In Western societies with a heavy cultural emphasis on dispassionate reason and unrelenting individualism, such values function to distort the inherent communality that even neuroscientists now conclude is actually hardwired in human beings for our collective survival.
However, Westerners, who often have so much less to lose as compared to the people of Bahrain, for instance, tend to be even more fearful of collective action, given their deeply conditioned cultural belief that cool individual reason is superior to passionate collective action.
Th is m
isguided notion is reinforced by the fact that mass action with stirred emotions is only considered legitimate in
the exercise of war, not democratic life.