How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
Cause Americans are obsessed with Rugged Individualism.
If you are in trouble, you don’t accept help, much less ask for it. You pull yourself up by your bootstraps and turn your fortunes around with grit and determination using nothing more than the loose change in your pocket.
Thats how anyone that needs help became nothing more than social parasites leeching off the rugged individualistic success of their betters.
Thats why Americans, on the whole, have all but erased empathy and good will towards others.
Its why 1/3rd of the country actively votes for weak, pathetic fascists who poorly playact as strongmen. Its why 1/3rd of the country didnt bother voting, because they have no problem with fasciatic strongmen punishing the weak and the other.
The New Religion of the American Orthodoxy is basically “Fuck you, Got Mine”.
Hyper-individualism is a much more modern idea that may have its roots in our founding but it was exploited by capitalism during the post-war financial boom last century.
Before we had media showing us “how it should be” families lived together throughout their lives, communities helped each other and American towns pulled together and helped each other in a variety of ways. The whole idea of single-family homes was invented by the housing industry to get people to buy three to four times as many homes. To sell this they started leaning harder into the idea that you’re the protagonist, you specifically, you are special just for being American, you are special for wanting your own things (that are advertised to you) and so on.
And before industrialized America and throughout the last several hundred MILLENNIA we were a communal species, it’s why we have so much contradictory hard-wiring that influences how we feel about our social standing, about other people’s feelings towards us, why there are so many people who latch onto authoritarians and fear strangers. These are ideas that run in direct opposition to “rugged individualism” and they are clear signs we’re not living the way we’ve been designed by literally millions of years of evolution.
Capitalism has pried apart the very fabric of our species and weaponized it.
You’re reciting history through rose colored glasses. The whole American dream has been to come here get some land of your own and go do your own thing.
There’s nothing “rosey” about the struggles of pioneering communities in early European settlement in the Americas, nor in the way that people pretty much had to shelter together for the last million years before America’s founding, my well-agreed on thesis is that community is how our species has survived and the idea of single-family homes and individualism is not only a new thing in our history but antithetical to our very nature as a species, which is why “social death” is a mentally and physically harmful condition that we’re all vulnerable to.
The “American Dream” was for people to make their own way, and at the time it was groups of people who settled and built communities, it was the drive for wealth along with the sudden vast tracts of land that came with America that encouraged people to start spreading out into single-family homes and leaving one’s community or family system. If you curl your lip at the idea of staying with your family through your life, that’s understandable, but that’s because families and our perceptions of family has changed. It’s not something easily reversible nor am I making a prescriptive statement, I am describing how things have changed and if I were to prescribe anything at all, it’s that we need to work harder at renormalizing actual socializing, at making and preserving friend groups so we learn and understand emotional intelligence, so challenge ourselves to new ideas and re-learn compromise and compassion, something not just missing from the worst people, but broadly through all ends of the political spectrum. Understanding that our current state of loneliness and depression and anxiety is not a natural part of our lives is an important fact that we can’t lose.
We are not living how we’ve been adapted by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it’s having profound impact on our collective mental health, and it’s allowing the atomization of our political perspectives to disastrous consequence.