> No. These are virtues, not luxuries. You don't need a high income to be compassionate or have self-esteem.

It's not about you, it's about others around you. If they do not have a "high income" (or, in other words, materially comfortable life), you cannot expect them to be comfortable enough to be compassionate or have self-esteem. And then, if they don't, but you do, it's an easy recipe for your compassion to be exploited and your self-esteem to be perceived as danger. It's a self-leveling system.

It's not an individual matter, but a social one. Always has been.

And it's not specific to China - I see it in Poland, a relatively "we've been damn poor forty years ago" country as well.

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IncreasePosts 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.

Maybe it's bias because I'm an "exotic" white guy in many areas and not just a random down on their luck average guy from their own region.

I've also been offered generosity by rich people, as well, but, I will generalize, that mainly came after I demonstrated some proof that I didn't actually need their generosity

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neural_thing 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.

Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.

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alightsoul 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe it's country dependent. I have seen what you describe in countries where christianity is the dominant religion and most people in those countries something like 70 to 80 percent identify with it. And religion in those places is most prevalent among the poor, so much so there is a direct relationship between poverty and religion, the more religious, the poorer.

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daymanstep 2 hours ago | parent [-]

In my personal experience, religiosity correlates with the appearance of kindness but not the actual act of kindness.

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