East or West:
Do you want to live in a culture where ideas are an instrument to well-being, or where life is instrumental to ideas, for only that can make life meaningful?
At the level of values, the trade off is between social freedom and individual well-being. But the mode of valuation differs, between valuing an idea and valuing an experience.
This is why "pragmatism" comes much more easily to policymakers in Asia, which is not for want of the ability of those in the liberal west to distinguish the proper place of ends and means (to have values and then to find the most effective means of achieving them), but because the idea itself constitutes the experience.
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