Honduran Culture of poverty & benefits of family!

A PCV´s thoughts on culture´s impact on Family and Poverty:


Honduran culture has many great things, which are essentially disregarded as poor, while also many cultural norms that dam them to poverty and eventual voluntary societal collapse. The most obvious and sad culture is that the only way guys will talk about anything of any possible disagreement or interest, is to become inebriated. Thus, instead of gaining trust from continual conversation or work, they rely on liqueur to reach a state to speak of other things than the weather or a hot girl. This forces many guys, who want to change or do something, to run the gauntlet of drug addiction and a large financial expense, so that they can gain the confidence to talk about important issues. The side effect is that by drinking publically they lose much of the good will of society, as drunks are viewed very badly by everyone in this society.

The shockingly obvious idea of family coming first is a culture that is not so prevalent in modern USA and increasingly in the more developed world. Here the job & ones individual self are secondary to the family. Instead of thinking of obtaining a good job and then caring for one’s family, they think first of their family and maintain it. This is of course upstanding citizens. The bonds, close & often clan mentality allow them to turn to family during hard times, instead of to themselves and their jobs. The obvious difference is that most families are the biggest entertainment for them, as the news of distant relatives makes afternoon conversation. The northern culture has forgotten about the family bonds, instead spending increasingly more time at work, less time considering family, and even less thought of being family first and a profession second. The most obvious example of family first was illustrated during my cousin kidnapping. Everyone in the family quit their jobs to return to the village, unite and look for him. I was shocked to hear that they just left their job to hang out and look for the kid. It obvious was not smart business, yet in the long run the bond and family unity allowed for those financially less well off to lean on the others, who provided for them out of family good will. Instead of a welfare system they have the family system, which does work, albeit is reliant on an overly successful family member sustaining the less well off or a family leader with much support or a vassal system on the family scale. Basically, the family survives regardless of society, as each family functions as a part of a whole, leaving it a fractured society with plenty of self sustaining families that either succeed as a whole or die fracturing into small weak families.

The second sad cultural norm that really makes little economic sense in theory, yet perhaps in a new altered human perspective, is that a wage increase usually leads to the employee working less , feeling less responsibility, & a general societal acceptance of being above the law of work or the law period. This could be interesting to investigate in the US as well, as it could be that the CEOs earning 26 million are actually working less, relaxing more, and would work harder and improve their companies with more normal wages, which do not let them pay off everyone and everything without regard. I would assume that the efficiency of capital spent on a CEO could easily and more profitably be spent elsewhere, so that the overall company & stockholders would benefit, while the CEO will not make out like a bandit for nothing extraordinary. These super rich will never be able to spend their money in a lifetime, which allows them to buy services, things, & over-consume at will and whim, which may or may not represent their societal contribution or negative externalities provided by this banana republic capital clout.

The state in Honduras mirrors the Mayan society and most societies that choose to fail, in that the poor do all the hard labor & produce everything necessary in life, food, clothes etc. Meanwhile the rich take an increasingly larger portion of the pie without doing any more to contribute to society’s well being and in my experience actually less. The goal of most mothers and parents here is to have their kids find a plush job paying a nice wage, where you do absolutely nothing, as real work is for those stupid people, who cannot find work without responsibilities. If you start to work, get things done, improve the business, you will more likely be fired by your superiors for threatening their easy way of life and making them look bad. In a large part, this is engrained by the wealthy, who hold the reigns of most organizations and dictate to the rest, who respect them unconditionally due to their holding the keys to money, the law, & society. The culture is really limiting in that everyone dreams of becoming a dependent to society, where the productive parts of society are given less, while the unproductive are above the law with the un-proportional wealth & ability to inhibit anyone trying to create wealth, essential for any real growth & a sustainable society. As societies that choose to fail have illiterate unaware poor working for less, while the rich unproductive super wealthy over-consume, until nature naturally reverts to the mean of agricultural production or essential consumption for human life. This leaves the wealthy uneducated inutile left to die, while the poor continue with their way of life without leadership, yet also with fewer useless mouths to feed.

Are we reaching this point again in Honduras or will the Honduras gain a rule of law to counter the Banana Repulic or now Coffee republic for a society that allows the wage to equal productivity & have back testing on more wage increases etc. ?

I think that, unless something drastic is done to limit the riches over-consumption & over valued pay relative to productivity, that the world will merely go from bust to bust to a gradual decline until everyone is in debt and only the smart capable will survive, albeit poorer. This may leave a relative society that compares the “civilized” Mayans to the post “non-civilized” Mayans, which would be a probability for our global society. Naturally, this problem is not something that is inevitable, rather this culture will have a choice of the destruction of much wealth & eradication of much human knowledge and capacity or a limitation of those over-consuming non-productive members of society. The most important change in the future should be to eliminate this danger by greatly reducing the over-consuming unproductive parts of developing societies & developed societies, so that the capital and resources are better allocated, instead of landing in the hands of greedy individuals that often do not produce & are bad investments for their organizations, society, and eventually the world.