Natural Experiment
When some country or entire civilization develops separately from the rest and without contact, and over a long period of time major divergences begin in how they do things.
Unfortunately, there haven't been examples in the last few hundred years where both such civilizations that encountered each other again were comparable in development, yet had different approaches to organizing life and society. What happens is that one strongly dominates the other. Now on earth there are basically no other places left that are big enough for someone to develop in their own unique way. And so it turns out that we, along with you, all the readers and all your personal and virtual acquaintances, have long been in this very "developed" civilization. We're unlikely to meet aliens anytime soon, and even if we do, it'll be interesting for a different reason. But to encounter another specifically human civilization that's no less developed but unique, does many things differently - that would be really fascinating. There's so much we could learn. In anthropology this is called a "natural experiment" by the way.
To some extent this exists on a less radical level just between countries. Like, you go live somewhere in another country, and there they already have their own customs, their own cool conveniences and local neat stuff. More often of course there'll be more local quirks and inconveniences, which maybe aren't worse than "ours," it's just that we've already gotten used to ours, while there you still need to figure things out on the go. There was such a strong divide between the socialist bloc and the west, but that's already passed. It was even more complicated there because along with the opening to the west came the destruction of the previous system and therefore mass poverty and disorder, crime and for many just straight-up devastation.
But I'm really talking about something else. I'm just genuinely curious how a completely different society could develop. Where the economic model is different, where the structure of the state, family and education are absolutely nothing like ours, maybe there's even something that's just as important as education, rule of law and the institution of family, but we just don't have it at all, while they do and it's really significant. Maybe when that moment comes that we all eventually go into some kind of hyper-spaces and start living in literally completely isolated bubbles. And then a couple generations later there'll be this kind of gap. I'd love to find some like that right now, but only if they weren't malicious, because examples of savagery do exist after all, and there everything's different, it's just that you don't want to learn from that.
Tags: thoughts
