Firstly, I do not hate Americans, though aspects of American culture and the extreme nature of their expression disturb me. Americans themselves only disturb me to the extent that they embrace such things. One thing that I will note in passing on this point is that when Americans start to talk about Anti-American sentiments and people hating them they essentially manifest a vanity that itself gives cause to finding America distasteful. This vanity is not confined to America, of course, but it is nevertheless an ugly aspect of culture and national identity.Anna wrote:Your hatred of Americans is unbecoming. Am I to believe Australians are less neurotic?
Now, as to the question of whether Australia is less neurotic than America. The short answer might be: Doh, there is no place on Earth more neurotic than America, but that's not very helpful so I'll only state it for the sake of emphasis and gratuitous sarcasm.
Australia has a different developmental history and dynamic than America. Australia has all the various neuroses observable in western cultures, mitigated, dissipated and diluted by an important factor: our more laconic, even sardonic cultural ethos. The reason these things mitigate what might otherwise make us just like America will become clearer as I attempt to explain what as I see as the essential reasons America is so messed up. Or, maybe not:
Despite the rhetoric of urban myth and even the highest formulations of political, philosophical and literary expression and romance, freedoms do not necessarily make us free. Physical, political and economic freedoms do not necessarily free the mind from its most basic and deleterious movements and instincts. They do not free us from the chains of our own egotistical follies. Indeed, freedoms can even create such chains because they place us in circumstances where social dynamics cause different values and goals, different senses of loss and gain and different challenges and scope for failure. The superficially noble and outwardly egalitarian sentiments expressed in the literature of the Founding Fathers bespoke a certain naiveté regarding human nature. Egalitarian principles juxtaposed with freedom and striving for achievements and a "you can be what you dream of being and indeed should be" social ethos is a recipe for the very neuroses that now constitutes the fabric of American culture. One of the problems with a free, egalitarian society where most of the inhabitants have more or less the same living standard available to them is that where social sameness exists, the smallest of differences stand out. People don't envy those from a bygone era, however wealthy they may have been - they envy their neighbours, those with whom they can compare themselves here and now. Every difference, every fashion, every seeming improvement in the condition of another is a thing to be envied, coveted, desired beyond content because the social ethos is that of improvement and freedom to not be left behind. To not have what one's neighbour has is to be a social failure, or, worse, to be a social dissident. At the very least lack of distaste for not having what others have makes one such a dissident. One must conform in soul, not merely in action and expression.
Equality highlights its own absence. Difference is more palpable. Whatever the injustices inherent in Aristocratic systems, they nonetheless allow people to more comfortably accept their life without the constant burden of covetous dreams. You don't envy those with more because you can't aspire to their station, it being a birthright rather than a status attained within a system of achievement theoretically available to all who would embrace it.
In a modern society in which we have so much but which promises so much more, we are struck by a certain psychological irony: the more we have and can have the more deprived we naturally feel. This is because the contrast between what we have and what is available is more stark. It's presented to us at every possible opportunity. Thus we find poverty in our riches. A simple trip to the local supermarket or homegoods store immerses us in this reality. We see our neighbour buying a second TV and we feel deprived because we don't have one or possibly can't yet afford it. In the 70's no more than 3% of Americans considered a second TV to be a household necessity. By the 90's it was over 75%. Today it is probably nearer 90%. Even our logistical inability to experience all that the average supermarket has to offer in terms of variety of goods is, itself, enough to make us anxious that we are lacking. Industrial, material commerce survives on desires and the very dynamic being addressed here. Advertising is specifically designed to prey on our psychological frailties and anxieties, to heighten our desire and our sense of lacking. Choice and ability to acquire enslave rather than free us when we are unconscious to the psychological forces driving us. This is part of western neuroses generally, but exhibited more completely in America, the land of choice and ability to acquire for no other reason than the social ethos says you should - indeed, must.
The birth of neurosis
When the Founding Fathers declared, wrongly, that they find self-evident that all people are created equal, they barely knew the nature of the genie they were conjuring. The establishment of the American nation brought forth a new social paradigm, one freed from the caste-like structure of Aristocracy, but oblivious to the downside of the materialist Meritocracy is was to become. People could now aspire to be anything they wanted, to have anything they wanted. But, so could their kinsmen....
It wasn't long before the [theoretical] ability to be and have what one wanted became an expectation that you did just that. This dynamic must be seen within the overall context of the exponential growth of material comfort and resources which had by now become the primary measure for "success" in most people's thinking and lives. Expectations and therefore pressure to succeed, tied inexorably to one's sense of fulfillment and therefore self worth and esteem, have conspired to bring about what is a primary cause and manifestation of social anxiety and neuroses in America. This all-encompassing feature of American society declares itself in every aspect of its culture.
The corollary of success driven self-esteem and personal worth is the lack of acceptance, even demonisation of failure or "mediocrity". For all its improvements over Aristocracy, Meritocracy - which is the prevailing social system evidenced in America - yet has it weaknesses. Meritocracy is not built on objectively calculated standards, but rather on simple comparison with others. Equality of opportunity, such that it can even be said to exist in practical terms, had a dark side - it means you have no excuse other than your own incapacities or lack of will for your failures or inability to sublimate your desires. Those that make it, those that stand at the pinnacle of the measure for success are those that have not only made the best of this equality of opportunity, but also by definition those that deserve their success and subsequent social status. Again, the natural corollary of this is that those that fail or fall by the wayside equally deserve their circumstances. If winners deserve their fate, then losers must also. If winners make their own luck, then so too must it be that way for failures. Thus the poor or underprivileged in American society slide into self-loathing, assisted by the sense that such a mentality is a just response to things. One of the reasons that America is so able to blithely tolerate the extraordinary juxtaposition of wealth and poverty and homelessness that exists there is that to militate against such social inequity would be to militate against the very ethos of a nation. The poor cannot militate against the indulgences and excesses and injustices of the wealthy because this would be to militate against their own goals and aspirations, the very source of the sense of esteem and worth they crave. Thus a great many Americans are stuck in a crazed world of impractical and mostly shattered hopes and dreams, self-loathing, envy, despair and ultimately a festering hatred for life and fate. Even those dimensions of society that might ordinary mitigate these dynamics have become a substantial and perhaps unwitting part of them.....
Xianity in America is ostensibly Protestant. Most forms of Protestantism are more worldly in their nature than Catholicism, which has less of a hold on the mind of America. But even Xianity, with its otherworldly ideals and sympathies has aligned itself with the material values and notions of success of the American ethos. American preachers are symbols of this ethos, sometimes vaingloriously so. God rewards goodness by affording those who accept his grace with a place of significance in the social structure - i.e. with wealth and security and social status. Those that acquire such things are automatically deemed beneficiaries of that grace and therefore good persons in themselves. Catholic sympathies are more able to accommodate the idea that a person's social status is not, of itself, a measure of a person's goodness. In this way American Xianity has become an accomplice in the growth of a neurotic nation.
American architecture is also an interesting symbol of this mentality. In Europe one will often see churches and cathedrals towering above the landscape asserting their significance in the psychology of the people, even if only in their sense of history. In America such edifices cower amidst the shadows of the grand cathedrals of commerce. The subliminal effect of this on the psyche of a people can't be ignored and should not be underestimated.
Secularisation has undeniable advantages over societies driven by religious sentiment, but when mixed with the material/success ethos that is the American way, it presents its own dark-side: that of heightened pressure to succeed and make what one can of oneself in this life, because this life is all there is - succeed now or be a failure for all of eternity! Americans cannot relax. Not only must they succeed but they must be seen to be succeeding, for not to be is to be a nobody and a failure; it is to be rejected by your society. This all adds up the most notable form of American neurosis:
Status Anxiety
Ever been to a school or class reunion? How did the prospect make you feel? Be honest! You were terrified about how you'd be perceived, right? Well, even if you weren't, most people are. The person who attends such a gathering is highly unlikely, unless already bathing in the light of significant social success, to be the person who goes about his/her ordinary daily business. It's all a game of pretend where everyone jostles for a place in the acceptance and respect stakes. The sources for status anxiety among Americans (and members of western society generally) are manifold - potential job loss or redundancy, being passed over for promotion, kept waiting for anything one feels entitled to, the envy (and possibly shame) of others doing better, people owning household goods we don't etc, etc. A significant problem people face with this dynamic, even though it is inherently absurd, is that what grants status in specific terms is not a static thing; it is subject to the whims of fashion and commercial fluidity. One may have attained what one wants and needs to be and appear successful only to find that those things are no longer the fashion. One potentially goes from being a status symbol to a source of mirth and derision. The distance between success and failure is difficult to measure. How long is a piece of whim?
One of the more salient features of American culture, which is intimately tied to what I've been speaking about, is the constant seeking for rewards and attention. Americans have an obsession not only with winning but with being noticed and being perceived as a winner (a success). Just about every American feels that if they appear on television, even as part of an audience, that they have somehow increased their social status just by being noticed. "I saw you on telly" is the equivalent statement of "I will treat you with the respect you deserve."
Rich people don't keep working because they are addicted to work, but generally for reasons of respect and esteem; they certainly don't keep working for the money. Success makes you respectable; people treat you better because you deserve to be, even if you happen to be an arsehole. Men do not buy fancy cars to impress and attract women - that is simply a by-product of the real reason - which is the respect they gain from the appearance of wealth and success. Women are attracted to that appearance. Everyone wants to be treated well, to be respected and noticed, to be listed to. In American culture there's only one way to afford oneself that social luxury, and that is to be a success within the parameters of how that is measured in that culture. And that is the trappings of material acquisition. Consumption is not a pragmatic endeavor; people don't shop and purchase for reasons of genuine material need, they do so for purely psychological reasons - to be seen as able to do so, to be seen as successful and thereby gain respect and be treated well. People tend to look down on "window shoppers" for a reason.
One also notices a difference between the way the celebrity cult manifests in Britain and America. In Britain it still contains an aristocratic air, a sense of the famous being born to their station and naturally above all others. There's a certain otherworldliness to their version of this social insipidity. Brits don't necessarily aspire to be like their celebrities, they simply look up to them. In America celebrity is more closely tied to wealth and status. Celebrity in America is a thing to which one can and ought aspire. Celebrities are the epitome of what one ought be. When British celebs screw up, it's simple entertainment; when American celebs screw up, it's an injustice perpetrated on the community itself. If you fall you damage the dream. This is unacceptable.
American culture is full of the fruits of this cultural ethos, from its commerce, to its architecture to its literature - biographies of self made social heroes (millionaires) litter bookstore shelves, likewise lifestyle and culture magazines outlining all the various ways in which one can and must make a success of one's life.
Social status is by no means a new phenomenon; it has existed in various forms forever. There was a time when men would engage in deadly duels over simple matters of status. These days litigation has taken its place; duels are fought in courtrooms under the watchful eye of Judge Judy. But make no mistake! When you watch an episode of Judge Judy you are not watching a legal proceeding. Law is almost peripheral to the real dynamic going on, which is all about a person's acceptability within the parameters of materialistic measure of success and status.
There are others reasons that I often assert the neurotic nature of American culture, but this outlines the main ones. Hopefully this has made my viewpoint a little more clear.
I hereby acknowledge some inspiration for the above from Allain de Botton's documentary on Status Anxiety and also Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", which I highly recommend as an insightful, sometimes prescient analysis of American society.
Democracy in America
