if the united states ever has even a hope of recovering we have to destroy the idea of american individualism. "they don't owe you anything" we owe each other everything actually
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it's very weird and so obviously stupid too?? if we didn't have society-level cooperation 99.99999% of us would never know how to use a single fucking tool.
americans think they'd be born knowing how to build a log cabin. no. you owe it *all* to mfs who *taught others* how to build stuff.
I had a talk with my boss yesterday about taking over the supervisor role for the team I’m on. I told her I’d like to talk with all of them first to make sure they are cool with me in that position. She said nobody’s ever asked to do that before. That being worrying how other people are affected.
I have designed a poster for the upcoming HANDS OFF! protests on Saturday, April 5th. If anyone wants a printable file of it, please message me : ) Find out more about the protests here: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/
you hit the nail right on the head! a society is all about obligations to one another individually and everyone collectively. that's the only way we'll move forward as a species, is together.
I agree with everything you are saying. The only people I'm actively hoping will suffer are Trump and his assorted cronies. I take no joy as a blue dot in a red state when my neighbors suffer directly as a result of Trump being the president they voted for. I think I just feel sad.
I keep saying we need to get rid of American Exceptionalism, same same but different. We are simultaneously more worthy than we feel, and less important. Both can be true.
I think people need to learn that capitalism is not individualism. It’s collectivism of the working class but only works to benefit the wealthy. We’re still all working together for a singular goal, but that goal is to make some loser more money then they’ll ever be able to spend. It’s unnatural.
Under capitalism most people aren’t doing anything fulfilling- they work a job because it pays enough money for them to survive.
Often you’re ridiculed for even expressing you’d like to do something fulfilling instead of lucrative- that seems antithetical to individualism.
People really got a whole hell of a lot less than they expect. I’ve got more than most but a cancer diagnosis would still likely bankrupt me completely
We are a nation built on greed. We were founded by wealthy white men who owned companies and were offended they couldn't maximize their profits. Especially once they realized just how much was here to be extracted and exploited. But if you notice, they are only constrained by "rules and traditions".
"...the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends."
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve often thought that the people now running the country are the ideological descendants of Timothy McVeigh but I’ve never seen it articulated till I read this.
I live in VT and my parents live in a deeply conservative part of a nearby state. When COVID first hit, they wanted me to come home for “safety:” everyone there had started stocking up on ammo and preparing for their neighbors to raid them, but I felt safer here, where the response was mutual aid.
I saw people arguing that humanity survived ancient prehistory by sticking to “fuck you I got mine” and it’s entirely the exact opposite. We are the most successful organism on the planet because we’re willing to work together, with no promise of return or personal self interest. That is how we win.
My kid likes to watch this dog documentary on Netflix and they call dog success “survival of the friendliest”. And honestly, people ultimately do better that way as well. The opposite typically just has short term success.
dogs are actually selfish in nature. ever seen how they'll steal food from one another or other members of the family? meanwhile, cats will form community bonds with new arrivals and go hungry just to ensure other members of the group get to eat.
i always think about the prehistoric burial sites they find with physically disabled people who show clear signs of having been meticulously cared for over years.
Humans will pack bond with anything a sizeable part of military training is making that pack bond with the institution because people don't fight for their country they fight for their friends. The problem is a small subset of humans aren't capable of that and it lets them use it against us.
Jacob Marley had it right in the end: "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business"
The whole "manifest destiny" bullshit we are sold is rugged individuals moving west.
When in reality every time native Americans pushed back against these settlers stealing their land, these "individuals" all of a sudden needed the federal government to send troops in.
there is enough for everyone, it is our responsibility to each other to make sure everyone safe and taken care of. this being a controversial political view still blows my mind.
I have been thinking about things like this a lot lately. Too many Americans have bought into the “American exceptionalism” to such an extent that they don’t realize people in some other countries are far more civilized than we are in many ways.
One of the most poignant pieces of social commentary I've read in years! One boat, many paddles, still tough to learn to row together for the good of the many. Might have something to do with running government as a business, instead of a social service.
So I’m writing a book that’s out next year that is about burnout but also about solidarity, and there is a whole section on our morality about work and why it fucking sucks, and this whole rugged individualist shit comes up A LOT.
Celebrate *Inter*dependence Day, instead of *In*dependence Day! It is because our ancestors stood together against oppression that we exist as a country at all.
We're going to have to keep on doing that as long as the morbidly rich are allowed to hoard wealth at the expense of the People.
Americans are shit at balance and nuance. We don't seem to be able to differentiate between "intolerable harm and violation of boundaries" and "I don't like it but it doesn't hurt me"
Put another way:
You’re not entitled to everything. The world owes you nothing. No one is coming.
You have each other, and that is more than enough and is the very best and, as long as money and things are not more important than people, you’ll be ok. This isn’t socialism; it basic common sense.
so i get the point you’re making but i do think “the world owes you nothing” is the same doomer rhetoric that leads to this toxic individualism. the world has enough for us to all be entitled to peace and security and beauty and love. it is being stolen from us.
I hear you. In my heart, I agree. I continue to see posts from Americans who (even the lefties) are angry at Canada for not permitting asylum claims for average Americans (ie. those without the privilege of a Yale professor). It is my observation that this entitlement is cultural.
the criticism here is not that you didn’t list every entitled behavior ever, it’s that you used absolutes to say nobody deserves anything when actually in order to accept that we owe things to other people we need to be comfortable knowing other people owe them to us too
Well hang on — I never said that Americans aren’t *deserving*. I vehemently hold that you ARE. You’re just not going to be handed what you need from The World. We’re not coming to rescue the… good (any?) Americans from the “bad” ones. Your population has to do the work of saving your own country.
okay sure this is one specific example of an entitled behavior but what i am saying is that your language of “the world owes you nothing” is contributing to the exact problem cait is talking about whether you’re actually an american yourself or not
…and, well, it’s true that no one’s coming. It’s not a threat, it’s a statement of fact on the front page of publications worldwide. But here’s the thing: here we are, trying to encourage *all* Americans to act but instead find irksome responses to “they don’t like us”. It’s not energy well spent.
Friends — we here in The World, share experience re: 🇺🇸. Ex: even in response to a post of support, the one phrase that raises ire & argument is the one that pushes back against entitlement that The World has endured for a long time. It proves the entitlement. Give it some thought. I’m stepping away.
i think you somehow interpreted this as me saying you lack something from the experience of being american but i was actually saying that your superiority complex is misplaced on a technicality. that’s okay though, you’ll think what you want.
Yes I’m tired of living in this “every man for himself” hellscape. We can still of course have individual expression but sorely need community values. Isolation forced upon us by automobile enslavement and suburban land use patterns have been the biggest contributing factors to our demise tbh.
Sorry to reply again so late but are you familiar with February 1917, real success story for Tsar Nicholas, yessiree bob, not sure individualism made the working class rise up and force him to abdicate
but go off!
No problem, I been known to reply to months old posts.
I used tzar as a nod to the Russian component in our little worldwide meltdown.
My point was that people and populations tend to maintain what they are most adapted to. It takes a major shakeup: WWII or Depression to make any great change.
Individualism is great. However, that idea of neighbors helping neighbors has been lost. Which used to be societal glue. We helped one another, because when we needed help, they were there.
That's why landlords like high turnover. Tenants don't band together.
Yes and then we had cold war propaganda that said individualism was better than socialism, and looking after your neighbor is socialism. So we're back to "individualism is bad actually".
take a day to read every headline you see and ask yourself if the writer is trying to unite or divide, if they are trying to convince you that someone "lesser" than you is trying to take things away from you, and ask yourself why anyone would try this hard to pit americans against each other
it's a hard realization to come to because the united states has spent 250 years building a populace that is scared, disenfranchised, poor, sick and angry. it's all part and parcel of the same root cause. politicians want you to be afraid of your neighbors and in competition with everyone you meet
I know a lot of people respond to stuff like this with "we gotta build community but I don't know how" and I'm here to tell you it's as easy as joining a mutual aid group and listening to people when they talk to you. It's a crucial first step in learning that we're all on the same team.
once you admit some of it you have to admit to all of it. the "sex trafficking" hysteria, companies spending millions to keep their workers from unionizing, the anti-DEI push, policies intentionally and artificially limiting the shared pool of resources to make us fight each other instead of them
Trying to establish a union with my colleagues (👋 @ericcarlschwartz.com) and then experiencing the incredibly hostile reaction from our employer was a radicalizing experience.
it's been very troubling to see self-professed liberals gloating over disenfranchised communities having services stripped from them bc they had the misfortune of living in a red state, even if they are literal children. imagine thinking children don't deserve to eat.
I remember seeing some sneering little ‘Humans of Walmart’-style post about a decade ago where the joke was that the people in the picture were poor and fat, and just thinking “Dorothea Lange would have turned you into a pillar of inedible salt”
Honestly, you should care about the humanity even of people you don’t like: imagine gloating that kids are going hungry because of their parents’ vote. But then imagine that maybe their parents didn’t even vote for this. There are liberals in red states too (and they might have it the hardest.)
This is why I get annoyed about the "West Coast and East Coast should just secede, that'll show them". It was an amusing thought for about a nanosecond and then you go oh wait, quite a lot of non-Republicans live in red states, including a significant amount of of Black and Native American folks.
It’s also completely dismissive of the fact that I’ve seen plenty of photos of Nazis marching every couple months in Huntington Beach in liberal So-Cal California. They’re not “safe” there.
It seems ghoulish to me to be raring to abandon these people to the whims of a fascist state and just go either "good luck!" or "move if you don't want to live there"
I remember unfollowing several liberals (including Deanna Troi from TNG) for basically blaming Hurricane Harvey on its victims voting wrong. Sorry our progressive, modern city is in a red state, I guess that makes us all deserving of suffering!
i saw a tweet yesterday talking about the bible belt and how stupid the people there are and i have to think the posters are just thinking of racist hillbillies but the south has the highest black population in the us. they may vote republican but they also have very little education or wealth
Yes, and this isn't just a liberal thing. I remember when Bernie fans were mocking Hillary Clinton for campaigning extensively in the "Confederate states."
then i was thinking about how shitty it is that i have to say “actually there are black people there so you should care” and i just didn’t say anything
This doesn't surprise me at all. This is how liberals always act. Borderline fascist, all the talk about human life and Humanitarian law and all of that rhetoric is always bullshit
You know how Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself? I think there are a lot of self-loathing MFers out there who don’t like themselves and have a twisted malevolent glee at hating their neighbors. A lot of the Evangelical movement is underpinned by the fire-and-brimstone, you’re-going-to-hell
One of the most unsettling but useful things I've learned since getting into zazen and Zen Buddhism is that for a lot of Americans (me included), it is often easier to have compassion for people you loathe than to really, truly feel compassion for yourself.
Baptist sect. They’re going to hell and are willing to take the rest of us with them. (A cousin, raised Catholic, married a Baptist and took to her faith version. Apparently he and his wife are bitter assholes according to my cousin and uncle. They were chagrined at a recent lunch about that fact.)
Especially considering the work Piper has done to raise money and awareness in MO for candidates the national Dems never support. We double the number of people uncontested seats in MO. Voted yes on raising Minimum Wage and women’s health. Jeff City ignored both. MOdems get sh!t from everyone.
This is what guts me, for so many reasons. What I’ve learned when this comes up IRL is that my response of
“I hate MAGA politics & all the ruthless bigotry around it. But I also don’t want to be a ruthless bigot reveling in anyone’s suffering. I won’t dehumanize myself or anyone else that way” 1/2
It usually quiets them for a moment, long enough to for their demeanor to shift —and that’s when I mention it’s the power structure & systemic issues behind this that needs to go. That’s what’s trapping all of us.
If they did vote for the Democrats who actually care about people that don't have a lot of money versus the Republicans that wanna give trillion dollar tax speaks to the rich and pay for it by ripping off the poor that's the reality dude! 🤨
No one has ever truly done anything on their own. Everyone was taught by others, supported by others. People forget how much we're all connected and how much everything in the world is connected because we spend time by ourselves, but everything on this planet relies on something else to live.
i always remember hearing about a friend of my moms who was in the peace corp or something in kenya after college and had to be told like, not hiring someone in the community to clean her american house would be seen as hoarding wealth, not “self sufficiency” or whatever we prefer to call it
idk it made me realize that we have a really weird and messed up view of the service industry in this country and it’s definitely not like ‘pro-worker’ to believe hiring people to provide certain services is spoiled and lazy.
Breaking this culture of "I got mine, fuck you" is a problem I can't even begin to fathom how to solve, nor do I even understand how we got to this shitty place to begin with.
No one is asking you to give up individuality, thats the point. Individualism is the idea that no one matters except the individual. Only assholes subscribe to that.
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americans think they'd be born knowing how to build a log cabin. no. you owe it *all* to mfs who *taught others* how to build stuff.
That's why kids who are orphans are at such high risk. There's no generational information passed down to them.
Often you’re ridiculed for even expressing you’d like to do something fulfilling instead of lucrative- that seems antithetical to individualism.
dogs are like trucks in american mythos.
When in reality every time native Americans pushed back against these settlers stealing their land, these "individuals" all of a sudden needed the federal government to send troops in.
We depend on each other for everything.
#LoveYourNeighbor
And I think now with social media they achieved to distance people even further
We have to destroy Capitalism.
That’s the ideology that American individualism stems from.
so much this
We're going to have to keep on doing that as long as the morbidly rich are allowed to hoard wealth at the expense of the People.
You’re not entitled to everything. The world owes you nothing. No one is coming.
You have each other, and that is more than enough and is the very best and, as long as money and things are not more important than people, you’ll be ok. This isn’t socialism; it basic common sense.
We have to work together for common cause. For some that requires small sacrifices, for others larger sacrifices.
But nothing's coming with you in the end, so give while you can.
Brought to you by @drharmony.bsky.social
https://linktr.ee/revolution2025
but go off!
I used tzar as a nod to the Russian component in our little worldwide meltdown.
My point was that people and populations tend to maintain what they are most adapted to. It takes a major shakeup: WWII or Depression to make any great change.
That's why landlords like high turnover. Tenants don't band together.
Tl;dr it's a white people thing across the board.
then i was thinking about how shitty it is that i have to say “actually there are black people there so you should care” and i just didn’t say anything
Sigh.
“I hate MAGA politics & all the ruthless bigotry around it. But I also don’t want to be a ruthless bigot reveling in anyone’s suffering. I won’t dehumanize myself or anyone else that way” 1/2
No one deserves to go hungry, that's a shit world. But by liberals' own reasoning, those most in need vote the "correct" way!
Like, idk, maybe encouraging empathy for those living under a corrupt regime of oligarchs might have some selfish benefits in the long run.
Ty, Cory Booker!! ❤️
Good luck getting GREED out of the gene pool.