JaakkoMultanen on Nostr: The deep cultural beliefs are a great topic to think about. They affect everything ...
The deep cultural beliefs are a great topic to think about. They affect everything without people realizing it themselves.
In Finnish culture, there is a very deep belief of "fortune constancy", or "luck constancy", whichever word you'd like to use. In a nutshell, it means that the amount of good things in life for people is a fixed constant.
If you get anything good in life, I get less.
You might ask "well what exact group of people is that and how much good things are in store", but that would be a rational question, and this is an irrational belief. For the sake of this belief, it is the people around you, and the good things are whatever happens to be. This is about feelings, not an excel sheet.
This fixed scarcity mindset affects everything, and is the main driver behind the cultural phenomenon of Finns being probably the only people in the world who would pay 50€ for their neighbor NOT to get 20€.
That's sort of a joke in Finland, but when you see people actually behaving like that, it's not funny.
This belief results in extreme and active envy, a serious problem in Finland. It's also the main driver behind the unbelievably high tax rate, around 75% of average person's total earnings go to the state in one form or another (and high earners have it even worse).
People think (or rather, subconsciously FEEL) that it's better if the money goes to the state, where they might get some of it back, rather than have all that wealth be taken away forever by other people. Better just let the tax man take everything.
The government knows best what to do with the money, and as some of it comes back in form of services, it's like an investment instead of the permanent loss and misfortune that would surely happen if other people got that money for themselves...
In Finnish culture, there is a very deep belief of "fortune constancy", or "luck constancy", whichever word you'd like to use. In a nutshell, it means that the amount of good things in life for people is a fixed constant.
If you get anything good in life, I get less.
You might ask "well what exact group of people is that and how much good things are in store", but that would be a rational question, and this is an irrational belief. For the sake of this belief, it is the people around you, and the good things are whatever happens to be. This is about feelings, not an excel sheet.
This fixed scarcity mindset affects everything, and is the main driver behind the cultural phenomenon of Finns being probably the only people in the world who would pay 50€ for their neighbor NOT to get 20€.
That's sort of a joke in Finland, but when you see people actually behaving like that, it's not funny.
This belief results in extreme and active envy, a serious problem in Finland. It's also the main driver behind the unbelievably high tax rate, around 75% of average person's total earnings go to the state in one form or another (and high earners have it even worse).
People think (or rather, subconsciously FEEL) that it's better if the money goes to the state, where they might get some of it back, rather than have all that wealth be taken away forever by other people. Better just let the tax man take everything.
The government knows best what to do with the money, and as some of it comes back in form of services, it's like an investment instead of the permanent loss and misfortune that would surely happen if other people got that money for themselves...