The totality of events and actions that take place within a culture determines what is possible within a community. In particular, institutional practices, norms, and values set precedence for what is expected of people in a society. As such, it is imperative that individuals learn about these issues in order to achieve maximum social acceptance. …
American anthropologist, Edward Hall, coined the cultural iceberg analogy whereby he compared culture to enigmatic icebergs. The mystery surrounding these glacially-derived rocks is not their gigantic size, but rather their deceiving appearance. Only 10% of an iceberg floats above the water surface, while the remaining 90% remains underneath the surface. Therefore, it is impossible to …
In the words of Edward Twitchell Hall, a renowned cross-cultural anthropologist, culture is mankind’s medium. It cuts across all aspects of human life, influencing how people express themselves, think, their personalities, and how they move. Ideally, culture refers to a set of feelings, practices, and beliefs that tie people together. It represents all aspects of …
A pseudo-democracy, also known as tactical liberalization, is a political order designed to put on a democratic façade. Such regimes imitate a democratic system by holding regular political elections without any genuine intentions of offering the country’s citizens a voice. In most cases, a ruling party consolidates power with an aim of monopolizing the state’s …
The contemporary global society is rife with feelings of contempt for liberal democracy due to a persistent rise in societal, economic, and political inequalities. As a result, countries from all corners of the world are increasingly abandoning this democratic approach to governance for alternative political movements, such as nationalism, populism, and more worryingly, illiberal democracy. …
What are your options as a person under an absolute monarchy where you hardly have a voice in how you get governed? Pretty much nothing. That describes the bleak world before the winds of liberalism came blowing. For centuries, Europe was ruled by monarchs (or sometimes aristocrats) who based their legitimacy on the so-called divine …
Parliamentary democracy is arguably one of the most dominant forms of governance across the globe, with 51 out of 195 sovereign nations adopting this administrative system. In this kind of democracy, the legislature and executive branches of government are intertwined. The executive is held accountable to, and derives its permissibility from, the legislature. What’s more, …
Would you boil a baby in order to save a million people? Some people would object most likely with shock. Boiling a baby would be morally unacceptable under any circumstances for them. Yet others would justify it for the sake of saving a million lives. This dicey situation introduces us to a concept in ethics …
Picture how our modern economy consumes enormous amounts of resources and generates mountain loads of waste each year. How do we defuse this ticking time bomb that one day threatens to lay waste to our planet? Well, many economists think they have figured a way out—it’s called a circular economy. As its name implies, the …
In game theory, the zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. In other words, whatever one person gains in utility, someone else loses an equal amount. The term “zero-sum …
