What is the ethos of the Human culture? Like enjoying life is the core aspect of the Italian culture and having a good reputation of the Chinese one.
Order: a Human is basically someone that put things into order (including the order itself).
All our culture is a product of this basic drive: we build our language because we want to put words into order, we build our calendar because we want to put time into order, we build our society because we want to put social relations into order.
Harmony and rationality are vital needs for us, like air and water: we shun anything that is arbitrary – because it is unstable: it could vary from subgroups and generations – and, when building an element of our culture, we are not satisfied until we find a solution that is at the same time internally and externally coherent – this is why we are fond of recurring themes, like the Four Elements, that help us tying up our cultural system into an organic unity –.
Without order, we are just a bunch of poor bastards unable to understand themselves, disloyal to each other and exposed to every stroke of luck.
Putting things into order is of course not something specific to Humans – all living beings, by definition, shape matter according to their own internal order: think of a prion, the simplest form of life, that folds other proteins replicating its structure –, but, while animals are mainly driven by insticts and Foreigners by historical traditions and fashions, only Humans consciously and systematically put everything into order, according to principles that they find out by themselves and that they can render an account for.
This is why humanity can be simply defined as the highest form of life and a Human as a person in the full sense of the word.
Since we put order (something external and objective) above anything else, individualism can’t find fertile ground in our minds: nobody is an end in himself.
But at the same time individual initiative is fundamental: the life purpose of every Human, from his first to his last day, is being author of our culture and the world. You are meant to discuss any element of the Human culture whenever it makes sense to you, but you can only change one thing at a time, until it becomes common sense, in order to avoid confusion and conflict: if you disagree with A, you have nonetheless to accept B, C, D and so on.
In other words, our culture evolves like biological organisms: through single mutations occurring in different times and places, not through cataclysmic events.
Il Vento d'Oriente 