People are cool everywhere

Andy Hill

From my travelling, I have found that people are far more likely to show kindness and help you out of a jam than we are blitzed with in TV and movies.

One thing I’ve noticed about traveling, in all the places I’ve been, is that people are basically nice everywhere. People want to give you a hand or a lift or help out of a jam in most parts of the  globe.

This is a fundamentally human trait. Peter Kropotkin, in his incredible Mutual Aid: a Factor in Evolution, showed that it was cooperation, not competition that seemed to order nature.

Basic anarchistic philosophy, which has flourished from the 19^th century to the present, has this as perhaps its core tenet. The basic idea that humans are basically good, and in the event of catastrophe will look out for one another.

This isn’t usually the view of humans that we get from popular television and movies, where people are constantly conniving, cheating, and murdering their way through each episode.

The average westerner is pumped full of so much violence every night via his TV than would ever happen in a million years on the streets of Phnom Penh.

To the contrary, from my own, subjective experience in Southeast Asia, humans, in their natural environment, are far more often than not to be hospitable, helpful, and generally down to help out everywhere.

Of course in any unit of people there are assholes, but from my experience being here for three years, the ratio of asshole-to-sweet person is the same everywhere. And that ratio is usually extremely low on the asshole side.

I have experienced so many instances of the most genuine hospitality in my travels throughout Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia that it would take me a week in a cabin with a trash bag full of Ritalin to remember them all.

And people are basically the same everywhere, as well. They all want the same things. To play with their kids, to see them grow up happy and healthy, to have a family that is provided for, to make a living, and enjoy the lives of their families and neighborhoods.  

Civility and politeness are the rules of the game, and I think all humans, regardless of whether they choose to enact it, have a deep and integral understanding of this.

This is all my opinion, which is subjective, my ‘reality tunnel’ as Robert Anton Wilson called it, but it has been my experience that people are basically good, everywhere.