I found relevant commentary about a visit to Venezuela in 1998 by Eric S. Raymond, the purveyor of the term ‘open source’, which relates Venezuela’s geographically abundant (extractive and naturally occurring wild food) resources to the culture that developed as a result.

Interestingly it predicted the economic collapse of Venezuela that is ongoing now and it predicts the coming economic collapse of the U.S.A. due to deviation from the Anglo-Saxon Puritan work ethic (mentioned in Part 2 of my blog above) to the underlying ressentiment-based ideological delusion that my blog above is about:

I spend most of that lunch talking with Andreas's boss, a semiretired mathematical logician and university administrator, Hector somebody whose last name I never catch. His interests in formal systems theory parallel some remembered preoccupations of mine from my student days. We have a lively and interesting discussion. Then he begins to tell me about his attempts to apply mathematical analysis to the sociology of Venezuela. His projection of the future is rather bleak. He thinks Venezuela's climate and resources have been too kind to humans, never giving them any incentive to build the self-discipline or stock of skills needed to generate wealth once the extractive industries have played out.

I already know that Venezuela's economy floats on cheap oil. I know that the easily taxable wealth from extractive industries in the Third World has actually retarded broad-based modernization by encouraging corrupt, lazy and brutal political regimes. What I've never seen before is how this process looks from the point of view of a member of the local power elite who's too honest to blink. This is fascinating!

The U.S.'s culture is so imbued with Weberian virtue that we take our own ability to make money in any kind of physical environment for granted -- so we don't think much about natural-resource stocks or climate as a determinant of national character. The professor, steeped in Venezuelan history, sees great significance in the fact that Venezuela has always made its wealth from extractive industries (hardwoods, copper, oil) rather than agriculture or industry. And the requisites for survival in Venezuela's temperate tropical climate with abundant wild foods have been light -- proverbially, a hammock and a poncho.

To the professor, the post-WWII oil boom (and inevitable bust) is just the latest cycle in an old story. The land is too good to its people, so the people are lazy. They never grow the social maturity, thrift, or civic virtue to handle crisis and deprivation. As a result, Venezuela remains a fool's paradise run by kleptocrats, its long lazy tropical dreams occasionally interrupted by racking fever as it hunts up the next extractive fix.

If the professor's dissection of his own country is pitiless, his prognosis for the U.S. is hardly kinder. He admires the American achievement, but believes we have become so used to wealth that we are forgotting the virtues that made us wealthy. When we exhaust the natural wealth of the U.S. (he projects) we will crash. There are obvious holes in his economics, but when I consider the squalid mess our politics and media have become the charge suddenly seems hard to refute.

I learn a lot from the questions they ask me and the job titles they politely ask me if I match. One of the things I learn is there seems to be no native hacker culture at all here!

That means more than you'd think. I've talked with hackers in Warsaw. Even there, just recovering from forty years of life in the Soviet bloc, there's some concept that you can choose your place in the system, or choose (with some effort) to stand partway outside it. In the U.S. we have lots of hackers like me because it's relatively easy to cut partway loose from the scarcity-economics game and define your own individual niche based on what you want to do. In Poland this is harder to accomplish, because everyone is poorer and has to spend more time chasing food and rent, but at least they understand the concept. So there is a Polish hacker culture, though not a large one.

Venezuela is a much wealthier country than Poland, but the men and women in that ballroom displayed no Polish understanding at all. As I tried to explain what I did and why, I learned that the only labels in their model of the world that fit me were ‘consultor’ and ‘independiente’. It became clear that these have even stronger connotations of ‘hired gun’ than they do in English. And, revealingly, the noun ‘independiente’ doesn't take any modifiers or specifiers -- as though, have said one is outside the corporate or government ambit, there are no other distinctions worth making.

Of course I'd read all the angry descriptions of South American politics, the immorality tales of smug and corrupt oligarchies lording it over masses of peasants and campesinos. What I met in the Grand Salon was subtler and sadder than that -- people who know they're big frogs in a small pond, looking for a way to a bigger one but blinkered by their own inability to imagine an unstratified society of independent peers.

My education in Venezuelan psychopolitics was interrupted […]