The other day, I told the story of how a man collapsed in front of me — literally convulsing — and nobody stopped to help him. That parable tells the tale of the bizarre cruelty and indifference of American life. People stepped over him, as if he wasn’t there. All he needed was a glass of water and a bite to eat. Here was a man literally dying of thirst…on a street full of restaurants and cafes…and nobody stopped to help him.
I want to ask the question: why are Americans like this? Why are they so indifferent, cruel — to a degree which can only, by now, really be described as obscene and grotesque? I’ve seen scenes like the above — people simply stepping over those left to die in the street — wherever I’ve lived in America. I’ve never seen them anywhere else in the world. Even in poor countries, the community would have come together to help the man dying of thirst.
There begins an answer to the question: what is it that makes America so cruel? I reflected on what happened that day with friends, especially from poor countries. And they all agreed that something like this would have happened. Let’s say the man dying of thirst collapsed in, I don’t know, Delhi, or Karachi. The passers-by would have stopped, instantly, and helped him up. They wouldn’t have had to buy him a meal and some water — because the restaurant owners themselves would have offered. Someone would have called an ambulance. And unlike in America, where when we called the authorities, they simply told him to go die somewhere else…the medics would have taken him to the hospital.
In other words, the community would have pulled together to help. Take care of an emergency, solve a problem. And that begins, at least, to provide an answer to my question. There is no community in America. The story I told happened in an affluent, liberal town. It’s a town, sure — but not a community. What’s a community? Well, it’s a set of social bonds. Which prize a common good. Which have shared interests.
People in my little town in America might say and even think they’re a community. But they’re not, at least in any meaningful sense. They don’t really have social bonds, shared interests, a sense of the common good. How do I know? Because they were willing to let one of their own die of thirst on the street. A community — at least a genuine one — does not do that. It takes care of its vulnerable, because they are the ones which prove itself to it, its goodness and decency, that social bonds exist, that a common good carries moral and social weight. You don’t just watch someone die of thirst, and go on laughing as you browse TikTok.
Americans might say things like “of course we have a sense of community.” Maybe they do. What they don’t have, though, is actual community. See the difference? Again and again, I’ve seen scenes that shock people from anywhere else in the world play out — New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Americans are totally inured to suffering to the point they’ll happily step over someone dying, injured, sick on the street. Not my problem. That is not community. That is ignorance and indifference. It’s cruelty, of a profound kind. What does it really cost to buy someone a glass of water or a meal? Maybe a little medicine?
Why don’t Americans have the community which exists literally everywhere else in the world? Think of the meaning of the word — unity, in common. Americans are individualistic and materialistic. Hyper individualistic and materialistic. Here my story shifts to economics, which I think tells the tale best.
America has a seriously, seriously distorted set of priorities. Americans do. And all that’s reflected best in their economy. It’s 80% consumption. That’s the highest level of consumption in the world. By a very, very long way.
What does that statistic mean? Anything at all? To me, it says something tragic and foolish.
Americans value things more than people. Americans are notorious around the world for being inveterate, insatiable consumers. They buy, buy, buy like nobody else in the world. Their entire culture revolves around making them obsessed with consumption. Americans used to buy endless designer jeans and sneakers and so on — plastic junk, mostly. Now, they’re addicted zombie consumers of social media. Walk down a street, and see everyone staring into their phones. What the hell are they doing?
It’s not like this elsewhere in the world. Not so much like this, anyways. People in, say, Paris, Montreal, London, Berlin aren’t so totally addicted to their screens. Americans are the world’s most voracious consumers of social media, too, by a very long way.
And all that social media has taken the place of real community. What are all those people doing on their screens? They’re having algorithmically mediated social interactions, which have replaced real community. Some algorithm is telling them whom to date, another one, which kind of fashion to buy, another one, what to read, yet another one, how they should look today.
One result, which me and my friends talk about a great deal these days, is that Americans look really weird these days. Their moral obscenity has begun to be reflected on the outside, too. The insta-girls and their overly made up faces and their plastic smiles. The men with their bulging muscles. The dead eyes. The blank stares, when they have to talk to real people. About real things.
Americans don’t seem to know how to interact socially anymore. The internet has replaced what a community should do — offer norms and values, orient people towards a common good, provide a sense of shared interest. And instead, it lets Americans live in tiny manufactured bubbles of pure self-interest. Who should I hook up with tonight? Hmm, what can I buy today? Do my pecs look good enough? Maybe I need more implants. Let me see what my fake friends think.
That’s not community. That’s hyper individualism. Hyper materialism. Do you kind of see the point I’m getting at? It’s an abstract one. Americans have always been individualist and materialistic. Their economy is premised on it. That was bad enough. Then along came social media — and bang, any hope Americans had of forming real communities went up in flames. Now, Americans will happily ignore someone dying of thirst on the street — because there are more important things to do. Arrange a Tinder date. Go on a Tinder date. Check your Facebook account. See if you have new Twitter followers. And so on. I’m caricaturing a little — but only a little.
What do individualism and materialism do? Well, they make people selfish. Ruthless. Indifferent. Cruel. When you’re obsessed with having more stuff, and you value it more than people, then of course people begin not to matter to you. The end of that road is that people can die of thirst on the street right in front of you — and you don’t care.
Let me continue telling the deep and tragic story of the statistic I’ve recounted — America’s economy is 80% consumption. What else does it say? Well, just 20% of America’s economy is investment. In people. In each other. That’s a shockingly low figure. Let me contrast it with other societies. In Europe and Canada, economies are what you might call almost perfectly balanced — 50% consumption, 50% investment.
What does that mean? It means that, yes, people consume stuff. It’s not as though Europeans and Canadians live in burlap sacks and yurts. But they consume much, much less than Americans do. That leaves them more left over to invest in each other. And they happily do. That 50% of the economy which is investment adds up to functioning healthcare, education, retirement, transport, media systems. For all. Robust, universal ones.
But because Americans consume so much, there isn’t enough left over for them to invest in universal public goods like functioning healthcare systems. The caricature of the ugly American in this sense really is true. Americans really would rather have gigantic SUVs and McMansions and designer clothes and plastic junk than a functioning society. They are not willing to consume less and invest more in order to have universal public goods.
That is the most damning way in which it’s starkly evident that Americans value things more than people. They’re flatly unwilling to invest in each other, to the level which a modern society demands. You see, you can’t have a modern society at America’s weirdly distorted, imbalanced levels of consumption and investment. You can’t have a functioning healthcare or retirement or education system when you’re consuming 80% of what you make, and investing just 20%. It’s not possible. You can only have decrepit, broken, nonexistent systems with those lethal economics.
You might think those economics are an abstraction. Let me assure you, they’re not. Let’s go back to the people on my street, who were happy to watch a man die of thirst — as long as their dinner, lunch, date, meeting wasn’t interrupted. That, too, is imbalanced levels of consumption and investment, only at a personal level. Those people were saying: “Hey! Don’t interrupt my consumption! I’m sitting here sipping a fancy designer cocktail, a ten dollar coffee, having a fifty dollar steak! Get out of my face! All those are way, way more important to me than giving some loser dying of thirst a glass of water!” You can see it in the cafe, too, who charged us for the sandwich and water to give to the dying man. The sandwich they were literally about to throw out anyway.
Again, you can see the way in which Americans value things more than people — another way of saying they’re obsessed with consumption, and aren’t interested in investment, not just financial, but social, cultural, public, intellectual — very very starkly in this example when you think about it.
What happens, though, to a society which values things above people? Well, it comes undone. Its social bonds disintegrate. Its towns and cities begin to die. Public investment dries up. Life becomes something like a hyper rat race — people compete to the death, for more and more consumption, for more stuff. Everything revolves around how much you have — not whether or not you’re a decent, sane, wise, intelligent, friendly person. Social status begins to belong to sociopaths, who quickly climb up ladders of prestige, the most ruthless and ambitious trampling the rest. Norms of indifference and cruelty evolve — and norms of gentleness and friendship and kindness and decency never do.
The problem with valuing things over people is pretty simple, in the end, though. Things are mostly just junk. They depreciate. They can’t take care of you. They can’t make art, literature, science. They don’t have great ideas. You can’t have conversations with them. Things are just…things. A society like America, which has way, way more things than it needs? What happens to it? It drowns in its own trash. It chokes on its own garbage. It retreats into misery and despair — because happiness comes from living relationships, not things — and doesn’t understand why. It buys even more things to try and solve the problem of meaningless and futility and nihilism — but those problems can’t be solved even with all the things in the world.
A society like that ends up run by and for predators. You can see that very, very clearly in America. America’s elites are ultra-predatory. They don’t appear to care about anything, except gain for themselves. Think of Wall St is full of “hedge funds” who “raid” pensions — meaning they steal money on a mass scale. And it’s not just legal, it’s something lionised by the financial press and good old Marketplace on NPR. Think of how CEOs walk away with massive, massive paychecks and bonuses — American CEOs make way, way more than those in any other country. Think of how “lobbying,” aka propaganda, is such a normalised part of life that it’s something you literally see on TV ads. Think of Americans are bombarded by entires kinds of ads — for drugs, for politicians, for dead ideas — which are literally illegal in most of the rest of the world. American life is run and for the worst in society, predators, who make out like bandits, earning huge fortunes, precisely by depriving the rest of decent lives. If that doesn’t make sense, just think of, say opioids, and who walked away with billions.
It’s hard to live in a predatory society. You need something to numb the pain. What do Americans turn to? In a sad irony, they turn to more stuff. They’ve accepted the Faustian that they’ll be exploited by their elites in utterly barbaric ways — left to die without medicine, healthcare, retirement, working until their dying days. And as long as they get more stuff, they reason, maybe it’s not so bad. As long as they can get a bigger house, a bigger car, a bigger credit card with a higher limit.
Americans seek to exploit, just as they’ve been exploited, in order to numb, dull, and normalise the pain of being dehumanised and abused in the first place.
That is why they’re so shockingly indifferent and cruel to the rest of the world, to the point of letting people die of thirst on the street. They seem to reason: “Hey, I’ve been exploited, too. And I had to toughen up! I don’t get healthcare or medicine or retirement, or at least not very much. So why should you get any help? Why should anyone help you when no one helps me? Maybe you’re weak. And weakness is a liability. Maybe if I give you that glass of water, I’ll end up weak like you. Hey — pull yourself up by your own torn shoelaces!!”
Only it doesn’t work. This strategy of trying to beat the despair and futility of an exploited life with becoming an exploiter and abuser yourself. It doesn’t work on a personal level: it doesn’t make Americans happy, because happiness comes from genuinely nourishing human relationships, and the positive experiences they provide — not from exploiting people. And it doesn’t work at a social level — Americans have chosen to exploit each other all the way down, but all that’s led to is a failed society without any working systems or institutions, nobody willing to invest modern, functioning ones.
Americans really are the world’s most cruel and indifferent people. I’m sad to say it, but I have to conclude that much. Anyone who’s lived around the world, I think, will agree. Americans are not right in the head. There is something deeply, profoundly wrong with them. They will let people die of thirst on the street in front of them — stewing in resentment and rage at the person who’s suffering. Hey! Don’t die on my block! Get out of here! They won’t lift a finger to help. That’s reflected, at an economic level, in a completely imbalanced economy. It’s reflected in norms which value things more than people. And it’s reflected in a society that’s drifted past nihilism and folly into grotesque obscenity — billionaires jetting off to Mars while the planet burns, and the average American’s more interested in living a pretend life on social media than engaging with any form of social, cultural, or human reality, which they seem utterly incapable of dealing with anymore.
It’s a sad, sad way to live. You can feel the despair and rage and resentment and indifference pulsing through America. You can feel the cruelty, like a shockwave, echoing through it. And what’s saddest of all is that what it’s come to mean to be be “really” American is to accept it, laugh at it, to revel in the cruelty and indifference. That’s the line at which obscenity begins, my friends. And it is what makes Americans so, so ugly to the world, right about now.
Umair
August 2021
