Culture.
Look at how countries are clustered on this map:
South Americans just do not have the culture of narcissism ("self-expression") and loathing for traditions that defines modern Western Culture ("Protestant Europe" and "English-Speaking" on that chart).
The average USA citizen doesn't really belong in that cluster either - see chart - hence the burning paranoia among Western elites that the USA might "defect" from the West if it found a strong, populist leader.
I really wish I understood what was going on in this graph
They asked people in different places a lot of questions about the values important to them.
They then used math to decompose all those answers into two themes ("tradition" vs "secular" and "survival"/"responsibility" vs "self-expression" and averaged by country and put a dot for each country on the chart.
The colored bubbles aren't from math though, they're just the writers' drawing lines around countries with historical affinities for each other, and showing how closely their people's values are today.
Very fascinating
From https://worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp
The map presents empirical evidence of massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions. Main thesis holds that socioeconomic development is linked with a broad syndrome of distinctive value orientations. Analysis of WVS data made by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world:
1) Traditional values versus Secular-rational values and
2) Survival values versus Self-expression values.
-Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
-Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)
-Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
-Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.
nostr:note16p346vghdawe5elfm9kp06vlu5dj3pxkhxmx26fdj2wmhz238gxs8x6lds
where is Chile?
oh, nevermind
