Why a lot of migrants are acting crazy and how it makes sense.
It's Izzat
This was taken from a post in an infamous forum, similar to 4chan. I’ve edited and added my own commentary for clarity. It’s why you find such cultural difference between you in America, Canada, UK or Australia, and the SE Asian subcontinent, of whom you’ve probably seen millions of new migrants in the last few years.
Izzat has no direct translation into English. We have similar concepts, like honor, or face, but they aren’t the same. Izzat is so much more. It’s a zero-sum game of collective honor shared by whole groups of people and they take it seriously. It’s foreign to the western ideas, Enlightenment values and Christian ideals. It’s antithetical to every high trust type of human organization on the planet.
It pollutes any system that assumes good faith of people. It’s the pinnacle concept of a low trust society.
Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who wins and who loses. A zero-sum game where just about any action is justified, including murder, to restore the lost Izzat. When Pakistani’s and Indians first moved to Canada in the 1980s, we had a few National news pieces of honor killings, in Canada of all places. We found it abhorrent and barbaric. Izzat found it to be restorative.
Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game well enough, they can get away with just about anything. If you’ve ever noticed people who ignore bad behavior within their own group while attacking it in other groups, you’ve seen Izzat. Another Canadian example is seeing Canadians arrested for having weapons in their home for self defense, while Sikh nationalists are shooting illegal guns at the river along a roadway in an affluent neighborhood and being asked nicely to stop.
The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group’s collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Izzat is attacked is the complete destruction of whoever insulted it. You’ve argued before with someone who just continues to babble incoherently at you and you eventually give up? Izzat.
Two people get into an argument. They might escalate, but chances are it won’t be that bad.
“Sorry I broke your garden gnome.”
With two Indians in an argument, the stakes are always deadly thanks to Izzat. Neither of them can back down, nor can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Izzat is shared, you are shaming everyone who shares your Izzat. So, admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide. This means even if the dispute was over something completely fucking stupid or trivial, it could spiral into a decades long honor feud.
Izzat is also the reason why police are reluctant to get involved in disputes. Because Izzat is a zero-sum game, all participants are involved in the game. If a policeman sides with one family over another in an Izzat dispute, this means that he’s deliberately taking the side of that family and dishonoring the other. This marks him for retribution by the offending party. Without parties being able to be impartial, then centralized authority cannot effectively function.
Someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official responsible for the water pipe denies it’s a problem and counterattacks him instead, because daring to question his efficacy in his role was challenging his Izzat. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed.
Izzat is also the reason why Indian managers are so infamous for hiring more Indians. It’s because from the manager’s perspective, he’s using his position to gain an invisible social currency. Merit and actual qualifications come second to that idea. If he hired a westerner, he would not gain or even lose Izzat by doing so. He has a very strong cultural incentive not to be impartial. Meanwhile, if he can strong-arm dozens of Indians into a company, he is gaining huge quantities of Izzat and conspirators who owe an absolute debt to him.
I’ve seen it. I have a close friend in Toronto who works for the HQ of a major Canadian company. When I first visited his office it was mostly women and gay men in the office. After COVID, once the migration wave started, it was all Indian. Many people had taken retirement packages and left, blaming the changing company culture. Others were simply laid off. It was always the Canadians laid off, never the kin.
Izzat.
It’s not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the west. And yes, izzat is very much a system that enables short term success. But the fundamental reality is the prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn’t exist if the west practiced Izzat. Our systems can only exist on the assumption of good faith, and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he can just go back to India. He has no stakes in the long-term prosperity, functionality or stability of these systems. The stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian’s favor.
There’s infamous video of that Indian scamming a food bank. If you don’t know it, Tiktok is full of similar ones. Indians who find a way to take advantage of a system giving howto guides for others to take advantage. Winning is righteous. Losing is not. By employing clever means (Jugaad), he successfully extracted more resources for himself and his family. From the perspective of Jugaad, a rule is not something to respect, but merely an obstacle to the Indian’s own gain. He cheated the system and wasn’t caught, he is righteous and dignified in Izzat.
In India, a man offered to pay another man to use a public toilet instead of defecating openly. The latter man left and came back with several friends and beat the former man to death. The problem was not that he was defecating openly, but that he was criticized for it. And with Izzat, it’s not an eye-for-an-eye. Izzat is often an eye-for-a-whole-head. Disproportionately and brutally annihilating your enemies is the correct move to make because you take back your lost Izzat and then some. This kind of vindictiveness would be rightly seen as horrifying and disgusting in most of the world.
There was a greentext from 4chan. Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims: he could bench press 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government etc.
Anon said he didn’t believe the Indian.
The Indian reacted with indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened. It’s 4chan, so it might be made up, but it illustrates the point.
Without Izzat, this looks like an utterly insane and pointless sequence of events. But with Izzat? The Indian’s actions suddenly make sense. He was boasting to increase his Izzat, and when Anon simply stated his disbelief, it was seen as a vicious attack on his Izzat. The Indian escalated the situation to restore the lost Izzat. When the police got involved, the dispute had become public, so the Indian’s shame had increased to unbearable levels. He committed suicide in order to save his remaining Izzat. Anon had no idea what Izzat was, yet the Indian’s actions perfectly align with this framework.
The western idea of merit is competence. Merit in Izzat is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal, with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path, as printing a degree that says you’re qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Izzat. In other words, Izzat selects for the appearance of merit over actual merit, which is harder.
Now, a counterargument an Indian might make is that Izzat is dated, or We don’t use that word. Compare it to the word vendetta.
Vendetta in Italian has a very specific meaning: a familial blood feud where revenge must be taken to restore honor.
This word would not exist if this didn’t reflect a specific facet of Italian life. Izzat is no different. Izzat isn’t an archaic term. It’s well and truly alive in the modern Indian lexicon.
If Izzat were regularly discussed openly, this would be considered one of the greatest possible insults in the Izzat framework. Izzat is why Indians do mass reports, death threats, false flags and various other underhanded tactics when a westerner exposes something they don’t want people to see. such as a youtube video on a poop throwing festival.
If I knew something like that existed in the west, I would say ‘wow that’s disgusting, we should stop this’. But in India, the problem is not the point. The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult from exposing the problem.
The water pipe never gets fixed.
Izzat performs awfully in the long term. Once Indians displace Canadians in the office, they will go back to playing this insane game among themselves. It’s what happened to companies that got hit by Izzat. This is also why there aren’t any homegrown Indian companies that have the same influence as Microsoft or Google. Whenever they get ahead, their companies implode from infighting. Nobody works, everybody tries to cheat each other and nobody addresses critical issues.
Systems that delegate authority and work on good faith eventually win out over zero-sum honor feuding. Izzat cannot maintain complex systems because its players are only concerned with short term gain.
With the west, the issue is we do not always live up to our own ideals. It’s not a perfect system, but we can course correct and address problems. With Izzat, they live up to their ideals often. When you see the dysfunctionality of India, remember that it’s a feature of Izzat, not a bug.
Self-expoopatory, really.
Dam. No wonder they’re all screwed up!