This is very accurate. Having lived in other countries, I can say the "other" side suffers from a different extreme: Sticking to flawed social constructs that impede their progress and/or happiness, no matter how much research and/or self help you throw at them.
For that matter, less-individualistic societies such as European countries don’t seem immune to some of the symptoms the parent comment mentioned, such as sports-worship.
There is something to the notion that American individualism comes with its unique pathologies, but there’s clearly a lot more to the story of why things like self-help have exploded.
For one thing, as traditional sources of meaning have withered under the harsh lights of science and modernity, all wealthy societies have seemed to struggle with a crisis of meaning.
This leaves a vacuum that gets filled with self-help (the secret to a meaningful life is here in this book), sports-worship, celebrity-worship, video-game escapism, neo-nationalism, whatever. This can be seen all over the developed world. However, America’s extreme individualism may exacerbate this crisis of meaning, since community is often itself a source of meaning.
We cannot go back to pre-modernity, nor should we try.
What can we do to build societies, here and now, that help people feel a sense of meaning in their lives without the ghastly drawbacks of past sources of meaning such as religion and ethnic nationalism?
I am a very happy and fulfilled person, and I've not had to engolf myself in self-help, sports-worship, celebrity-worship, video-game escapism or whatever else you listed, neither do I engolf myself in religion and ethnic nationalism.
That leaves me that either your explanation is simply wrong, or only true for some individual.
In my opinion, there's a false projection, it's like people complaining about Java versus the number of happy Java developers who don't care to participate either in the complaint or the praises of it online or at every occasion they find. If all you knew about it was the article and comments you'd read online, you'd think everyone dreads Java and become depressed from its prolonged use. Well I feel it similar with America and people's complaints about it.
And the closest data I can find is the world surveys on self perceived happiness where people rate themselves on 0 to 10, with 10 being the happiest they can imagine themselves, and on those surveys, individualistic western countries tend to rank better.
Edit: Not that I disagree with your conclusion, to help people find meaning and wellbeing in their life is great, and should be a goal of society, as long as is not forced on people, but simply provided as options that are made accessible to them to choose from if they so want.
"western countries" is a broad category that includes Europe and the UK. I think the parent was suggesting that these countries' cultures are distinct from the U.S. w/r/t finding meaning.
>...to help people find meaning and wellbeing in their life is great, and should be a goal of society, as long as is not forced on people...
What an odd response. Was anyone suggesting forcing anything on anyone?
I think you left out the biggest thing people do to fill the void of existential dread: spend money! America is far more obsessed with that habit than any of the ones listed in my experience.
Science has virtually nothing to say about the meaning of life. Science cannot contradict most traditional sources of meaning because they do not make many if any scientific assertions. To my way of thinking, the erosion of traditional sources of meaning and morality is caused solely by human hubris : we see all our scientific acconolishments and think "bah : how could we trust opinions held by ancient humans?! They didn't even have the internet"
This seems to be a cycle thats repeated itself throughout history. Excess results in a rejection of traditional morals and meaning, which leads to a harsh reconciliation wherein civilization is struck with the rude reality of why those traditional morals where there in the first place. Which leads to an embrace of these traditional values, which then eventually creates more excess.
Fascinating stuff.
Of course it is always an option for religion to try to explain the old claims away as allegorical or misunderstood, but that leaves one with a very different kind of faith than someone who believed all of the claims fully and literally, with no reasonable doubt in their mind. Everything from the spread of disease to the fortunes of war to the success and failure of crops was once earnestly believed to be caused by the will of god or gods. Even the most ardent fundamentalist today cannot really get away without accepting—at least implicitly—materialist explanations for why many things happen. Even fanatics check the weather forecast.
Modernity has also worn down the appeal of the old sources of meaning in other ways than through science.
Affluence, health, and security have taken a lot of the appeal out of religion. Getting on the good side of an all-powerful god was a lot more appealing when famine, disease, and violence could strike at any time. We all still feel like we’re at the mercy of the world sometimes, but many of us are fortunate enough to avoid the kind of physical insecurity that our ancestors faced, and religion has declined over a few generations in every place where these fears have receded.
Tribalism too has been sapped of its potency by the decline of endemic violence. Fear of the out-group is a lot more powerful when a violent death at their hands is a common fate of the people you know. In addition, the rise of fast, cheap travel has made it harder to believe that your home and your people are “the greatest on Earth” while all others are inferior. Among the classes with the disposable income to travel internationally, nationalism has grown very weak indeed.
Ideally we would find something better than consumerism and celebrity-worship with which to replace these crumbled idols. We certainly cannot go back: the damage is real and it is done. Each new wave of religious or tribalist revival crests lower than the last. Not to mention, the traditional sources of meaning had awful drawbacks and excesses, as you alluded to. I hope we can do better than a choice between nihilism and the miserable past.
The answer i think is already being played out around us and involves Nihilism, Hedonism and Fanaticism. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World also hints about it. On the individual level we all need means to access "varying altered levels of consciousness" and on the societal level we need to be made more interdependent as a collective. The former is an experience to justify our individual existence while the latter keeps us bound to "society".
There are definitely counterexamples within the US, but in my opinion they are much milder, and often in pockets. Generally speaking, if I take and practice advice in a self-help book that goes counter to the American norm, I don't get social rejection, and I often get more encouragement than negative vibes.
Oh, and sports-worship is everywhere - wealthy and poor :-)
This is the root of the problem. Bertrand Russel in his The Conquest of Happiness says; My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable.
This has now become true of almost all societies in varying degrees. All beliefs are questionable, nothing has any "inherent" meaning and there is always the tension of opposing viewpoints that need to be weighed and reconciled/accepted. It is all quite exhausting. Hence our need for "escapism" via Consumerism/Sports-worship/Celebrity-worship etc.
It's really not though.
By Western standards, America is a very conformist country. You can see this in how schoolchildren are required to pledge allegiance to the flag, to the slow acceptance of gay rights, to controversy over saying over "Happy Holidays."
I deeply wish America was a country that supported individualism in the sense of supporting and even celebrating the right to live your life as you see fit.
All too often, however, it seems that this love of "individualism" only surfaces when someone needs help or asks for cooperation.
That's not individualism. This simply selfishness.
Huh? Many US states legalized same-sex marriage before other Western democracies like France, New Zealand, Germany, etc. What exactly was slow?
France: 2013
New Zealand: 2013
United States: 2015
Germany: 2017
Other European nations began legalization as early as 2001.
Individual states, provinces, and cities might have acted sooner, but lets compare apples to apples.
An inordinate number of laws in the US are de facto “national” only because all States recognize similar laws, not because there is actually a national law. The Federal government doesn’t have the authority to enact most laws. It is the same reason the US does not have a national ID, why corporations are solely creatures of individual States, and why public health policy is decided by States (see: COVID).
New York (Population: 8.49 million): 2011
With populations like that, I think that is comparing apples to apples.
However, for the purpose of this discussion, we are talking about a society's relative tolerance of individuals choosing to live their life the way they wish and a relatively weak emphasis on social conformity.
I'm sure someone has done proper quantitative research on this, but offhand, I think the Netherlands would score pretty high.
P.S. I used "Western standards" to differentiate from developed Asian nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore which are more conformist.
It already did --- it's called politics.
"The problem for politics of the rise of individualism is that it can't deal with it. Politics requires you to say to people as a political party, come with me, join with us together and we will use that collective power to change the world. But to do that you have to accept that you are part of something, you have to surrender yourself to something. And for the radical movements, that was a disaster. But more than that, it was a disaster for politics generally. Because political parties fell away. So what then politicians they were then faced by is the fact that they didn't have mass support so they couldn't do the main thing that mass democratic politics rose up to do which is to be your representative, your bridgehead into power."
Later on in the video:
"I do think that one thing that's going to come back onto the table is religion. Because I think the real weakness of the modern systems of managing us as individuals is that it cannot deal with our own mortality... The sense that when they die something will go on and they will be part of something that's going on... In the modern rational, efficient, utilitarian, technocratic world of managing the individual - [the world] cannot give you any consolation."
I don't see how politics could answer that.
https://www.ozon.ru/highlight/top-200-knig-po-mneniyu-chitat...
Of the Top-12, 6 to 8 are some form of a self-help book:
* 1st: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.
2nd: Say Yes To Life, a self-help book from an Austrian Holocaust surviver.
* 4th: Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor.
* 5th: A Russian-author book on the art of "convincing" & "influencing" people (sound familiar?).
* 6th: Another American book, "Radical Forgiveness: A Guide to Spiritual Healing"
* 8th: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
* 11th: Women Who Love Too Much: If Love is Causing Suffering. Also a US book.
* 12th: Atlas Shrugged. I suppose it's not a self-help book, but it's very much in line with the spirit of "open-your-eyes" literature.
* If you go down the list, there is a bunch of other titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad, the full set of Nassim Taleb's quasi self-improvement books, etc.
We can sort of argue whether some of these books are self-help adjacent or not (like Ben Graham or Nassim Taleb), but the trend is clear: self-improvement literature is very popular in Russia.
This shows that the self-help cottage industry is not limited to the US. I think people just like the idea of self-improvement.
edit: formatting
If anything I would expect self-help to be more popular in less well-off countries, where there is perhaps more incentive to be hyper-competitive to try get ahead.
[0] https://www.economist.com/china/2020/11/12/why-self-help-boo...
The more general truth is that: it is very human to have a myth about several attributes which are supposedly unique to your culture and less applicable to a shallow stereotype of the other countries your culture leads you to be most faniliar with. For the Chinese, the Japanese, Koreans, and Americans. For the Thais, the Laoatians and Americans. Etc. on and on. With these pairings there is always an accompanying list of the things that make US not be THEM, regardless of whether or not they're factual.
It comes across as incredibly insular.
Very true. I went to a public school in Eastern Europe and everyone had to go through the same curriculum no matter what you wanted to focus on after graduation. The basic principle here is to expose students to all subjects and let them decide what they want to focus on in places of higher education.
However, in American schools it seemed that you could pretty much weave your way through public schools only taking courses you think you need after you cover some of the basic subjects. There are several problems with this approach. First of all, you're never exposed to subjects that you didn't originally have interest in, but could potentially have appreciation for had you invested some time learning about them. Secondly, your scope of knowledge ends up being pretty narrowly limited to things that you're interested in while having little to no idea about everything else. Lastly, I think colleges and universities end up picking up the slack here when they start teaching coursework that should've otherwise been part of public school curriculum.
All-in-all, it is my belief that having at least surface-level understanding in various subjects does make a difference as you get older because it gives you just enough knowledge to be able to look at life in a different light and, at the very least, have a general idea how to start making adjustments. Not to say that you won't need help. In fact, you still might but you're in a much better place than where you would be blindly following someone's advice in a gimmicky self-help book.
In my final year of High School education I had some freedom, but it was along the lines of, "You have access to advanced Biology, Physics, and English. Choose two." (It was more complicated than this, simplified for example's sake)
For the rest of high school I had one elective course and the rest was more rigid. I was able to choose which foreign language I would like to study and I could choose a particular artistic pursuit. Everything else was thoroughly constructed and regimented. Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Mathematics, Language were required each year.
Even when I went to college, the first two semesters required the same mix of curriculum before I was able to specialize.
The latter definition has taken hold over the last few decades because it is seen as offensive to reinforce good choices. Suggesting that people maintain a good diet and exercise is seen as offensive to obese people. Suggesting that people marry a good, stable partner before having children is seen as offensive to single mothers. Suggesting that people focus on jobs and careers that provide stable income is seen as crushing someone's self-actualized aspirations. And suggesting that any of these groups be responsible for the outcomes of their choices is unthinkable.
When such basic advice is off-limits, what cultural infrastructure could we possibly have?
Edit: removed distracting example.
I don't agree with the current trends either ("it's completely ok to do bad thing X!"). However, in addition to good advice for individuals, we need to keep trying to create cultural infrastructure that really does work.
That’s a bad example. Family stability plummeted after the sexual revolution, even as access to birth control and abortion made family planning easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...
My siblings in law come from one of those middle/lower middle class primarily white towns you sometimes read about, where two-parent families have declined tremendously. The devastation to the kids is real. Comfortable finances dissolve into financial strain. Lack of stability affects kids’ performance in school. Boys, in particular, suffer growing up without fathers to keep them in line. (It wasn’t until I had boys of my own that I realized how differently they often relate to their mothers versus their fathers. And trust me, we’re not modeling traditional gender roles at my house—my wife’s a scary trial lawyer who pays our mortgage.)
Always happy for the opportunity to say that, so thanks!
The loss came from self-acceptance. I stopped beating myself up when I slipped up, and I stopped letting other people shame me for it. That was good for 50 pounds, and I'm headed back down now that I'm vaccinated and getting as much back on track as I can. I don't have data handy, but I suspect shaming has killed more people and ruined more lives than acceptance.
if the shaming is the stick, but where is the carrot?
they should be provided alternatives and policies that prod towards the better options.
By who?
I'm pretty sure they still teach the difference between passive and active voice in school. Passive voice is great if you want to paint in broad strokes without naming names so people can't actually discuss your points. This is choir-preaching. Or argument by implication if you want a secular term.
Or perhaps theres a travelling sideshow element to self-help that appeals to the PT Barnum types. But I'm not so cynical.
… celebrity worship, corporation worship, politician worship, money worship, conspiracy theories …
Yeah, not everybody. I love some of the things that money can buy, buy I genuinely hate money. Love of money brings out the absolute worst in humanity far too often, and lack of enough money causes entirely too much misery. The old phrase "money is the root of all evil" isn't all that far off from true. Greed and love of money are the cause of more problems on this planet than I can count (and I'm pretty damned good at counting).
What causes problems is inequality, not money per se.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
There are very few people not raised in religion or similar belief systems, the few I do know though simply don't worship anything in particular.
It was strange for me to accept at first, like... Ok but like what are you? What do you believe in? And having someone answer: "I'm just me and I don't believe in anything, I don't even ask myself that question, I just live." was perspective changing for me.
Some people actually don't worship anything, and don't care about it.
I certainly don't disagree. Wallace's proposition is still provocative, uses a broader than religious definition of worship and lays a marker that when one examines one's own viewpoints there are belief structures to be found.
That said, from only the quote, I find that it's a bad leap to go from saying that everyone has some beliefs, to saying that everyone worships something.
I think at this point some clear definitions of how Wallace uses the words is needed to even make sure we discuss the same thing.
Using standard definitions, off course, anyone still capable of thought (so ignore people that are brain dead and other edge cases), will need to make decisions based on partial information all the time. So someone might come to accept that the sky is blue or the earth is round, and won't continue digging deeper into it. Do they know without a doubt that it is true, probably not, but they can "believe" it to be true for practical purposes.
But that belief need not be firmly held, it can simply be based on whatever data they currently know and freely change as more data is revealed to them.
Now to jump to worshipping, you need an externality and the belief in that externality as something to trust in and follow, revere and adore. You need something that you can listen too in order to predict what actions will lead to the future you desire, and to listen too as what future you were meant to arrive at or other such things.
And that's where I'm saying no, some people don't need any externality for that. Some people don't need to believe in a higher meaning or purpose, some people are happy not knowing what the purpose of life if any is, or that there is one to begin with. Some people are happy just living life and being guided by their innate desires and their own thoughts and ideas. They don't need answers to "why do we do what we do, why do we exist, what happens after we die".
Similarly, some people don't worship anything. There is no externality they adore and revere in, that they delegate their life too, and their full trust in.
"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing."
The type of worship and belief discussed goes beyond the spiritual or existential or external.
So I'd consider that quote was effectively pulled out of context.
They could've chosen to not disclose it to you or don't know the true answer for themselves. In that anecdote, they must believe that something is worth just living for, even if it is just themselves.
From later on in the speech transcript linked:
"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing."
I don’t think this person has a lot of insight into the minds of non-religious people.
The part of your post reading “ agnosticism is more diametrically opposed to belief than atheism; the latter is belief in one's own disbelief.” is a misrepresentation of what atheism is. Atheism is the conviction that there is most likely not any higher being. Agnosticism is ”I’m not sure if there is a higher being or not”.
Atheism: the doctrine or belief that there is no God [dictionary.com]; the belief that God does not exist [Cambridge Dictionary].
Also, "this person's" father was an atheist, he studied philosophy, and was in-and-out of addiction recovery programs throughout adulthood. He likely had more insight into the minds of non-religious, religious, and whatever people than you're giving him credit for.
What defines and motivates the observed behaviors of folks who are "basically decent people?"
How can that answer be distinguished from that of folks who are not "basically decent people?"
Edit: Obviously decentness is a subjective measure. I’m not sure if you’re trolling me or not but I’m pretty sure you’re at least being intentionally provocative.
Two concrete examples. Families have strong involvement in marriage. This isn’t just “here’s your spouse take it or leave it.” It’s a process by which people who have been married a long time and coach a young person about what qualities to look for in a marriage partner. (I remember my wife remarking 8 years into our American-style marriage that she was surprised by how inconsequential her dating preferences at 25 turned out to be. “Who cares what kind of music your husband likes at 2 am when the baby is crying?”)
There’s also a lot of active coaching in marriage. I remember my dad being dispatched by the aunties to fly to another state to coach a young couple going through a rough patch.
First and foremost, there's the pure frequency in which that term is used. Good luck spending a day in Europe and not being exposed to one tradition or another. It's kind of cute in a superficial way (the way that people dress up for balls in Vienna), and very counter-progressive in others (the way that doctors are more respected than programmers).
I would also wage to say that the pure interpretation of the term is a bit different. In the US, using the term "traditionally" in a sentence could have a positive connotation (eg: "traditionally, we celebrate new launches with some drinks") or a negative connotation ("those traditional companies are usually lacking in technology"). In contrast, invoking the term "tradition" in a sentence in, let's say Germany, would be to describe a near-religious ritual that cannot and must not be changed or even questioned (eg: "for Oktoberfest, people dress in traditional outfits that include lederhosen and dirndls.") I struggle to think of a frequent context in Germany in which the term traditional would have a negative connotation.
All this is to say that tradition is a wonderful thing if your circumstances lead you to invoke as little change as possible. But for those seeking social mobility and other types of change in their lives, I would argue that traditions can be very negative.
To be fair with the US, they have formed a pretty neat legend around the founding fathers and the constitution. I would consider that cultural infrastructure.
To quote an american catholic saying something very uncatholic, but very american: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.”
We should not be surprised that into this psychic vacuum rushes various alternatives such as self-help, sports-worship and so forth.