Everyone For Themselves

The idea of Americans as individualistic is somewhere between stereotype and cliché. The United States is well known for prizing a rugged self-sufficiency dating back to when most of country was frontier land, and a settler's nearest neighbors may have been miles away. While there are still parts of the country where the next house is over the horizon, the idea of the open frontier is viewed as a relic of a past long-gone. But the virtuousness of individualism persists, and I've started to wonder why.

There's a phrase that I've come to associate with a certain Conservative mindset of the past few years: "No-one is coming to save us." And as I've encountered it more and more, my understanding of the ethic of self-sufficiency started to change. American culture isn't as much individualistic as it is isolating. If one views the broader society as being some combination of indifferent and unreliable, then being ready, willing and able to do everything for oneself starts to make quite a bit of sense. And if other people won't or can't come to one's assistance in a time of need, why spend the time and effort needed to be ready to assist them?

The lack of social trust that is so evident in the United States started to have a broader reason than simple disunity; the idea that large parts of American society had been set up to operate well in circumstances where social trust was, for whatever reason, lacking. And once the system had been shown to operate reasonably well without that trust, the general lack of need for it inhibited its growth. (After all, the United States has managed to do quite a bit without ever needing to be broadly unified.)

While I think that smaller groups feel the lack of social cohesion more acutely than larger groups, I think that everyone feels it to some degree or another. But the society as a whole doesn't feel it strongly enough to perceive it as a problem that needs fixing.