I was so moved by the thrilling experience of trying to cross the road in Hanoi that I sent the Commentator a piece comparing and contrasting socialism (and socialists) in Vietnam and here.
If you have never been to Hanoi or indeed Asia before, nothing can prepare you and your nose for the restless, crowded confusion out there on the streets. People are everywhere. Crossing the road requires nerves of steel as swarms of people on improbably laden scooters come at you from all directions, tooting their horns and chatting on their mobile phones.
Almost everyone is busy doing something, carrying, pushing, sorting, haggling, stacking. It is more than obvious that idleness is not rewarded. No work, no food!
Micro-restaurants proliferate with scant regard for our prissy health and safety standards: a shop selling bits of metal will have someone cooking generous quantities of lunch on a small stove for shifts of people squatting on the street; fresh ingredients delivered non-stop from here and there as cooking proceeds.
Life in Dickens's London must have been something like this, albeit perhaps in a more genteel way despite the poverty of many people; remember how on Christmas Day the Cratchit family ordered their goose from a shop cooking it?
Watching in amazement the hustle and bustle of Hanoi, with its overwhelmingly youthful population, I started to wonder what the operational ethics of such a society must be.
Social relationships will be myriad and subtle, with extended networks of family and friends working together to create all sorts of improvised, fast-moving supply chains. Taxi drivers who bring a shop new tourist business will get rewarded according to finely calibrated scales. There will be cheating, but likewise in each neighbourhood social trust will accumulate fast.
Obvious miscreants will be quickly identified, thumped, and shunned. Vietnam scores poorly on world corruption perception indices: that sort of obvious cheating is all about the state sector’s machinations, not the mass of people hustling to survive.
Old people in Vietnam keep working to the end. I saw people who looked as if they personally knew Confucius scurrying along carrying heavy trays of vegetables or helping chop things for dinner. This is the social safety net of a poor but fast-developing country.
No doubt the conditions for many disabled or mentally ill people must be grim, yet even they are much more likely to have some sort of active honourable family support than their counterparts in the UK where families have outsourced private responsibility to the state.
You see the difference as soon as you get off the plane at Heathrow. People working at the airport project a lower order of urgency and purpose. Whereas anyone in Vietnam with a proper job wears an immaculate uniform with pride and works at something like top speed, the ranks of British immigration and other officials come across as indefinably scruffier and usually overweight. They look like people who know all too well that it is next to impossible to sack them for slacking: a general "good enough" 70 percent effort will suffice, and even a dismal 55 percent effort is unlikely to provoke any serious sanction.
Back in Vietnam if you don’t try hard in your job you get thrown out in favour of someone desperate to succeed. That sort of merciless pressure is, well, merciless. But it keeps up standards and morale and ambition...
Isn't the problem in the bureaucratic West that we are outsourcing more and more of our lives to impersonal, literally inhuman processes run by the state? And that this erodes our most basic survival instincts including sociability and everything that goes with it?
