| | Swiss banks and Swiss francs, what is not to love about them?
When Switzerland's state church outlawed jewelry, the jewlers began making watches. Although they invented many of the constituent pieces, that watch industry was complacent in 1970 and lost market share to cheap digital watches. There is apparently no historical record of mass protests, labor rallies, or other signs of social distress, even as the banks decided to liquidate what was left of the industry. Then came the Swatch.
One reason that there were no protests is that culturally, the Swiss are very restrained. That is an affect of Calvinism, but is also seen among the Catholics. The two are very similar in Switzerland.
Another reason is that Switzerland does not have a good experience with protest marches. A brigade of untrained summer soldiers once turned their machine guns on a rally and its bystanders.
But the society is not without change. Women began voting (in church -- church is state; state is church) before World War I. Today, Swiss teens adopt the slang of Kosovo rap poets. Switzerland has devalued the franc, demonetized notes, and sold off gold, all to apply the theories of John Maynard Keynes to the problems of the national economy and the national currency.
A Baptist minister once told me that there are a lot of Baptists at the bottom of Lake Geneva. The Calvinists threw them in for denying infant baptism. Ayn Rand made a strong point about philosophy preceding politics and economics. Any Switzerisms found in American culture -- capitalism, for instance -- are traceable to the Puritan heritage we share. A longer post will couple that to the fact that these were people who hanged a Quaker and tortured confessions from witches, but the fact remains.
Unlike the United States, Switzerland is at once isolated and a crossroads for trade. Endogamy has social consequences in many Swiss communes. Unlike the United States, Switzerland is organized at the commune level, as if an American state were built from the township to the county to the state. In fact, the national constitution says explicitly that anyone who is a citizen of a commune and the canton in which it is located is a citizen of the nation. If a parish has an unresolvable problem, the parish will apply to the commune to be split.To understand "Switzerland" (so-called), you have to start at the local level with the clergy whose salaries come from the governments that regulate their work.
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