Collective Progress and the Maximalist American Dream
When the politically-conscious, historical-revisionist class of people claim that they somehow disagree with the policies and actions of “America”, who exactly are they referring to? Is it the ruling faction, the collective decisions of whomever on the right-left dichotomy is making the big decisions? Or maybe the politicians, touched by the dark hand of business, driven by a need for re-election. Perhaps it's the people, stupid and self-certain, self-destructive and unaware. Or maybe only some of the people, the archetypal “other half” that simply doesn’t get it and brings the other half down as a result.
My view, however, is that the real subject is neither person nor group nor politician nor leader. It is the conceptual “America”, the country defined loosely in 1776, the great Western experiment in free market liberal democracy, that deserves the largest amount of criticism from this school of thought. In every way, the growth and expansion of America represented a departure from the norm in ways that had irreparable effects on the human relationship with ourselves and our existence. That sounds overstated and self-aggrandizing — but it is the myth of America, the ethos around what the country means for human beings that has demonstrable power in the world that we live in. But that power comes at a cost.
The problem is both historical and biological. Our understanding of human cognition, although still fairly opaque in technical meaning, likely points to some sort of evolutionarily-based predisposition towards self-betterment. It is what compelled early humans to make an effort to organize and collaborate. While this is not to say that progress is the sole reason for existence (such a claim would not be rooted in any real theory), the fact that civilization did emerge, the fact that we gave up a life of hunting and gathering in order to plant crops and domesticate animals points towards some human need to work to make our lives better.
The conundrum of this theory, however, is the fact that this view of our self-domestication and the domestication of the world around us as the means of satiating some biological need is that the theory behind it is flawed. The Agricultural Revolution, while beneficial to the few who could reap the benefits without working hard, ended up setting the roots of social stratification that would come to define society forever. It is the dilemma of progress, civilization at the cost of one’s ability to escape from it. But perhaps that conflict is also the fundamental nature of progress — it’s neither understood nor desired, but it had the power to compel us to fall into a system through which humanity as a whole was able to progress. It is this drive towards collective betterment, to find actualization in menial tasks, to succumb to exploitation, that is perhaps the unique trait of human beings.
The America that was founded in 1776 and the America of today, at as high a level as one could imagine, is the epitome of that innate drive for self-betterment taken to an unregulated and unwieldy extreme. We seem to suffer collectively from hindsight bias when looking at the path that the United States took over the 19th and 20th century. The American experience of state-building not as an initiative of those endowed with power, but as a product of “the people” (whatever that might’ve meant) was such an extraordinary departure from the historical and contemporary norm.
If you frame the Revolutionary War with these two ideas in mind, this predilection towards irrational collective betterment and the absolutely unprecedented nature of early America, you can begin to frame the United States not as a departure from the Old World system of monarchy or despotism, and rather as a discontinuous jump in the capacity to strive towards this sense of collective progress. Instead of relying on societal growth at the expense of self-subjugation, America promised that the self-interest of the individual was indistinguishable from the interest of society as a whole. The taxes that King George leverage against the colonies were not grounds for revolution because they were extortive (in fact, British citizens paid far higher taxes than the colonists did) but rather because the colonists saw the potential of this new land to
It was built on the unique and improbable coincidence of a resource-rich, overly-spacious country in which native inhabitants couldn’t organize large-scale resistance for reasons of microbiology.
The series of events that happened following the founding of the country — westward expansion under the auspices of Manifest Destiny, the expansion and subsequent implosion of American slavery, the massive industrialization of the northeast, Fordism in all its forms, the World Wars, the emergence as a global Superpower, post-Reaganomics capitalism — were all efforts to see the world not as a where one is simply able to act of their unique desires, but rather where those desires deserve to be a part of the collective meaning and myth of the nation. They were the maximalist dreams of a people who were essentially given free rein over a land of pure and absolute excess.
And it is that exact characteristic that is at the center of what makes the American myth so disastrous. It’s why this country is at the center of the growth-based global economic system that is directly to blame for climate change. It is the reason why the election of Donald Trump was so incomprehensible to half of voted in. The American myth is based on the views of the individual somehow manifesting into the world around us, of anything being possible because the collective is somehow “on your side”. Even though American history is a history of antagonizing marginalized groups, those groups still believed in the corrective power of shifting collective beliefs. It’s why people direct blame at “America” collectively. It’s why Martin Luther King, Jr. called on “America” to redirect course (and not simply the racist ones).
It’s why the institution of American slavery feels so materially different from serfdom in Russia, for example, which was outlawed only two years prior to slavery. The conflict it presented was explicity in conflict with their individual idea of collective progress. When the Civil War broke out, the South didn’t include much about the economics of a post-slave society in their Declarations of Secession — they emphasized how their individual rights both as ideologically-cohesive states and as slave-owning individuals were not being protected by the government. There was a disconnect between the hyper-self-interested ruling elite in the South, who believed that their system of King Cotton both gave purpose to a lesser race and provided the nation with economic prosperity, and the government they felt instrumental in helping grow.
Looking at the subsequent history of America, our involvement in foreign wars, the development of massive corporations that exported our unique form of consumerism and industrialization, our factionalism and polarization— they all can be seen as the late stages of a nation that was built on the idea that individual self-interest is akin to the good for the collective. While Adam Smith posited that it is rational self-interest that allows the economy to run smoothly, the American way says that it is unbridled self-interest, the self-interest at the extremities, that somehow pushes society forward the most. As we move into an era dominated by the Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, whose companies have gained the capacity to control the very thoughts of their users, this question of self-interest and collectivization begins to take on new meaning. Perhaps the real dilemma of progress and humanity is actually between the self and the collective.
