We celebrate our own culture and it becomes the roots of our misunderstanding of others. It's like trying to fit a square shaped block into a round hole. It's not that square or round is "necessarily" better, but it is the only opening we have until we acquire the tools to create universal holes... you know either a square hole large enough to let a round piece pass through, or a circle hole large enough to let a square piece pass through.
That's just "opening up", or opening our minds, if you will.
A perhaps unobtainable option would be adapting both a universal hole and a universal piece, for cultural convergence. People don't like to talk about something like that, because it sounds like a threat of making humanity far too homogeneous (i.e. boring). However, it should be better conceived of as eliminating our "bad" cultural habits, not the benign ones.
All that mumbo jumbo boils down to:
We don't fit together well! The world is fragmented like a broken heart.
"Te quiero" is an interesting example. Many Spanish speaking nations are considered "Collectivist" or highly dependent upon one another in the family and societal groupings. Individuals in these cultures tend to "drop the pronoun" or the "I" part of the statement... whereas "Individualist" cultures (many English speaking ones) are more focused on "self" or I.
It's an interesting example on this Valentine's Day, to know that even "I love you" or "Love you" gets lost in translation between cultures.
In fact, an medieval Arabic poet is quoted as writing:
the satanic 'I' be damned!
Language just so happens to be one of those huge pieces that does not fit quite so well into the holes (i.e. communications opportunities) we have with other cultures.
It's a fragmented world.
The Insider
