Aspirations toward cultural membership can be undermined by the aspirant’s own values and style

Evidence

Clashes regularly occur over the Australians’ commitment to democracy, human rights, a free press, and its protests over the violations of those rights by the governments of virtually all its neighbors. … Differences in character, style, and behavior are also pronounced. As Mahathir suggested, Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world. … The gap between cultures was so large that it blinded the proponent of cultural convergence to the extent his own behavior repelled those whom he claimed as cultural brethren. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 415

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing observation—that Keating’s push for Asian identity foundered precisely because his Australian bluntness repelled the very people he sought to join—is a genuinely dense, counterintuitive mechanism: the aspirant’s identity is not just an obstacle others see, but an active self-sabotage engine. Worth sitting with.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the odd man in’ impossible aspiration—how political figures’ own deeply-ingrained cultural styles sabotage their declared projects of cultural convergence, as a general phenomenon beyond Australia.
• XREF: connects to: Valuing one’s own speech as citizenship requires inventing a new cultural niche — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1203