No, I have not spent 14+ years living in another country. Have you? However, I am pretty sure significant numbers of what we think of as great works of comparative political and anthropological study occur while spending less time than that in the country. Alexis de Tocqueville spent only 9 months in the United States before writing "Democracy in America," which is widely regarded as incisive and significantly socially predictive of American society. Classic examples of ethnology study (Montaigne on cannibalism, or Levi-Strauss' work on universal taboos) have been done with far less than 14 years of living in another country.
I also wrote the paranthetical because I think it's ridiculous to imply that Americans have universal beliefs that are understood through osmosis. It's a pretty diverse society.
Unless you're going to declare entire fields of social science irrelevant and invalid, I think you need to back down on this one.
Oh, and great job with all my other questions testing your brightline. Your answers were rich and compelling.
I bow before your obvious intellectual superiority and accept your single-dimensional examples as absolute and total explanation of a multi-faceted and highly complex issue.
Feel better?
Oh I also feel bad for you that you cannot imagine what it is like to feel part of a community such that you cannot even fathom for one moment what it means to understand what makes a group of people "tick". Or that you have never had the experience of trying to understand a people foreign to yourself, and come to the realization of the deep significance of another cultural heritage with which you are not familiar.
No matter what you put out there, nothing, no scholarly work, can ever take the place of living and growing up in a particular place, region, or country. It cannot give you the same loyalty, understanding, and emotional connection to the people or the place. I could live in germany the rest of my life and never really fully understand the deep cultural impact the second world war had on those people (for one simple example), and the influence it exerts even today. I can read about it. Study it. Observe it. But I cannot really ever live it the way they do.
It is much like cancer. You can study it, become an oncologist, spend every waking moment exclusively with cancer patients, know everything there is to know about the disease, be proclaimed as the greatest scientist ever in the realm of cancer research and find ways to cure every single kind of cancer ever known to man. But until you have had cancer, you cannot really know what it means to have the disease, live with the disease, and fight the disease. You cannot truly be part of that community.
The same applies, imo, to understanding a culture. Unless you are part of it and have stock in the history and the events that defined that culture, where it has some influence on your life beyond simply the job you have and the schooling you have received, you cannot really know what it is like to be part of that culture.
I do not think it is a stretch to want the person who leads my country to have that type of cultural connection. I feel bad for you if you cannot understand that, for all your super-advanced learning.
