Thus many Americans loudly protest that the people who stormed the Capitol building are ‘not who we are’ when, in fact, history suggests that it is indeed who they are.

An anti-government and rabid libertarian outlook has long been a feature of the USA. Trump has merely tapped into this for his own advantage.

Hazel Kutkue writes that Papua New Guineans are effectively stuck in a cultural hole, one which is helping both create and nurture a rampantly corrupt culture in many spheres of society.

She is right but very, very few people are going to be willing to admit this.

Like the Americans they will cry ‘this is not who are'. At one level that is true too but I think that both things are true and exist simultaneously.

Culture, rather like God is supposed to be, is in us and around us all the time. It is just that we never seem to notice this.

For this reason, the bad things in our various cultures can persist largely unacknowledged and unchallenged.

The bad things are just too painful or shameful to openly admit or, if we do, we describe them as aberrations, not the logical outgrowth of our cultures.

This is true of all cultures, not just that of PNG.

In that sense many of us, perhaps most of us, live a perpetual lie, preferring to emphasise the good in our cultures and avoiding admitting our collectively culpability for the bad.

This tendency has been the source of enormous suffering and grief over the centuries and, sadly, seems likely to be so again in the future.

So I congratulate Dr Kutkue for stating the truth. Sadly, I fear, few will be listening.