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Of the Big Six, the Méxica or Náhuatl people of the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Quechua people of the Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyu in Peru were both, in spite of great differences in outward cosmetic culture, unitary societies . The same underlying type of social system also occurs frequently on the less-organized tribal level in many other parts of the Americas. The unitary worldview is, in fact, characteristic of all those societies around the world that utilize kin-naming terminologies referred to as generational (Type IA) or descriptive (Type IB), as described in the introduction. In the rest of the world, most native Paci¤c and Far Eastern societies, with the exception of Japan, Korea, Tibet, Bhutan, Cambodia, and Mongolia, utilize such systems and their accompanying unitary re®ections in the other aspects of their cultures—the governmental system and politics, the economic system, the religious system, the military system, and the arts and literature. The world’s largest and most powerful unitary state today is China, with a descriptive or unitary IB social system (Kryukov 1972, 1998). Unitary states of either subtype, IA or IB, as can be seen from the map in Figure 8, are rare in Europe and Africa, IA occurring in Europe only in historically quite modi-¤ed form in Serbia and Montenegro and type IB occurring only in Scandinavia. The tenets of unitary logic constitute what most Western Europeans other than Scandinavians view as illogical, accompanied by what is often perceived as either self-serving, sometimes even devious, or opportunistic action. This is because unitary peoples are the world’s best pragmatists—the end, carefully conceived, always justi¤es the means, equally carefully executed. Unitary peoples invariably solve problems with whatever solution will produce positive results at that particular time, not on the basis of presumed universal rightsvs .-wrongs. European and Euro-American societies, which belong to dualistic 4 Unitary Norms TheAsianPerspective Figure 8. The World’s Unitary States, 2004 social systems, do not understand or know how to cope with such ®uctuating norms, norms not pinned down to concepts of absolute, unchangeable and in®exible value sets. That inability has led not surprisingly to the caricatured concepts of the hyper-Pragmatic Scandinavian, the volatile Quixotic Yugoslav, and, particularly, the Inscrutable Oriental. We do not know how to deal with such societies, and we generally do not fully trust their governments, for we have learned that a promise or decision made today may be completely reversed later, even tomorrow, and what seems a ¤rm contract today may be broken without compunction six months from now. Often perceived as betrayal by nonunitary peoples, such ®uctuation is simply seen as logical, intelligent , and normal social-preservation behavior by unitary societies. A major reason for the lack of trust the majority of Western societies places in unitary systems is that these societies come as close to literal all-encompassing economic, political, and cultural communism as one can imagine, not just in terms of the distribution and ownership of goods but also in terms of broad social rights, duties, and privileges. We are not referring to the self-styled Marxist Communism promulgated by Marx himself or its Lenin-altered practice in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe over the past 70-plus years. That philosophy, which became in effect Marxist Fascism in the hands of European societies, has almost nothing in common with literal communism other than the euphemism of the name. Neither Russia nor the other Eastern European societies have ever practiced communism in the social sense of the word, and it is enlightening to note that these societies have all in recent years returned to the Western European, dualistic, nonunitary fold where they all by nature belong—a foregone social conclusion expected and prognosticated by many over the past ¤ve decades. The true communist societies of Asia and the Paci¤c, and even those few in Europe, are unitary in the sense that every member of society is ideally considered of equal importance and worth. Men and women are differentbut -equal partners in society and life at large. Some unitary societies place greater emphasis on males than females—China, for example—and some place greater emphasis on females, but by and large the duties and privileges of both sexes are much the same. Scandinavian societies provide prime examples of the implementation of such social equality. There is in unitary societies usually only a single social class—The People—though in the larger...

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