Juan Pablo Villarino: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the 18th century a French political writer, Montesquieu, claimed that poorer peoples show more hospitality to strangers on average. Do you think he was right? I think it has to do with many things, not only with economic factors. For example, if you go to countries like Ethiopia in Africa, where you can find really poor people by our standards, then you will not find or receive as much hospitality as I had received, for example, in Muslim countries like Iran or Syria. This has to do with the place that interdependence has as a value in that society. For example, in the Middle East — and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with religion, but with geographical things — in the Middle East, I have found that people have been through millennial years to depend on each other because of the long distances. They’re living in a desert scenario, where you could eventually need the help of your neighbors tomorrow, so you help them today. This I have found in the Middle East and the Muslim countries. I wouldn’t consider them poor, but I would put them in a middle scale if we consider Africa as well. In general, countries which are used to sharing resources for whatever reason, whether religious or because they were part of the communist bloc, which also developed some social structures in which sharing resources was very common, then it’s easy today to hitchhike in Romania or Poland. So there are many, many indicators or things that could make that part right, but in general, yeah, I could say that Montesquieu had a point, let’s say. Do you have a thought on why some of the societies that seem to show the most trust with respect to hitchhikers in other ways, perhaps superficial or misguided, but seem to show lower levels of trust? You mention Iraq as being a good county to hitchhike. Iraq is not known at the macro or political level for always having a high degree of trust.…

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