First-World Values, Third-World Problems

What makes a country first world? What makes it third world? These ideas are very important to understand today as the world becomes more globalised and the demographics of many “first world countries” shift rapidly, as well as the economic status of many “third world” countries.

The term “third world” arose during the cold war to define those countries that neither aligned with NATO nor with the Warsaw Pact. Countries that aligned with NATO were called “first world” and countries that aligned with the Soviet Union were called “second world”. However, over time, the definition came to indicate many other things such as culture and economic status of a country as well because many of these original “third world” countries were also very poor.

An ordinary person does not think about the Cold War today when defining the first world or the third world. Rather, they think of things like the quality of the roads, the trustworthiness of the justice system and the banks, whether or not you can bribe your way to a degree or simply out of a fine, even something as small as whether the public bathrooms are likely to be clean.

Though I am not as well travelled as most, I have spent a considerable amount of time living in both what we would called “the third world” and “the first world”.

The most relevant definition of “first world” in my opinion, is the value system of the average people living in that society. 

“However, God was great, and Mahbub Ali felt he had done all he could for the time being. Kim was the one soul in the world who had never told him a lie. That would have been a fatal blot on Kim’s character if Mahbub had not known that to others, for his own ends or Mahbub’s business, Kim could lie like an Oriental.” - Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

Values of the First World vs Third World

Values are interesting because some people might be extremely kind, hospitable and honest toward their own family and friends, but completely rude, dismissive and fraudulent toward strangers. In much of the world, reputation is the main thing keeping people behaving well toward each other because business is conducted through reputation and relationships, so a poor reputation can quite literally be financially sabotage. 

People who behave well because they need a good reputation for their own livelihood and financial well-being, are not behaving well out of an inherent value they have, but rather because it is externally motivated. This means that if they encounter a situation where their poor behaviour will not have an impact on their reputation, they will not continue to behave well. For example, if they encounter a foreigner who will not be able to influence their reputation in the community due to a lack of standing in society, or if they encounter someone who’s opinion will not be highly regarded by others because they are poorer or of a lower social class, they might behave in a rude or fraudulent way because it wont have social reputation consequences.

Someone who holds values such as kindness, respect, and honesty, inherently, will maintain these values regardless the power of the person they encounter to influence their reputation in society. A person with inherent values is said to have integrity. Integrity is an engineering term that indicates the ability of an object to retain its form and shape in a variety of situations. In this case, integrity is a description of an individual who is not capricious with their good behaviour.

This difference in value systems: inherent vs reputation based, is a key difference between “first world” and “third world” behaviour in my experience. At this point I would like to emphasise that there are many third world societies even in first world countries. As this is a discussion of culture and not politics, we must understand that most countries are not culturally homogenous, especially not today when there is so much movement across borders because of the ease of migration. 

Poverty and Third World Mentality

We are often told the story of the poor people with the hearts of gold who, despite their poverty, are some of the kindest people you ever meet. This is a naive story. It may be true in particular cases, but is not true when we take the whole of humanity into consideration. People who are truly poor, in the sense of the word that they do not have reliable access to food, shelter and safety for generations, they do not retain this kindness and consideration for others as all values are eclipsed by one, and only one, prerogative: survival.

The third world is generally quite poor economically, and usually in close proximity to war and other kinds of political violence. This means that most people are in survival mode and therefore function in a completely self serving way. This is a logical response to that situation. It is also part of our fallen nature as human beings that this way of being is our default as human beings, and basic kindness, consideration for others, and honesty, are things that must be taught. This is why even people who are wealthy and do not have to worry about their basic survival can be quite nasty. 

Wealth does not guarantee first world value systems, but true destitution does guarantee, over a long enough time period, a third world value system. The exception to this rule I believe are people who have some religious motivation or inspiration behind their poverty. There is a reason that poverty is considered a virtue by my Catholic orders of mendicant friars over the centuries. These people, however, were raised in high-trust societies, and, despite their poverty, never went without food or shelter because despite their poverty, they continued to live in these high-trust societies afterwards.

Proof via Civic Behaviour

On a civic level, the lack of inherent value system manifests in behaviours such as littering, vandalism, poor maintenance of public infrastructure, no consideration for things like queues, not holding doors open for people, and basic rudeness and disregard for others in public. Anyone who has travelled from a place like Canada to India will recognise this difference in public behaviour immediately, and there are many other examples. If you travel to the third world, you must learn things like shoving in front to get on the bus, keeping your things close to you to avoid theft, and learning to be rude to sellers so that they don’t defraud you and charge you a much higher price for ordinary items. 

Sidewalks and public infrastructure are neglected while individual homes are immaculately maintained because if you don’t care about your neighbour, why in the world would you care about the road he has to walk on? Why would you care what ordinary public streets look like? Caring about more than just your own house and family requires a value system that is not entirely based in selfishness and self-enrichment. 

This is also why “Walkable communities” only exist in the first world in European countries. Walkability in a town or society does not depend completely on the infrastructure, but depends more importantly on cleanliness and safety. An excellent example of the depredation of walkable infrastructure is New York, San Fransisco (US) and Birmingham and Leicester (UK). These cities are built with “walkable” infrastructure but because of third world corruption and third world politics, they have not only become unclean, but unsafe to walk in. Everyone would prefer to take a car if there is a chance they could be assaulted, groped or robbed if they went by foot. This has many social and health consequences for the people in the community as people no longer see their own neighbours and the members of their society, so they have less of a connection and love for them. They are also less fit and their entire existence comprises only the people they already know in their own family and social circle, meaning the aforementioned third world culture propagates itself.

Fraudulent Institutions

It is not uncommon for people to be apprehensive about getting a surgery done in a place like Mexico, the Philippines or Thailand. It is not necessarily because these places are poorer than a place like America or Australia, for example, but rather because there is an implicit understanding we all have about the value system and integrity of the accreditation and legal systems in “first world countries”. Despite the many flaws that first world countries face today (I argue they are devolving into third world patterns) they are still superior in many ways to the third world. For example, in many third world countries, people can pay to get even serious degrees like medicine and law, people can bribe officers and institutions to pass health and safety checks even when they don’t meet international standards. They do not feel guilt for this type of fraud because each man, after all, is only looking after himself. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people die each year from surgeries and medical treatments they get in third world countries that would have been completely avoided in the first world by simple health and safety guardrails. They are harmed by negligence rather than ordinary/unavoidable adverse events or complications. There are reports of people whose organs are harvested without consent during surgeries. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1125055/ 

“Third World” behaviour, then, primary manifests as a lack of trust in institutions. When these institutions cannot be trusted, then the ordinary person must look out for themselves in every way. This prevents such a society from building or accomplishing anything impressive or excellent because that requires social trust. This is why individual people who migrate from the third world to the first world tend to excel remarkably, but those same people do not achieve anything impressive in their homelands. When everyone is a crab in a bucket bringing each other down, no one can rise. 

The Consequences of “Importing the Third World”

Today, the third world is migrating to the first world en masse. This means that they are doing so at a rate at which it is impossible for the individuals to adapt and recalibrate their value systems to match the first world. They retain their third world mentality and culture. Natives who were either born into, or embody first world values, are reasonably upset as the part of the world that was supposed to be a high-trust society slowly degrades over time.

Will globalisation and mass migration turn the whole world into a degraded version of the third world? When this happens, where can people who wish to live in a high-trust society go?

The first world and access to it via immigration, was once the glittering opportunity for someone mired in the third world to escape into a high-trust society. Now that mass, unvetted migration is diluting these first world values, it seems that the luxuries of high-trust societies will no longer be available to ordinary people. A more important question is, how can we build high-trust societies in the whole world? How can we get the whole world to adopt “First world” mentality? I suppose this is as foolish a question as asking “how can we build paradise” but I believe that every good person has at least asked themselves this once. 

The issue of immigration is often defined as a racial issue, but I see it as largely a cultural one. The main thing that is worth preserving is a positive, high-trust culture, a “first world” culture. This is a culture where people can trust their neighbours, trust their institutions and trust that due process and justice will prevail no matter what. It is a culture that punishes fraudulence and dishonesty, and rewards virtue and fairness.

I am not so naive as to believe that the West is all of these things I have described. There are myriad examples of unfairness and fraudulence in the West as well. However, on a balance in the comparison, there is more fairness to be found there compared to many third world countries (for now). Wherever this kernel of good culture exists, we must nurture and protect it.