Can we talk about America/US-centrism for a minute?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is a topic that immediately tends to incite some strong emotions in people, but I’d like to ask the courtesy of the community here to keep the discussion intelligent, respectful, and as dispassionate as possible, as I think there’s some genuinely interesting discussion to be had here.

“America” as an entity (comprised of all its inhabitants’ collective endeavors to date) has accomplished a lot. I don’t think anyone would deny that a ton of important scientific/technological, as well as cultural/artistic innovation has come out of it, which has ended up becoming pretty important to all humanity (I mean… it created the Internet, for one). It continues to have a huge influence on the rest of the world (the US presidential election was relatively big news in every country, but that’s hardly ever true for anywhere else). We also continue to export our culture globally via professional entertainment, as well as shaping a large segment of the global internet.

If you’re someone who happened to be born in America, it’s natural to assimilate a certain amount of automatic cultural pride for the accomplishments of those who came before as well as contemporaries, regardless of what we have done or will do in our own lives to actually contribute (if anything). That’s of course one problem with that type of pride off the bat - it can inflate the self-worth of individuals who haven’t in any way earned that level of recognition.

It’s also simply arrogant and uncouth when anyone either asserts or implies that their lives or their desires/will/whatever is more important than anyone else’s because they are American. That’s an inherently insulting position to take and undercuts the idea of equanimity for all, which most of us at least claim to support. The “USA #1 no matter what!” attitude can look ugly and shameful, especially when empathizing with outsiders who feel disgusted/ostracized by it.

But from the self-preservation perspective of the animal, doesn’t arrogance and narcissism kinda work? Hasn’t it gotten us where we are today? Someone who acts like he has the right to take the lion’s share of resources, and steps up and takes them without asking anyone’s permission or making any pretense of dividing them equally, is typically going to get the lion’s share of resources. I think the truth of that is self-evident, but it’s not one we really like to face or talk about. Because we do have empathy for the ones who have been left out or taken advantage of, and we feel shame if we realize we’ve internalized that attitude at all.

The past is even harder to reconcile, because we know our ancestors did some pretty horrible things by our standards. But… they won. They not only survived but thrived, and we still benefit from their sometimes cruel and always rapacious attitudes to this day. And we know it.

So why aren’t all people such vocal candidates for their own self-interests and self-importance? And is it simply because the Industrial and Digital Revolutions have brought such abundance of resources that we now feel a greater urge toward egalitarianism than in the past? Because if there were a true “it’s us or them” situation, anyone on any side of that situation should reasonably be expected to pick “us”, and to fight for their own self interests - to the death if necessary. But in the world of today since we feel no need to fight (mostly, but not always), that’s the only reason the dynamic has somewhat shifted.

Thoughts?

2

Hmm, the OP really took a turn. I not only agreed with you but thought you were pretty eloquent for the first few paragraphs.

Well it’s advantageous in some contexts, and not in others. Which is probably why there’s a distribution of such traits in the population.
If you’re asking my opinion, I would say, in the modern world it probably hinders more than helps.
And I wouldn’t necessarily lump jingoism and nationalism in with arrogance or narcissism. They’re different things.

Who is the “self” in this? Me? My family? My extended social group? My species?
Why should self-interest mean the people born within a particular border?

3

Well, I’m trying to honestly examine all sides of it, not really promote a particular viewpoint.

In this context it would be a particular nation-state, to the extent that any particular policy, military action, or other action benefits members of that nation-state more than non-members, and may even be detrimental to non-members. To take it to the utmost extreme: say either every member of your own country had to die, or everyone else in the world did. You would pick your own country to survive every time given that choice, as would anyone else in their sane mind, right? While real-world examples aren’t so black and white, I’m sure there are plenty of valid shared interests/concerns that have impacts on all members of any specific nation-state.

4

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and Americans wear it like a badge of honor. Not only do we exhibit excessive pride, but have pride in the display of pride. Look at us, see how proud we are!

5

It depends on to what extent want to be able to get on with non-Americans.

6

It’s interesting that you bring up a religious angle. If pride is an effective method for one group gaining extra resources and attention over another group, what is the downside / disincentive which should push that group to not feel and act pridefully? The imagined threat of eternal damnation? There has to be a better reason than that.

7

Yes indeed, and the globalization of culture makes this issue out of necessity a more delicate one than it was in the times when a group of people could huddle together in privacy and say “Fuck those guys, we’re gonna kill them and take all their stuff.” And everyone would be OK with that, because as far as they were concerned it was an “us or them” dichotomy.

8

I’m too slothful to bother with pride.

9

No. Poor example right off the bat.

I would pick my country to die because rest of the world constitutes most of the human population, genetic diversity and economy. The world would bounce back much more quickly.

Yes of course I care more about myself, my family and people I know than random strangers.
But none of us are going to be around that long. I can’t relate to anyone that would put a few decades of life (in a post-apocalyptic world) ahead of the fate / well-being of their whole species. Isn’t that a thing movie villains do?

10

See now I feel that you’re being deliberately dishonest because you know it’s not a choice you’ll ever have to make in reality, and even if you somehow did, you know you wouldn’t be bound to what you’re saying here.

But unless you’re truly suicidal, I just don’t believe there’s any way in hell you would choose ceasing to exist forever (as well as choosing that fate for all of your loved ones), over survival, when it actually came down to it, because of some sort of lofty forward-thinking idealism you claim to value. It’s just not human. A human with the will to live will never make that choice when it comes down to it.

11

Well obviously there’s nothing I can say to you if you are just going to assume I’m being dishonest (wilfully or otherwise).
But I didn’t just say I’d choose my country to die, I gave reasons why.
And as for choosing to cease to exist, I’m going to die anyway. I’m old enough to be at peace with that.

So if it’s just a push of a red button, then fine, I logically set out the reasons as given above, and then I press the button.

If, OTOH, the deaths are going to be slow and painful, then sure that changes things. And we can contrive some set of circumstances where visceral fear and pain could make me ignore the rational part of my mind for a moment and take the other option. I’m not sure how this helps your point though (we could make anyone do anything with torture).

12

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Wait, so rigamarole, by your logic, even if the choice is just you + family or the entire rest of the world, you’d pick the former? So you’d choose the end of Homo sapiens just so you and family could wander around bored for a few years?
And you think anyone that disagrees with this choice is “insane” or “dishonest”? Wow.

13

Does it? What did some jerk tiger ever accomplish?
Look up the game-theory concept of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”. The general gist is that based on the information available to two prisoners, they will act independently in a manner that they believe maximizes their utility. However, their utility is actually maximized when they coordinate and work together.

In simple terms, arrogance and narcissistic self interest often don’t work as well as cooperation and coordination. Even if you can beat anyone, you can’t beat everyone by yourself.

14

This sounds like a variant of the old competition-versus-cooperation question - do species do better by competing for resources, or cooperating to get them? From what I’ve seen of humanity, there’s an optimum point somewhere between the two, but damned if I can figure out exactly where it is.

The US has too many people on the “competition” side, usually because they’ve never really had to compete for resources in any kind of major way, and don’t realize that most of them are not the winners they think they are. See every attempt at a Libertarian town/city that’s been tried thus far.

15

There are plenty of things worth dying for, and history shows that people often voluntarily choose to die for them. Country, freedom, close friends, family, people in general, abstract ideas, justice, etc. Everyone dies eventually, and a lot of things are more important than pushing that date out a little further.

16

That’s a good point, and I ended up thinking a bit more about the competition/cooperation duality later last night after posting. And that’s definitely part of the downside of the pride complex when it’s inherited rather than earned.

What makes it difficult is just how blurry the line is between when it’s appropriate to cooperate and when it’s appropriate to compete. We clearly need a lot of help from each other to sustain our standard of living. Yet if there’s a limited amount of X/Y/Z important resources (and they often are limited), you can bet that as Americans we’re generally gonna say "yeah, those are ours,"and do what it takes to secure them for ourselves even if that means others will be deprived of them.

And how can you reasonably expect anyone to think otherwise? You can say “that might piss off a lot of the other people in the world, and we do depend on them in various ways, so it might be a bad idea because it might cause them to shun us.” But that argument feels less compelling when there’s not much historical precedent for it.

17

This is huge. American marketing and American Exceptionalism tell each and every one of us that we’re a 1% winner, not a 99% loser. But just like the lucky trust fund babies born on third base, we end up with a skewed version of reality as a result.

The Baby Boomer generation and those at its trailing edge such as myself were born, though no effort of our own, into a truly golden moment. It’s easy to spend your life assuming the world of your youth is the only possible and correct world; any degradation from that is pure treason by the Fates.

There’s plenty of research that supports the idea that people care more abut Us than Them.

The societal level problem is that for humans, Us at the deep emotional intrinsic level is limited to about the 150 folks whose names and stories you can really remember. Everybody else on the planet is at best a Neutral Non-entity, or at worst a Hated Them.

There is also good research that individuals differ in how willing they are to go beyond (or below) the typical intrinsic emotional 150 to embrace (or not) a larger society.

For a psychopath, Us=themselves only and Them = the rest of humanity. Most commonly Us=my immediate family, semi-Us is my friends plus some of my socioeconomic layer of my town, and all else is neutral or Them. Only the farthest tip of the human bell curve will sing Kumbaya for the entirety of humanity equally.

Lastly, there’s pretty good psychological evidence that traditional Left vs. Right political leanings have a lot to do with how big any individual’s circle of Us is. Small Us = Right-leaning, large Us = Left-leaning.

When Americans talk about invading Slobovistan to take the oil, it’s not that they hate Slobovistanians. It’s that they don’t matter. In many ways being a Neutral is more dangerous to some abstract Other than is being an active Them. If they are a Them, at least we can talk about it, discuss whether the Them label is really appropriate, etc. With Neutrals the questions don’t arise. We bulldoze Neutrals with no more thought than when we bulldoze a weed-covered lot to put up a building.

18

Not all things in the various scriptures are there out of blind faith in a deity. The fact that the founders and disciples of the great religions reached certain conclusions about moral compass does not necessarily restrict their teachings to religious dogma.

Theft is also “an effective method for one group gaining extra resources and attention over another group”, which does not by itself make it praiseworthy.

19

Here are some major reasons America has done so well:

[ul]
[li]We are protected by oceans on both sides, so we are hard to invade. [/li]
[li]We have a gigantic population for a developed nation (about 2.5x more people than Japan, 4x more people than Germany the 2nd and 3rd most populated OECD nations). [/li]
[li]Due to immigration, we invite talent from all over the world.[/li]
[li]We have a lot of natural resources [/li][/ul]

But really, it isn’t “America” that is great. It is a handful of cities and states that are great. The OP discusses advances in science and culture. But really, don’t many/most of those advances come from California and New York? Even then, it isn’t Those states, it is the cities in those states (San Francisco bay area, Los Angeles, New York City)?

Those 3 cities seem to play a huge role in the US and its contributions to science, technology, culture, art, etc. There are other cities obviously (Seattle, Raleigh, Boston, etc) but those 3 seem to be the big 3.

For example, in my field of biotechnology I once looked into the 10 most innovative cities. I believe 3 were within the bay area (Oakland, San Jose & SF proper). LA was one, San Diego was one, NYC was one. The other 4 were I believe Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia & Raleigh. So basically 5 of the 10 cities were within California (the list may have changed, this was a decade ago).

But even there, it is only a tiny minority of people in those cities who are actually contributing. Lots of people live in SF, LA, NYC and are not contributing to science, art, culture, technology, etc.

In a way it is far more honest to say ‘a tiny % of people in a tiny % of cities in a tiny % of states within the United States have made America great’. Using that as a justification to take whatever we want doesn’t sound like a winning strategy.

20

Interesting perspective overall. With a lot of merit. Thank you.

Ref the snip above, what makes America great(-er than the immediate competition TBH) is the overall system *plus *all the natural advantages you mention.

As you say, only a small percentage of people and organizations max-perform the system.

But it’d be an error to say the greatness comes exclusively from e.g. Silicon Valley or from the NJ / MA pharma/biotech clusters. Their success comes from them being embedded in a system of national finance, national markets, national regulatory stability, national quick and honest courts and law enforcement, national willingness for labor mobility, etc. In each of those areas and many more I didn’t list we have advantages over most, if not all, of our peers and near-peers.

If for whatever reason somebody or something pulls any one of those national bricks out from the foundation, the whole edifice starts to totter. The more bricks that are removed or eroded, the more systemic failure begins to replace systemic success; vicious circles begin to displace virtuous ones.
Another factor …

One of our largest advantages is a huge dollop of “first mover” advantage left over from the years immediately after WWII when we were the only advanced economy still standing.

Unlike the others mentioned above this asset is a wasting asset. It gave us a head start that if intelligently invested upon and continually reinvested could potentially keep us ahead of the curve for centuries. If instead we ever decide one day to eat the dividends instead of reinvesting them, the advantage will rapidly erode.

IMO we re-invested the dividends up until somewhere around 1980 plus/minus 10 years, and have eaten most/all of them since. The wasting asset isn’t used up yet, but it’s going that way quickly.

As much as people my age (late 50s) are amazed at how increasingly challenging the economy has become over the course of our careers, the younger folks ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. International politics will follow the same course of increasing difficulty from our POV.

As we saw with Britain post-WWII, the belief in exceptionalism and even more the belief in entitlement to exceptionalism will be a lagging indicator versus reality. Which has lots of risky consequences.