Why Do Indians **** At Such High Rates? Why Is A Country of Such Smart People So Poor?

Simone and Malcolm walk through a widely circulated write-up on izzat—the North Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi honor/reputation system—after Homath quote-tweeted it. They treat it the same way they treat critiques of Western hookup culture, Chinese face, or American individualism: as a cultural technology that can either support or sabotage flourishing.

They read the original Kiwi Farms post, then fact-check it. Izzat is a real, documented concept of collective family/clan honor. It is not practiced by all Indians. It is concentrated among many Hindi and Muslim communities in the north and is a poor fit for Jain, Christian, and Buddhist communities. Admitting fault can be treated as humiliating the whole group. Disputes can escalate past the original slight. Police and officials sometimes avoid taking sides. Honor killings are the part the original post underplayed: UNFPA and NGO estimates put worldwide honor killings in the thousands per year, and peer-reviewed work ties izzat to those cases in India and Pakistan. The 2017 Delhi toilet/urination murder they cite is a real case.

They also cover jugaad (workaround culture that can mean frugal innovation or cheating the rule), H-1B co-ethnic hiring and the Cognizant discrimination findings, Air India training scandals, and why a high-performing Indian diaspora can coexist with a country that still struggles with public goods and trust. Malcolm’s secondary explanation: License Raj and the post-independence decision to treat British rule as synonymous with capitalism.

Firsthand: their travel business had clients from many countries. Indian sub-agencies, they say, repeatedly broke vendor contracts, hid large bills, and scammed end customers—including after second chances. They live in a majority-Indian neighborhood and like their neighbors. The argument is about norms and selection, not “all Indians.”

They close by comparing this to Africans, Chinese, and Indians criticizing Western individualism and hookup culture, and by arguing that slapping “racist” on a pattern debate makes the backlash worse (Streisand effect), especially after Canada’s diploma-mill wave.

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Show Notes

The Izaat Post

On November 2nd, 2025, @XJosh posted three recent Kiwifarms screenshots to X, saying: Kiwi Farms user breaks down ‘Izzat’, the Indian subcontinent’s cultural honor system. It effectively explains every single trope about Indian behavior: they all participate in an invisible clout-chasing game that involves screwing over everyone as much as possible. Worth the read

The screenshots, showing a post by GluttonousManSlob read:

Hi. I didn’t see this term mentioned in the thread, so I wanted to share this all with you. It’s about Izzat. Some posts have mentioned ‘saving face’, which is Izzat, but I wanted to elaborate on it.

Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as ‘honour’ or ‘reputation’ or ‘face’. Izzat is so much more than that. It’s a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn’t just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I’d argue it’s antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith.