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Everyone Thinks Americans Are Selfish. They're Wrong.
- jfengel 5y agoThe writer is correct that individualism isn't really the problem. But altruism as they've defined it isn't exactly the opposite of selfishness. A lot of complaints leveled at Americans are that they reserve their compassion for specific groups of people who they perceive as "deserving". They're often opposed to aid if they think it might help somebody who doesn't deserve it. We have a hard time advancing minimum wage because the market has told them that that's all they deserve, and they're not entitled to any larger share of the profits. Victims of police brutality are often told that they deserved it, even though their deaths were unrelated to anything they might have done (and wouldn't have merited a death sentence). It was easy to scare Americans with the "welfare queens", living off their largesse. People refuse any kind of modification of student loans because the students took the loan terms and therefore deserve to repay them. We blame the homeless in San Francisco for making it a terrible place rather than looking at the reasons they became homeless, and wouldn't go through the easy expedient of giving them money because some of them would mis-use it. Charitable donations are easily targeted. (Or at least, perceived to be targeted -- you don't know who's getting your donated kidney but you certain envision that it's somebody good and upstanding.) That means a lot of people are incredibly unfortunate and can't get help from aid organizations because the donations weren't targeted to them. So I find that Americans are indeed generous, but it doesn't mean that they're not also incredibly selfish. (I'm referring to us as a group, as the article does; that is its point.) Not just sequentially, but at the same time, being generous with some and leaving others to suffer as not our problem.