In East Asians, a blunted sense of disgust and of morality

East Asians have never exported a moral code, whether secular or religious, despite having a long history of literate philosophical discourse. When Westerners get into "Buddhism," it's typically Tibetan Buddhism, and that belongs more to the Central Asian pastoralist cultures. (The Dalai Lama's family were horse traders, part of the local cowboy culture.) None of us can say what Confucianism teaches. And no amount of opium is going to help us uncover the cryptic system of Taoism.

Meanwhile, a tiny splinter group of Hebrew hillbillies founded the most widespread religion in the world, followed only by a religion founded by another breakaway group of Semitic desert-dwellers. Some groups are evidently better able to create moral codes that spread easily, and other groups less.

What seems to be lacking the most in East Asians, that would prevent them from developing spreadable moral systems, is a sharpened sense of disgust. That is the most visceral, and therefore the most powerful dimension of human morality. It underlies our feelings about what is sacred or taboo, and investing a moral system with sacredness makes it more appealing to the rest of mankind. Then it isn't just some handy rules of thumb that will only be useful in the narrow region where they were developed. Rather, there seems to be something pure about it, something worthy of respect, regardless of how this gist is adapted to particular local conditions.

And of course many of those rules of thumb will already have derived from the disgust reflex, for example, our reaction to one man shoving his pole up another man's butt.

Certainly this emphasis on disgust, purity, sanctity, and taboo is not sufficient for a mature moral system that will spread. It can also be taken too far, where religious participation devolves into one round after another of "Stone the defiler!" Nevertheless, it is a necessary part.

What's the evidence that East Asians don't get disgusted as much as other people? Sounds like a stupid question on the internet, doesn't it? They don't all show exactly the same signs, since no country is a clone of another. But here's a brief list. It doesn't matter if not everyone, or not even a majority, takes part in these things -- the fact that they're much more common in East Asia shows that their bell curve is shifted farther toward the "not easily grossed out" direction.

- Obviously, Japan being the world capital of porno for real sick fucks. Piss, shit, vomit, spit, gallons of jizz -- basically every disgusting kind of effluvia you can think of. The only place they have left to go is with blood and mucus (though maybe I'm out of the loop). Depictions of sex with not just animals but slithering sea creatures is also mainstream. Rape is so common in their porno that they clearly feel no aversion to it. Then there's the dirty old salaryman buying a schoolgirl's used underwear and sniffing it, or buying a plastic mold of a 13 year-old boy's anus, something that would weird out the rest of the world.

- Gross-out food. All over the world, certain classes of animals are found to be ickier than others, things that are more likely to give you the willies just looking at them -- creepy-crawlies. And you've never seen such enthusiasm for wolfing down all manner of insects, scorpions, tarantulas, bats, seahorses, not to mention the motley crew of slimy marine life they eat raw, perhaps with the eyes still open and the mouth still taking in futile gasps of air. I have to reiterate that this is not simply a case of outsiders finding the native cuisine unpalatable -- these are animal types that everyone regards as yuckier than game animals, livestock, vegetables, fruits, grains, etc. Christ, they even eat cats and dogs -- not even man's best friend is held sacred.

- Much higher rates of male homosexuality. According to the General Social Survey, 4% of American males are not heterosexual, judging from their sex partners over the past 5 years. Combining the Chinese and Japanese respondents, their rate is 12% -- 3 times higher than the national average. East Asians are low in exhibitionism in general, so their homos don't leap out at you like the more flamboyant Black or Irish fags, who come from overall more expressive groups. But don't be fooled by their sober, drab facades -- nearly 1 out of every 8 of them is A-OK with some random faceless dude cumming in their mouth.

- Somewhat related to that, what's up with all those ladyboys in Thailand? If you showed pictures of that stuff to Bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, they'd think you were making that shit up. The gods must be crazy. Surely some kind of disgust reaction would've prevented them from doing that even for a day, let alone make it their daily routine. But, not so in East Asia. Then there's their even more numerous clientele, who are as warped as the trannies themselves. Asians just let that stuff pass, not being very grossed out by it, whereas the Arabs would have burned their polluted workplaces to the ground.

- Japanese torture porn (splatter movies) seem to be even sicker than Western ones. I'm going by what others say, and matter-of-fact descriptions of what is shown, such as this one from Wikipedia about Audition:

A flashback shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face into the vomit and hungrily consumes it.

Gives a whole new meaning to "barf me out". It doesn't sound like they try to portray physical corruption as a signal of deeper or broader decay, as for example in Videodrome, or that killer mass death scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Asians seem to be better able at stomaching all this sick shit with no larger purpose.

And those in the West who are most into making and consuming torture porn are like the East Asians in all sorts of other ways, but most importantly in being quasi-autistic nerds with, again, apparently no disgust response. They try to make themselves out to be tough guys, stronger than those half-men who would get queasy watching dismembered bodies lapping up puke from a dog dish. But back on Planet Earth they prove nothing by watching these movies without getting weirded out. That would require them to have an intact disgust reflex that, by iron willpower, they've managed to keep a lid on. But since their disgust reflex is not there to begin with, it's no feat of mental strength to watch all this gory junk. It's all just a goof for a cerebral audience.

There are probably other examples to point to, but that gives the basic idea across a range of disgust-related domains (food, sex, and death). Like I said, there are other reasons why Asians do not wind up as morally developed as other groups do, but their blunted disgust response has to play a major role there. They are just not very corporeal people, being more cerebral.

Perhaps their relatively weak sense of disgust explains partly why they rely so much on external authority to tell them how to behave -- if you lack even the most basic internal voice that screams, "Eww, don't do that!" then you're pretty hopeless on your own. Of course, what's chicken and what's egg? Maybe the blind reliance on your parents' orders evolved first, and that weakened the need for internal guidance like disgust.

One last thing -- I skipped over things like leaving your shoes outside the house and other examples of hygiene practices because they are obviously cancelled out by all the other vile crap I pointed to. Not tracking dirt into the house, while spending hours watching tentacle rape porn, loses out to dirty shoes inside and sex-with-a-real-life-girlfriend. So if anyone feels like trying to stick up for Asians, please refrain from making any clueless arguments along those lines.