FORUM VOŠ Domažlice

Memetics, development, East Germans and Czechs compared

Comparison of the East Germans and Czechs as far as their developmental dislike to performance is concerned. Idea initiated by speech by Helmut Schmidt, former German Chancellor and my own experiences with East Germans as well as with Czechs

Today I have read another chapter from a book written by the former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. There are many of his public speeches he made shortly after the political turn over in Europe and the reunion of both German states.

He criticises a lot, but according to my understanding , and spite the fact that I think of Helmut Schmidt as the only good Chancellor in Germany in last 30 years, I see there some ideas which I cannot fully agree with. He is very often upset with the arrogance of the West Germens toward the East Germans.

He puts it that way that this arrogance was wrong. I myself am not so much sure. Arrogance comes from a certain feeling. Humans perform constantly one ritual, ritual of estimating their own hierarchy position relative to others, they meet. There is a whole bunch of aspects which are assessed, evaluated and compared.

If it happens that members of a certain group of humans usually perform worse, are nor friendly enough, or tolerant enough, know too little compared to the members of the other group, then, of course, the humans who perceive themselves as smarter, and over all better, at first try to help the others to catch up with them.

Unfortunately, the members of the group which perceive themselves, unconsciously, worse than the first group try at the beginning to catch up. But because it is really a lot to learn, these people do not see results of their efforts immediately and get upset, and start increasing their own worth relative to the better group by swindling, pretending and not by real effort.

Also it seems to me that Helmut Schmidt, maybe because of political reasons, did not find courage enough to tell the truth about the East Germans. This one aspect is that people who live a long time under a certain system which is hostile to high performance will need a lot of time, maybe generations to “recover”. This in turn would mean that for several next generations East Germans will not be prepared to perform as the western people are, with all the consequences.

This low preparedness to perform is common to most eastern people, they will only perform when the incentive is huge, they must be “over motivated, over stimulated” to perform. This can be seen especially at the lower level of each society.

This can be extremely easily observed at vocational schools in the Czech Republic. Most of teenagers attending such schools are not willing to perform, but they do it if they feel a lot of pressure, poor grades or even conditional expel from the school. Usually they do not react positively at positive incentives. Of course there are exceptions, as always, but the majority of the eastern people react and behave that way.

I have also heard complaints about similar states in the west school, and some will argue that this behaviour is not originally coming from the east. Well, I do not believe this; it is coming from the east. If similar reactions or behaviour is found in the west, then mostly in groups of people who originate from the east and stay in a sort of “their own subculture” outside off normal western community.

The group seems to me to be the important thing here, because in one group with a lot of similarities the members of the group are not willing to accept the new ideas, new way of thinking and get on purpose together to get reaffirmation that their thinking and acting is ok, which of course, the group will do.

On the other hand there are single persons coming from whatever other less developed society and when they take the decision to get “assimilated”, they on purpose seek the closeness of the new group and learn the new way of thinking and acting and get assimilated soon. Such people are prepared to perform even more than the original population in the new country.

So it depends if a person changing from one type of society into another one is prepared to get assimilated and activily helps and supports this process, or if a person is not able to do that and though being in the new society it seeks the closeness of its fellows coming from the same society.

This has been observed for decades in all countries with high numbers of immigrants, be it the USA, Germany or even The Czech Republic.

In the second half of the 70`s my American friend told me that some immigrants are extremely willing to perform in order to reach the standards of living of their new home country. He spoke of people of Asiatic and Hispanic origin.

In 80´s I have experienced this on my own as I escaped from Czechoslovakia to Germany, and I have seen that on many other immigrants there. Now I can see the same phenomenon in the Czech Republic. Many people of Vietnamese origin stayed in the Czech Republic after the turn over in 1990. Many of them are already successful businessmen and employ Czechs. Their children, some of them not all of them, are the best students at high schools and strive for some academic degree.

If somebody wants to understand this even better or confront my ideas with ideas of other people I would suggest to read the paper of Derek Gatherer about passing over information among groups of people. This can be found in Journal of Memetics, where Derek uses the SIM model of Axelrod and goes even more into detail.

Actually, this idea if correct would suggest that there are minimally two types of people those who are willing to work hard under new changed conditions and those who are not, and this is most probably valid not only for immigrants but for all the people. The case of immigrants just can serve as a good example as it is easily obvious. It also shows how people “domesticate” themselves by joining or not joining a certain subgroup of society.

So the study of memetics can help to understand the development of groups of people when properly applied to real situations in the world.