In the Soviet film "Road to Saturn," the Russian spy who infiltrated the training program that the Germans were using to train Russian operatives is sitting at the table, drinking with one of the Russian women who are apparently being run in a parallel program. She looks at him with disdain, and says "You even drink like a German...We Russians have the truth, but we live in s--t up to our ears."
One peculiarity of some folks from the large country to the east whom I've encountered is a disdain for brooms. It took me a while to realize that this was a learned aversion, rooted in social distinction. The poor have brooms, the normal folks have vacuums. Similarly, both there and in other places, excessive organization or hygiene practices is sometimes marked as German behaviour. The need to distinguish yourself, for what might be entirely legitimate reasons, from the people of another culture can sometimes cause you to cede to them some objectively necessary aspects of human, as distinct from animal, behaviour. I presume this happens unconsciously.
The only way to keep this from happening is perhaps a culturally distant model. Two random cultures in the Americas might equally cultivate a specific Japanese mental discipline. Or perhaps it is possible to only have completely transcendent cultural models, notions of perfection not associated with any lineage or region. Perhaps America serves for this in the global context, or used to serve for this.
But there does have to be a discipline. Like the spy infiltrating the training program, you do need to have sufficient distance from both your own culture and the culture that is being proposed as the model, and yet be focusing your mental and spiritual energy on the task. As a result, being neither fish nor flesh becomes an objective of the psyche. (And the character is genuinely between two worlds a bit, as demonstrated by an almost unconscious sniff of the knuckle after sipping the drink.)
That focus is perhaps equivalent to the truth that the woman was speaking about. The desire for perfection that is so strong that it makes you consider the lesser perfections (e.g., hygiene, brooms) something that should be renounced. And yet, this focus, this apperceptive awareness, left to its druthers, would likely find those sorts of things useful.