How to Raise an (Optimistic) American, Part 3
"Think for yourself; If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?"
[This is the third of an 8-part series. Read Parts One and Two about what makes the U.S. system special. We’ll be posting one update a week going forward.]
The third of America’s eight foundations is our culture.
There are two types of cultures: individualistic and collectivistic. America is individualistic, philosophically rooted in the Enlightenment and Western civilization’s intellectual heritage of Judeo-Christian values. The individualistic cultures tend to be in the Western and Northern hemispheres and the collectivistic ones in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres, although there are exceptions, largely caused by colonial expansion.
Individualistic cultures put the individual before the group, whereas collectivistic cultures put the group before the individual. Americans have the freedom to express themselves, and boy, do they! You are allowed to stand out and to follow your own personal preferences in life, expecting that others will leave you alone to do your own thing. You get to make your own decisions (which entails taking responsibility for the outcome). Other cultures expect and sometimes even enforce greater and more pervasive demands for conformity and allow less room for personal expression.
Each way of life has advantages and disadvantages, but millennia of writings underpin this very foundational aspect of our culture. It is rooted as deeply as the Bible, another book with which educated Americans of all religions should be familiar in order to be contextually grounded. One reason for our strong belief in individualism is rooted in the strong religious beliefs of early founders of this country, and their faith in individual salvation. From this individualistic tradition comes our system of laws.
Foundational Reading: On Liberty by John Stuart Mill; “Self-Reliance” by Emerson; All Minus One (Heterodox Academy); Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”
Films: Braveheart, The Patriot, Sons of Liberty miniseries, John Adams miniseries.
[This is the third of an 8-part series. We’ll be posting one new update a week throughout 2024.]