[Link] The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty

What Happens When Societies Don’t Invest in Civilizing Themselves?

By Umair Haque

A friend, recently, told me a very interesting and telling story. She’d recently been in the States, where she was taking the subway to work, and she fell down, injuring her wrist. Not a single person helped her up — they all stared at her angrily as if to say: “you are going to make us late for work!!”. (Ironically, the train was full of doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers).

She contrasted that with London — where, the last year, when she’d broken a limb, and had a cast on, people would regularly, and very courteously, give up their seats on the tube.

It’s a tiny example. And perhaps you will say it’s just a meaningless anecdote. But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimiaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?

See that pic above? It’s kids huddling under bulletproof blankets, doing “active shooter drills”. That’s what I mean by “unique and spectacular cruelty”. No kid should — ever — have to be traumatized and victimized like that, and indeed, even kids in Pakistan and Iran aren’t.

(And no, I don’t mean “all Americans”. I just mean something like “more” or maybe “enough”, if you want to think statistically, that the distribution of cruelty has fatter tails and a higher peak.)

My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.

Read the full article: https://eand.co/the-origins-of-americas-unique-and-spectacular-cruelty-74a91f53ce29