House of Eratosthenes

I’ve been thinking about this today some more. Words mean something.

I think we use the word “American” in much to generic a manner. I think we need to deal with this in an honest manner. We need to do away with the hyphenated American moniker and form just two classes in this country. “Americans” and “US Citizens”.

“Americans” are those who are here to take responsibility for their lives. Red, Yellow, Black, or White. “Americans” are here to strive to better their lives and those around them. “Americans” live to not just better themselves, but they also live with a sense of gratitude for the price paid for their opportunity. “Americans” are proud to be “Americans”. “Americans” don’t live with their heads in the sand. They know that there have been mistakes made, yet they have a dogged determination to not repeat those mistakes and are willing to embrace all who have like aspirations. They know that by advancing and achieving they can give back, be a contributor.

“US Citizens” seem to have a tendency to castigate blame and seek ways to look to the faults of others to deflect their own shortcomings. “US Citizens” attempt to gain their strength by focusing on what they feel they are owed rather than what they can achieve.

Seems it would be much simpler to identify just two classes rather than five or ten or however many.

Conclusion:

All Americans are US Citizens, but not all US Citizens are yet Americans

There is a dangerous irony I see going on here, one in which it’s now likely for an American to lose his or her American-ness without even realizing this transformation is taking place. But there’s a bit higher level of difficulty involved in a non-American citizen gaining it.

For starters, there are — for a number of reasons — those who work to make this happen. At this point, I think that would be difficult to deny. All these phrases being tossed around breezily, without thought, mostly for the purpose of indicting America for this or that transgression and expunging national pride from any soul who may still have some.

And then there are all the subtly different notions of community. It seems to me when we fail to realize how many different ways you can regard yourself as being part of a community, we set ourselves up for this easy downward slide to take place. Some of the phrases that can be targeted by the anti-Americans are “here to strive to better their lives and those around them,” and “by advancing and achieving they can give back.”

It brings to mind what I thought of as a very awkwardly written passage in Atlas Shrugged, the one right before Hank Rearden signs over the “gift certificate” releasing his trademark rights to the metal he has invented. The statist bureaucrats supply the necessary motivation for this by blackmailing him, using the information they’ve collected about his extramarital affair. Rearden agrees to sign, not because he cares about his own reputation or that of his wife, but because he cares about his girlfriend Dagny Taggart.

Ayn Rand was cheating on her husband as she wrote this, so that’s probably why the passage comes off as so messy and incoherent. But there’s an interesting point to be made here about statism. Hank Rearden tells the bureaucrat something about “you must know the way you threaten to portray us is a lie, because you know if we were the kind of people you are ready to show us to be, your blackmail scheme would not be effective.” Or words to that effect. Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, being Ayn Rand heroes, care about the individual. But they also care about others. Rearden, threatened with an injury to his own reputation and nobody else’s, wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent damage to what others thought of him. He cares about Dagny. The bureaucrats who control the state would like to expose Rearden and Dagny as people who care nothing for others, only for themselves.

Sound familiar?

And so Americans are open to attack when we regard this sense of “helping others” as an all-or-nothing thing. It’s not.

Suppose you’re a U.S. citizen and, also, you’re an American. In addition to those, you’re a farmer with eighty acres. I move in next door, with another eighty acres, and show in a number of ways that I know very little about farming. You have a lot of options at your disposal.

You could let me learn from my mistakes, that I should be working sixteen hours a day plowing my fields just like you, rather than the six-and-a-half I put in before sitting on my back porch watching you work with a Martini in hand. You could just let events unfold. That might be fatal.

So we have a predicament here. But I think most people, before they’ve been poisoned by outsiders, approach this in a very common sense way: You should mind your own business, for the most part. Maybe come over and ask if something’s wrong with my equipment, do I need any spare parts. But when my harvest falls short in the fall, let me shiver and starve my way through the winter. At the same time, though, when things are really bad and I come knockin’, you’ll offer help like any American would.

Maybe I’ll have to get an earful. I think that would be most appropriate. But the first priority would be to make sure people get the assistance they need, when they need it — confident in the expectation that the lesson has been taught, and next year you’ll see new farming habits and longer plowing sessions on my spread.

That’s a very basic sense of community. You were the ant, I was the grasshopper, and we shared a sense of community strong enough for me to learn my lesson.

But here’s the funny thing about human nature. A mile away from us, there is another couple of neighbors in exactly the same situation. And they resolve it with a stronger sense of community: The ant ended up plowing the grasshopper’s fields for him.

At the annual county fair, the four of us get together and comment on this. You and I are a community. The other pair of neighbors is a commune. They have, in a very subtle way, lost their American-ness. They are the U.S. citizens of whom XtnYoda speaks, because they no longer enshrine American values.

And here’s how it will work every single time: They will say we should have resolved our conflict the way they resolved theirs. And they’ll probably convince us. They will be more inclined to use bullying maneuvers than we will. Why would they not? When you have a stronger sense of community, you just feel like a better person.

And you want everyone, within line-of-sight or not, to do things the way you do them. That’s what a strong sense of community is all about!

But you and I might say…with our way, Morgan eventually learned to be a better farmer. With your way, he would not have learned this. It’s a good point. It will be shouted down, sneered-at, shunted aside very casually.

Every single time.

And most of the time that scenario plays out, the COMMUNE-ists will win. It’s a human flaw. Unless we pay very close attention to what is happening here, we will discard a productive and beneficial sense of community, one that embraces the value of individual responsibility, in favor of a “stronger” but decidedly inferior and harmful sense of community that derides and derogates the value of individual responsibility.

And you know what will really shove that over the top? When we all get tractors, combines, harvesters. When the farmer’s day starts to shrink from sixteen hours, to twelve, to ten. That has a deleterious effect on this more modest, but more beneficial, sense of “community.” What it does, is make you socially into a bigger butthole should you choose not to plow your lazy neighbor’s field for him — because now you can.

Individual responsibility suffers. Individuality itself suffers. And ultimately, American nationalism suffers.

And I think that’s what has been happening here. We’re about a century past the later stages of the industrial revolution, give or take. Our sense — our SENSES — of community have become welded together so we are presented with a false dilemma, all moderate compromises artificially removed. We can become collectivist communists or individualist buttholes. To plagiarize the timeless metaphor about teaching a man to fish, this middle-of-road option has now been removed. We can let him starve, or give him all our fish.

And so the Americans of whom XtnYoda speaks, are constantly under attack, with their willingness to help others used against them. Citizens bully Americans into becoming just citizens and giving up their American-ness. Americans do not do very much, nor are they able to anymore, to encourage citizens to become Americans.

There is an accelerating quality to this sad metamorphosis. As this sense of community becomes more militant, people begin to get the idea that they are “giving back” simply by becoming an additional voice in micro-revolutions that are already several voices strong. A great example of this is one of the favorite recurring platitudes from the utterly anti-individualist social-butterfly Obama fan: “I want to be part of this.” And so across the landscape there arises a feeling that each individual has contributed, by “helping” to make something happen that would have happened anyway. This poisons the idea that an individual can make a difference, while offering a toxic disguise that what is taking place is precisely the opposite — we start to make what are thought of as “differences” by adding our support to things that would’ve hummed along just fine without us.

And so we stop being Americans, by bringing a stop to any belief in ourselves.

Which ultimately means we want everyone else to stop believing in themselves, as well.

Conclusion? The strongest sense of “community” is a relatively moderate affair, a hybrid of collective and individual values, drawing hungrily from the latter and only slightly from the former. Over time we have allowed the darker side of human nature to ensure there are more citizens than Americans, and more Americans becoming merely citizens every day. Because individuals will allow other individuals decide to be individualists or collectivists — but collectivists always have to make all other individuals into collectivists.

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Americans vs. CitizensTuesday, March 18th, 2008

Americans vs. Citizens
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008