. For example, Chinese brothers and sisters often spoke Chinese among themselves. Now that's a significant difference between them and the "Westerners." But what was in their minds at any given time is hard to say. I'm not saying that mindsets don't exist. Just that they are hard to pin down. What can be pinned down, to a larger extent is what people do. I'm not excluding verbal behavior. The whole idea of "The Lord's Recovery" was a proposition asserted by Witness Lee. It has been effectively argued on this website that it was a false proposition. It is at least a questionable one. Whenever, we say "LRC" we should say "alleged LRC" or "putative LRC". It was a social construct. If you believed it, you were part of it. You could call that a mind set. But what you would actually observe is what people did. Like how often they went to meeting. Did they shout or sing? Did they live with extended family, in a nuclear family or alone? Who made the decisions? What did we actually see, hear, and touch? Who was doing what to whom? When? Where? How? And of course how much? What do Westerners do differently than Asians? If we stick to observed behavior maybe at the end of the day we more likely to reach a common understanding of what we are talking about.