The Soul of a Nation Lies in its Stories

Why do ideas about morality, fairness, and ambition feel self-evident in one culture, yet repressed in another? For a long time, researchers in sociology, political science, and psychology have argued that moral outlooks are cultural patterns, rather than universal rules. These differences are shaped by the cultures in which people are raised, influencing how they should behave and their perception of the world (Forsyth et al., 2008). One influential way of understanding these patterns is Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension Theory, which suggests that societies internalize shared assumptions about authority, individuality, and social order. Rather than functioning as rigid categories, these dimensions reveal nuances and underlying ideas that shape how cultures perceive duty, success, and moral responsibility. For instance, cultures with high individualism tie moral worth to personal achievements and autonomy, while in collectivist cultures, morality is more closely linked to social harmony and obligation. When culture shapes a country’s values, texts from that country can be seen as cultural relics that visualize these values, and show the characteristics of the country through the story of their literary characters. With this perspective, literature from the U.S., China, Australia, Vietnam, and Turkiye could show the characteristics of their respective countries.

Across cultures, power and morality are rarely shown openly; instead, they are hidden behind ambition, obedience, and desire. And in the United States, these tensions emerge through high levels of individualism and masculine drive. This makes the U.S. culture focus more on competitiveness and individual success. F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby embodied these values through the concept of the American Dream: the belief that anyone can achieve wealth and social acceptance through hard work. Gatsby’s transformation from poverty to wealth illustrated this ideal quite well. However, his obsessive pursuit of Daisy symbolizes the unattainability of success in society’s eyes— the acceptance of other elites. This illustrated how class boundaries ultimately destroy the dream of equal opportunity. The contrast between the dream of social mobility and the reality of class privilege confesses the Americans’ hypocrisy in a society where freedom is promised by unequal distribution. Fitzgerald’s illustration of the American Dream is effective, as it does not reject that ambition outright, but reveals its internal contradictions, making Gatsby’s failure feel both personal and inevitable. Where American literature questions freedom from the hierarchy, other cultures interrogate obedience beneath it instead. 

If American literature critiques power by exposing false freedom, Chinese literature exposes power through visibility. Written in the 18th century during the Qing dynasty,  红楼梦 (Dream of the Red Chamber) depicts an aristocratic family governed by strict hierarchy, where collective duty outweighs individual desire. A very excellent point that the author, Cao Xueqin, rendered is the women’s admirable spirit and tragic fate. They could be considered the most intelligent, emotionally perceptive, and complex figures in the novel. The gendered morality shown in the novel depicted women having to stay silent and obey the patriarchal hierarchy imposed by men due to collectivist societal expectations. However, the author pays respect to the women, not by giving them happy fates, but rather by reflecting the tragedy of a woman’s life within a patriarchal and feudal system. This novel is less misogynistic than other literature pieces from the same era, showing that even the most capable women are confined to marriage, rivalry, or disposability. Although modern Chinese women no longer face such constraints, now having access to education, careers, and legal rights, the novel’s tension remains relevant. Contemporary struggles of Chinese women have shifted, rather than disappeared. They resurfaced in subtler forms, such as workplace discrimination, unequal labor, and persistent domestic violence (Z. Wang & Sekiyama, 2023; Stevensen & Dong, 2025). Cao Xueqin’s portrayal is powerful, not just because it mourns the fate of Chinese women but because it refuses to offer false consolation. The author forced readers to confront the intelligent and virtuous women’s tragic fate within a rigid patriarchal hierarchy, as people believe “rather the bitter truth than sweet lie.” This reveals how collectivism and power distance continue to shape gendered morality across centuries. The similarity between China and the U.S. is the unjust fate of individuals under the inherited structure; the difference lies in the mechanisms that drive those that the hierarchy controls.

Unlike Chinese literature, where hierarchy is preserved with tradition and societal pressure, Australia’s power-imbalanced hierarchy was imposed externally through colonialism. Australia has two moral worlds that have collided: a high-individualism colonizer culture founded on autonomy, and Indigenous cultures based on collectivism and spiritual links to the land. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence narrates this collision through the true, horrific story of three Aboriginal girls stolen from their families during the Stolen Generations era. An inhumane policy allowed thousands of children to be taken away from their families by the authorities to squander their Aboriginal identity, and these children were stripped of their heritage and are called the Stolen Generations (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, n.d.). In the story, the journey home demonstrates how colonial power-distance is enforced on the Aboriginals, cutting children from their roots and imposing Western norms that redefine their culture under administrative control, rather than letting them connect with their communal environment. Under this brutal administration, literature reflected the colliding point of two cultures: Aboriginal collectivism and colonizers’ hyper-individualism. The Australian culture tried to promise equal opportunities in an egalitarian society, but similarly to how the American Dream works, it’s only a myth. Settlers came to Australia and wrote their own history and created their own opportunities, while the colonized suffered. Through this, the cultural dimensions showed how the Australian culture was violently changed through oppression. The Aboriginals’ stories are a historical testament of a cold-blooded colonial regime’s impact on their people. However, the Aboriginal resistance takes the form of physical return to the land; resistance can also come in psychological forms instead.

In Vietnam, the colonial domination not only fractured family and land, but also fractured the national identity. French colonialism also imposed the Western culture dimension on Vietnam’s cultural orientation, which combines high collectivism, long-term orientation, and moderate to high power distance. Power distance indicates how acceptable citizens are towards unequal power distributions, and Vietnam is a country that accepts strict hierarchy. Vũ Trọng Phụng’s Số đỏ (Dumb luck) turned these values into satire. Written during French colonial rule and intense cultural confusion, this novel portrays a society where power distance is absurdly staged, and all the power lies within the performative elites and fake aristocracy, rather than ethics. Xuan Tóc đỏ (Red-haired Xuan) rises to influence within the society not by merit, but by performance. This reveals the laughable state of the country under the French influence. Authority became theatrical with morality being social imitation rather than ethical conviction. The collectivism of Vietnamese culture under colonialism was weaponized and surrounded by colonial pressure. This collectivism was driven by a fear of exclusion and punishment. Vũ Trọng Phụng used humor and exaggeration as a rebellion against the absurd forced Westernization by the colonizers. The psychological violence of Western colonizers imposed on Vietnamese society made it lose its ethical compass while trying to impress the colonizers. This novel revealed a moral crisis: people pursuing “modern values” without understanding them, and pitiful attempts to blend French customs with Vietnamese tradition in a way that is performative instead of transformative. By laughing at this absurd system, the author mocked colonial hierarchy while also trying to soothe the pain of cultural loss. He used satire as the only available act of rebellion against the French when direct resistance was impossible.

If Vietnam used satire to expose the external power reshaping morality through performance and imitation, Turkiye revealed what happens when outsider pressure becomes internalized. In Turkiye, the collectivist identity and deep power-distance norms have fostered a public morality shaped by fear of authority and social conformity. Sabahattin Ali’s İçimizdeki Şeytan (The Devil Within) follows Ömer, a character who blames all his failures on an imagined inner devil, symbolizing a culture of externalizing responsibility rather than confronting it. The novel suggested political anxiety getting internalized: individuals comply with power not because they agree, but because standing out feels dangerous under a system built on obedience. Though written in the 1930s, the story still resonates with Turkiye’s contemporary tensions, with media censorship, political polarization, and an authoritarian regime that prohibits criticism. Ömer’s passivity to everything in his life is not only a personal weakness, but also reflects a society in which the collective is shaped through fear and dictatorship. This creates a living condition in which authoritarian power can rise and justify itself. Literature now acts as a cultural mirror, showing moral relativism can be detrimental when combined with power distance to create a country that accepts oppression. Sabahattin Ali’s work illustrated the psychological and cultural roots of depression: through coercion and through the stories people tell themselves to avoid responsibility.

These literary traditions reveal that power does not operate uniformly across cultures, but rather adapts itself to local moral architectures. Oppression can hide behind promises of freedom or disguise itself as duty, harmony, or moral order. Colonial contexts could also complicate this dynamic, causing either performative imitation to hide the original culture or causing cultural fractures instead. The difference is not a clear presence of hierarchy or absence, but the strategies people develop to survive within that hierarchy.

The same moral question repeats itself in many different languages and through many different time periods: how many parts of a person’s identity must be surrendered to survive within the power hierarchy? Culture is a moral architecture that shapes what people believe is possible. Literature preserves these contradictions that emerge from this architecture, holding both ideals and sorrows, showing how people deal with the dissonance between hopes and ambitions with the weight of reality. Reading across cultures is not just comparing plots to plots, or characters to characters, but an insight into the values that govern lives in those cultures. Each literature piece becomes a sneak peek into the mind of the people. They show that morality, hopes, dreams, and aspirations are not universal but built and sculptured through culture and inherited through history.