What is most American about America comes down to either money or God. Often both.
Anything important in this country that isn’t all about money is all about God.
The ways we help one another, in particular, are limited to money or God. If you don’t have money, you damn well better believe in God.
In between money and God is the individual. He’s all over the place, and we think we enshrine him, but really, we’re scared as hell of him if he doesn’t dedicate himself to either money or God. Because then, we can’t understand him. Worse yet, we can’t control him.
You say that like it is a bad thing. What are the better alternatives? You didn’t give anything to talk about or debate. I also don’t see anything special about America in that regard either.That is just what people do in mix and match pairs especially in successful countries where you have the option to make money and have the freedom to practice whatever religion you wish while doing so. That is considered extreme progress in terms of human history.
As a libertarian and existentialist, I reject your likely candidate of secular humanism because I don’t think worshiping people in the abstract is any better than worshiping God or money. I don’t think worshiping the Earth or nature is good either because those will also go ‘poof’ someday and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Everything will.We are just transient beings on a tiny planet in minuscule set of islands in the vast sea of the universe. Whatever makes you happy temporarily works for me and the love of God and money are just as good if not better than other alternatives.
I think the closest we can come is to add an o to God and make him into good. A society that is about the good of our fellow beings (and ourselves, natch) is several orders of magnitude better than one that’s about carrots (money) and sticks (God), in themselves and for themselves.
Sounds good in general. Worshiping anything in the abstract is bad but religious fundamentalists are far from the only culprits on that. The problem is that people seem to need religion of some sort so, when people reject traditional religions, you still get things like hippies and PETA members. Give me a devout Presbyterian over them any day even though I am not especially religious myself.
The love of money for its own sake is bad (I think there may be a saying about that) but money is just an abstract representation of value to society and we definitively need that. If you dissociate money and wealth from individual contributors, you end with lovely situations like Communist Russia or Cuba. You could try social democracy like in Scandinavia like many people are sure to point out but the U.S. is not Scandinavia in any way. Give me a mostly homogeneous society of relatively wealthy white people and I would go for it too but most of the world isn’t like that and the U.S. is far too diverse as well as being a breeding ground innovation (based partially on the draw of money) that fuels other country’s ability to suck on those innovation teets to their own benefit.
Don’t get too down on the U.S. It is still the most powerful in the world and fuels a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation that benefits the entire world. It has its problems but it always has because it is constantly assimilating new people and not all ingredients in the pot cook evenly but the general idea is the best anyone has ever come up with.
As fasr as existentialism goes; I always thought the economy itself is more God like and more real than any god you read about in the bible.
Think about it, the more people that believe in the economy, the better off the economy is. And that has a direct positive effect on us. This is something, unlike God, that is actually tangible.
The more people who doubt the economy; well, those effects are obvious too.
They’re both, money and God, still a distraction from our fellow beings. Both demand we treat ourselves and each other, more often than not, as means to an end. We used to deny every earthly joy for God. Now we do it for money. One is no better than the other in that regard.
Ok, what is your philosophy then? You gave us the complaint in a very general way. How do we fix it and how does that work in concrete terms? Serious question.
Step one would be to understand, and combat, their influence in the national political dialogue. Too many issues are either money issues or God issues when they should be about education or roads or health or safety. The place to start step one would be to stop caving in to big business and organized religion.
Money, god, fame, career and thinness seem to be our biggest social motivators. No idea what an alternative society would look like. the reality is we are a society heavily based on racial and class divisions as well as faux individualism. So any attempt at what you describe (loving your neighbor as yourself and living as a community) is probably going to fail.
I don’t have the time nor desire to give you a lesson in the fundamentals of basic economics. However, I will say you might have a better understanding of the value people place on “money” if you actually had to work for it. Money is only an abstraction. A medium by which we exchange value. Your “job” is what you put into the system. In exchange for your work you get money so you can take stuff out of it. All people want the second part where you take stuff out. It’s less common to find people who are excited about the first part where they have to put into it.
I just came back from a vacation in Italy. One thing I found facinating was how some of the greatest and costliest engineering feats of the Roman empire were used to:
a) worship God
b) watch people kill each other for sport
These are the kinds of sites that the world loves to peddle to Americans. So this should come as no surprise. Did you visit any Roman irrigation works, roads, or public education facilities?