China

I want you to try to imagine something.

75 years ago, it was 1951. In 1951, the US was undergoing a technological revolution while it bombed the shit out of and occupied various countries around the world. In 1951, the average Chinese citizen was living off a $1/month. It was a peasant society.

In those 75 years, the US has seen massive technological improvements while simultaneously seeing massive increases in homelessness and economic precarity.

In those same 75 years, Chinese rice farming peasants became able to purchase and drive the world's most advanced electric cars. Homeownership rates in China are 50% higher than in the US.

There are 40 million people in China over the age of 75. Meaning they personally experienced the most rapid industrialization and economic development in the history of humanity. Edit: Let me be very clear. There are 40M people in China who went from an average of living in a peasant society on $1/month to driving electric cars.

I dunno. I kind of think that's a good reason to be happy with your government. I think if your whole family lives in multigenerational housing that you own, where poverty and homeless has been on a steady decline, where technological advancements make your lives better for 7 decades in a row, and where your elders are saying that things have literally never been better in their entire lives, that you're generally going to have a much higher approval rating than anything in the West.

Stephen Has[s]an

Is a psychologist who used to belong to a cult and has an axe to grind, which he has been grinding in Western society studying cults within Western society. His story is like reading Plato's allegory of the cave. He escaped one level of mental control and entered into Western society. Now he critiques cults against the backdrop of Western society as "normal" but doesn't ever critique Western society as pathologically and fundamentally, which it clearly and most assuredly is. He even wrote a book about the mental health harm of "Eastern Religions". Like, how much more do you need to know about the guy to understand his work has very limited applicability and certainly can't be easily transplanted to cultures he's never been a part of nor applied to things like national psychology for populations larger than anything he's ever studied before?