4 ms·
The core belief of Americans and the defining belief in my opinion is you can rise to any level of success or failure based off your own efforts alone. I’m not
by GuardianCaveman 7y ago
The core belief of Americans and the defining belief in my opinion is you can rise to any level of success or failure based off your own efforts alone. I’m not arguing the validity of belief but I am arguing against whatever idea you have of gods will and America’s founding.
Americans will have less sympathy for the victims of the virus but not because of gods will blaming but because they’ll blame that person for touching their face or not taking precautions. We blame people for failing not god.
- shadowgovt 7y agoWhere it gets tricky is one particular breed of religious refugee that settled the US in the European colonial period (and who's philosophical thinking is deeply encoded into American culture) was particularly interested in predestination. For some Americans (perhaps a critical mass), God's will and success based on your own efforts are one and the same---they succeed because God chose them for success. The flip-side of the "your success is due to your own efforts" coin is a kind of collective defeatism: if you get sick, it's not because you drew a short statistical straw, it's because you made bad choices. And coupled with that predestination meme, the thought extends to "And you deserve what you're getting because God wills you make bad choices." It's a meme cocktail that can make it hard to get people moving on collective action that could benefit the average person.