How to overcome the insidious disease at the center of “American Exception-all-ism”
Every country has its myths. But, America’s myths, unless we adopt new ones, are likely to become our downfall.
Take American exceptionalism.
This myth — whether in those words — is so core to being American, its why so many American tourists are judged to be arrogant. It is why John McCain made a political strategy of trying to take down Barack Obama in a political debate for disbelieving in the concept (cite).
But American exceptionalism is not about America as a country being special, as the myth makers may have wished us to believe. Not only.
It is about certain Americans themselves as being special. It is about exclusion, of its own citizens from basic freedoms, of exceptions to “rules” that are reinvented (“reinterpreted”) depending on political sway), of exceptions built into our myths. Exceptionalism is about superiority.
To have a mythos rooted in exceptionalism is to have inequality built into the foundation of how we view ourselves, fellow citizens, and the rest of the world. It is to have divisiveness in our core.
“All people are free… except…”
“We believe in freedom of religion… except if you’re anything other than Christian.”
“We believe in privacy… except for applied to women, people of color, anyone we’re suspicious of….”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal… except slaves and the 1 million people who were living on this land first and…”
Americans have more illusions of freedom than any other supposed Western liberal states. This is because we are more attached to the myths surrounding policy, than the policies themselves. From broad privacy invasion with The Patriot Act to imperialist acts of Manifest Destiny, human freedoms are consistently trampled on under the guise of protecting America’s way of life or mission.
This is what it is to be a master propaganda machine.
America is an expert at propaganda
Take, for example, the idea of embedding notions of human dignity, respect, love for our fellow citizens into our societal contract with one another — we see those ideas are treated as heresy. It’s not “in the constitution”!
The country would rather following cherry-picked interpretations of words written pre-electricity than admit to any concept of basic human rights.
Ambiguous rules benefit those in power to interpret rules.
It is not as rare as it would seem it should be for so many people to day-after-day to allow for their lives to be ruled, even destroyed, by the whims of subjective interpretation of ambiguous rules. Indeed, this is what rule by religion has always been. And America is uniquely susceptible to the ills of this sort of rule, as we are more deeply religious than other rich, Western democracies.
According to this PEW study,
“The U.S. is the only country out of 102 examined in the study that has higher-than-average levels of both prayer and wealth.”
The mythical version of American may hear this and point to our proud history of supporting religious freedoms, since the time of the Puritans arriving, heralding immigrants of all beliefs to our shores.
Again, we know that American exceptionalism is the key myth: “Freedom of religion… except if you’re anything but Christian.”
Texas could codify Christianity in its laws, but could you imagine the outrage if Washington state decided to become a Muslim state?
Don’t take my word for it, even The Smithsonian calls out America’s strong propaganda arm around the notion of religious freedom:
“In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith.
The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.”
More recently, sociologists have argued that there the link is between relatively high levels of income inequality in the U.S. and continued high levels of religiosity (cite). Those less well-off are more likely to seek comfort in religious faith, due to the difficulties of life they face, financial and other basic human insecurities.
Our very myth is self-perpetuating
This is the essence of good propaganda. If we were to dare suggest the federal government had a duty to ensure every citizen had equal opportunity by way of basic human necessities — good education, good healthcare, good working conditions, etc — that we had rights to these as citizens of a shared collective, not only is it heresy for “not being in the constitution,” but to make it so untouchable a subject helps to keep vast inequality in the United States, which in turn, correlates to our religiosity and likelihood to subscribe to systems of arbitrary interpretation of ambiguous rules.
In essence, our own myth makes us less likely to stand-up for ourselves and what we deserve.
It keeps people in a state of instability and therefore fear, which leads to fear of the other — to finding scapegoats for our situation of inequality, for turning in on each other despite the fact that many other western liberal democracies provide much more for their citizen with only slightly higher taxes on the rich.
But no one wants to be taxed here, because those tax dollars would be waste, the government as a non-cohesive entity does not subscribe the basic beliefs in human dignity — the majority of those tax dollars go to wars we lose and half-baked plans that get turned over at each new election. We’re not provided the visibility we, as shareholders essentially of this country, should demand of our taxes.
We are over committed to the notion of sacred
If you dare question the validity of the rules of the system, the subjective, non-politically elected interpreters, that is seen as heresy, even if it comes from a place of practicality adapting our system for the 21st century.
Why can we not admit that our founding documents were not the word of God, but the best attempt by flawed people with their own self-interests?
The idea that current American institutions are sacred is also a myth because it ignores the facts of the past: that current institutional power is nothing like what was envisioned at the start by those supposedly sacred founding fathers.
Take the Supreme Court. Today, the supreme court is nothing but a non-democratic political organization. But it wasn’t always that way, at least not at the “sacred moment of America’s conception.”
Chief Justice John Marshall set the precedent in 1803 in Marbury vs. Madison, a lawsuit effectively of in-fighting between political parties. Not all the founding fathers thought it was legitimate, see it as a vast grab of power not envisioned in the countries founding:
“The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly, there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches.”
— Thomas Jefferson to W. H. Torrance, 1815. ME 14:303
So, what are we cherishing?
If everything is re-interpretable, and the stack always stacked by whoever is in charge, we can reinterpret John Marshall as well.
Is it necessarily a bad thing that our entire political system is based not on straightforward sacred law, but interpretations of the time?
Why is it so hard for us to admit that our past was flawed, filled with power-hungry political grabs but also some people trying their best?
Why can we not admit that hundreds of years later, we can imagine an expansion to a better future than the one purely designed for us by the constitution?
So many of us Americans cite the “founding fathers” as if they were their actual father, or father God, instead of visionary yet flawed people like anyone else, and cherry picking their quotes out of context that suits them.
How many now cheering the supreme court, were the same to detract it before?
Or even realize that there is no such thing as being a TRUE traditionalist, as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison were anything but a monolith in beliefs?
Just as we as the people of this country have vastly different beliefs, so too did these land-holding white males who constructed the first set of rules to ward of the growing anarchy after the American revolution.
And yet this is what we are facing again. A system failing. A people turning in on themselves.
Let us revisit again
Instead of myths and sacred commandments, let us ask, what outcomes can we agree to as, a majority? Can we agree to a vision of the good life? Of the basic needs for human dignity in this world? Of not allowing our grandparents to go without healthcare? Of ensuring we have time to live, even if just a few weeks, instead of constantly work? Of demanding that women’s equal rights to work be codified with access to public daycare as other wealthy nations provide?
That if we are concerned about higher taxes, then the citizen of America should have visibility into how they are spent, and question where that $.56 per $1 of taxes set aside for military spend really goes. Considering all our recent military loses, it’s pretty bad ROI.
We’re a country that lives in the past because we life in national myth. And we will crumble and die the further the present moves from the past.
So how do ordinary citizens become okay with this?
And how do we change what is a cultural issue?
We can start with where these myths are being repurposed. Calling them out in political rhetoric sure, but also beyond.
Indeed, no arm is perhaps more powerful in American Exceptionalism myth-supporting than Hollywood.
“Many of [Hollywood’s] films are embedded in the American military. And made to glorify the American military,” Mirrlees said. “No country in the world churns out as many images of itself as the military hero… like the United States does. That is a unique cultural phenomenon.”
We are SO focused on how we appear externally (“Do people see us as the hegemon?”), that we have left our inner selves to wither and die.
This isn’t just a metaphor for the country, this is the state of us as a people of the United States.
America the great has the second highest rates of depression worldwide, sandwiched between Ukraine and Estonia.
Among wealthy nations we have the highest rate of suicide and join only one other European country in most stressed out.
We are burnt-out, lonely & isolated, poor and unequal, porn-watching, and with the highest incarceration rates.
What is life any more for the average American citizen?
We have lost our connection with our inner self — with any sense of the meaningful life — and with each other.
A country so focused on “me,” we forget what a country is — a “we.”
For a supposedly Christian nation, we do a piss poor job of following through of the underlying ethos: “Yet Jesus also said, ‘My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you’ (John 13:34)” and yet this basic human need (to love others openly and to be loved), continues to remain not only illusive, but it can appear on many days in America, despised.
How can broad notions of love for our fellow citizens of Earth exist when we must feel tough, rugged individual cowboys who require no one and nothing?
The myth of the self-interested, loner cowboy is deep within us.
But we are dying.
We are dying inside and out because of hate and contempt of one another.
We are interdependent
Our inner worlds and outer worlds are not separate. There is no such thing as individualism or communalism, these are imaginary, binary concepts meant to divide us. We are interdependent, a word that acknowledge at once us as separate individuals and also the inherent connection between us. The future myth is not “this or that,” it is “and also.”
The more that we live in a state of fear that there is not enough to go around, the more we think that individualism and communalism are at odds, that one comes at the expense of the other, then the more we divide our own basic nature. Our fractured everyday life, like a body at war with itself, will become our demise.
It is not a question of if. We all already see it crumbling before our eyes.
The real question is whether we will have the collective sense to do anything about it, or if will we perish in our respective corners for our inability to collaborate as a nation.
The only way forward is to first reckon with our past, our true past.
To admit it is flawed, but that is okay and there is so much worth saving, but there is work to do to save it.
To admit that WE the current people of America are this country.
Not some past text which is anything but sacred.
That it is okay to question.
Because without asking the right questions, how can we ever imagine a better future?
For as long as we dig our head in the sand, because we are too tied to our myths of being perfect and special, we will be a country with a cancer that continues to eat itself from the inside. We will not realize that we have the ability to self-heal, if we only change how we think.
And that there are more of us to benefit across all belief systems from a “we” that provides one another with what is needed for basic human dignity than those who seek to divide us for power, money, and the like.
We must relinquish our myths of the past to embrace a new present of basic human rights, respect, and acknowledgement of our collective interdependence. Indeed, “we” as a country have a duty to move past mere self-interest and do so. A country based on outcomes over religious-like deontology.
Because a country divided, a country with hatred towards each other, that does not afford fellow citizens basic dignity and not exception-all freedom, will not stand.
