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I envy these European countries, who can manage to do things collectively that make sense to do collectively. Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individual

I envy these European countries, who can manage to do things collectively that make sense to do collectively. Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."

mlinhares 2y ago
There are places where it happens in America, its just very hard to do that in such a large country without leaders that want to make it happen. Its much more profitable for politicians to have a population that doesn't want to work together and keeps fighting each other for transgender rights when they can't make ends meet and are one step away from being homeless. I think the last chance we had for a politician that was somewhat visionary was with the first Obama term but he was too entrenched in the politics to actually drive any real change, with all that bipartisanship bullshit. Now they will just continue to invest in driving a wedge between the population to prevent them from noticing they're in a class war.
- amiga386 2y ago
  Another way to look at it is through the lens of nationalism. Other countries, which have formed around nations (which are groups of people with a collective identity), have an inherent need to care for "their" people. Slovakia is 83.8% Slovak. Portugal is 87.8% Portuguese. Poland is 98.8% Polish. [*] America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation? [*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    Not sure, there have been moments of unity in the country, but you need someone inspiring to make that happen or a common enemy everyone can rally against, like what is happening in Canada right now. We're missing this inspiring factor, nations are mostly a made up construct, you can definitely build it one way or another.
psunavy03 2y ago
That's a fairly sophomoric take, to be honest. Not only is Europe a large place which can't be homogenized into one culture, so is the US. Unless you really think California and Texas will approach a problem the same? Or New York vs Alabama? And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.
- an0malous 2y ago
  Do you have examples of the underwritten things? I haven’t heard of this
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    I'm not saying there are line items in the US defense budget for European programs. I'm saying the existence of NATO and the guarantee of a robust US response to any attack on a member has allowed Europe to prioritize doing other things with their tax bases and budgets than fund robust militaries. And that a lot of the scoffing online about how Europe is somehow more "enlightened" than the US by having more generous social safety nets is at least partially due to said social safety nets being able to be paid for because the US is guaranteeing military support in the event of a crisis. Now, under Trump (whether or not you agree), there are going to have to be some hard choices in European capitals on how to fund a military deterrent to Russia if the US policy is "maybe we will, maybe we won't." Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.
    - senderista 2y ago
      > Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed. Or a Trumpist government may decide to provide no support at all, given how they have treated "the law of the land" so far.
Synaesthesia 2y ago
The US achieved a lot collectively, they created a really public education system for instance.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  My impression is that "public" is a very politically charged term in the US. Lots of people are suspicious of anything "public".
  - RajT88 2y ago
    You'd be right. Public schools are thought of as second rate. It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out. My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Local public schools vary dramatically in quality. A perfectly rational parent could have grown up in a good public school and when looking at the school that is assigned to their children based on where they moved to decide that private school is right for their kids given the public option they're faced with.
      - RajT88 2y ago
        A valid point. But - at least a couple people I know are choosing not to send their kids to better public schools than they themselves attended.
        inanutshellus 2y ago
jsbg 2y ago
> Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own." Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.
- brummm 2y ago
  What does size have to do with it? Switzerland also has less GDP, less tax revenue and less people to build things.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - TacticalCoder 2y ago
    [dead]
  - ty6853 2y ago
    Because when you're talking about federal/nation level spending it is easier to get people to spend money on a bridge or institution they have some chance of being able to drive to within a day rather than convincing a guy in Montana why he should be paying for native Hawaiian culture in some remote village in the Pacific he can't afford to visit and will probably be kapu'd out of by someone screaming about haoles. As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture. But this is. This is about attitudes, not size.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    Building bunker capacity for every citizen is definitely about size. The US is incredibly spread out compared to most European countries. And even culturally, population size determines attitudes. How do Europeans feel about Brussels? Can you imagine the commission building an EU-wide bunker system?
BjoernKW 2y ago
Switzerland is one of the few examples where such collective large-scale (i.e. state-run) endeavours still work. In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.
dmje 2y ago
My (probably naive) take on this is that America / the American Dream is founded on this principle of individualism / "boy done good" / "everyone can make something of themselves", and thus maybe a deep fear of collectivism? So: 1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc) 2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc 3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades 4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet... As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally. Here endeth the socialist lesson.
- mig39 2y ago
  I'd love someone to explain HOAs to me. They seem very prevalent in the USA. And it's the opposite of "freedom."
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    HOA’s are prominent in the US because they and the restrictive covenants imposing them were a way to replace de jure public racial discrimination and segregation with technically-private-but-legally-durable racial and cultural discrimination. The explicit racial aspect has since been made legally unavailable, but they remain a tool to enforce outward cultural conformity, which has a strong racial valence.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Or they provide for maintenance of the common areas (mowing, plowing) and maybe some minor amenities. Or the houses are basically built into a country club. I find that the places where there are insane HOAs are just as insane in the houses that aren't under HOAs.
stronglikedan 2y ago
Considering that America has contributed much more good to the world in general than any other country, I'd say whatever attitude America has is the right one. But I can say that it's not the attitude that you claim it is.
chrisdhoover 2y ago
The US had civil defense, air raid sirens and fallout shelters. Students practiced duck and cover. The paranoia was real. It led to the star wars defense program and out spending the Soviet union until they collapsed. Switzerland is surrounded by belligerents who have historically been at war with each other. France vs Italy. Italy versus Austria and Germany against everyone. Your take ignores the history of accomplishment in the US. The founding, the constitution, settling the continent , building great cities, industrialization, defeating Nazis, building the Interstate highway system, landing on the moon and placing satellites in space, creating world changing technology to name but a few.
- rapjr9 2y ago
  This raises a question in my mind as a US citizen. The US is planning on spending a trillion dollars to update our nuclear weapon stockpile. Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other. No. I did some research around the start of the Ukraine war. IIRC, the US Civil Defense program was always half-ass and has been pretty much non-existent for my entire lifetime.

I envy these European countries, who can manage to do things collectively that make sense to do collectively. Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."

mlinhares 2y ago

There are places where it happens in America, its just very hard to do that in such a large country without leaders that want to make it happen. Its much more profitable for politicians to have a population that doesn't want to work together and keeps fighting each other for transgender rights when they can't make ends meet and are one step away from being homeless. I think the last chance we had for a politician that was somewhat visionary was with the first Obama term but he was too entrenched in the politics to actually drive any real change, with all that bipartisanship bullshit. Now they will just continue to invest in driving a wedge between the population to prevent them from noticing they're in a class war.

amiga386 2y ago
Another way to look at it is through the lens of nationalism. Other countries, which have formed around nations (which are groups of people with a collective identity), have an inherent need to care for "their" people. Slovakia is 83.8% Slovak. Portugal is 87.8% Portuguese. Poland is 98.8% Polish. [*] America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation? [*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Not sure, there have been moments of unity in the country, but you need someone inspiring to make that happen or a common enemy everyone can rally against, like what is happening in Canada right now. We're missing this inspiring factor, nations are mostly a made up construct, you can definitely build it one way or another.

psunavy03 2y ago

That's a fairly sophomoric take, to be honest. Not only is Europe a large place which can't be homogenized into one culture, so is the US. Unless you really think California and Texas will approach a problem the same? Or New York vs Alabama? And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.

an0malous 2y ago
Do you have examples of the underwritten things? I haven’t heard of this
- psunavy03 2y ago
  I'm not saying there are line items in the US defense budget for European programs. I'm saying the existence of NATO and the guarantee of a robust US response to any attack on a member has allowed Europe to prioritize doing other things with their tax bases and budgets than fund robust militaries. And that a lot of the scoffing online about how Europe is somehow more "enlightened" than the US by having more generous social safety nets is at least partially due to said social safety nets being able to be paid for because the US is guaranteeing military support in the event of a crisis. Now, under Trump (whether or not you agree), there are going to have to be some hard choices in European capitals on how to fund a military deterrent to Russia if the US policy is "maybe we will, maybe we won't." Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.
  - senderista 2y ago
    > Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed. Or a Trumpist government may decide to provide no support at all, given how they have treated "the law of the land" so far.

Synaesthesia 2y ago

The US achieved a lot collectively, they created a really public education system for instance.

yodsanklai 2y ago
My impression is that "public" is a very politically charged term in the US. Lots of people are suspicious of anything "public".
- RajT88 2y ago
  You'd be right. Public schools are thought of as second rate. It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out. My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Local public schools vary dramatically in quality. A perfectly rational parent could have grown up in a good public school and when looking at the school that is assigned to their children based on where they moved to decide that private school is right for their kids given the public option they're faced with.
    - RajT88 2y ago
      A valid point. But - at least a couple people I know are choosing not to send their kids to better public schools than they themselves attended.
      - inanutshellus 2y ago

jsbg 2y ago

> Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own." Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.

brummm 2y ago
What does size have to do with it? Switzerland also has less GDP, less tax revenue and less people to build things.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  [dead]
- ty6853 2y ago
  Because when you're talking about federal/nation level spending it is easier to get people to spend money on a bridge or institution they have some chance of being able to drive to within a day rather than convincing a guy in Montana why he should be paying for native Hawaiian culture in some remote village in the Pacific he can't afford to visit and will probably be kapu'd out of by someone screaming about haoles. As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.
palmotea 2y ago
> Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture. But this is. This is about attitudes, not size.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  Building bunker capacity for every citizen is definitely about size. The US is incredibly spread out compared to most European countries. And even culturally, population size determines attitudes. How do Europeans feel about Brussels? Can you imagine the commission building an EU-wide bunker system?

BjoernKW 2y ago

Switzerland is one of the few examples where such collective large-scale (i.e. state-run) endeavours still work. In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.

dmje 2y ago

My (probably naive) take on this is that America / the American Dream is founded on this principle of individualism / "boy done good" / "everyone can make something of themselves", and thus maybe a deep fear of collectivism? So: 1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc) 2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc 3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades 4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet... As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally. Here endeth the socialist lesson.

mig39 2y ago
I'd love someone to explain HOAs to me. They seem very prevalent in the USA. And it's the opposite of "freedom."
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  HOA’s are prominent in the US because they and the restrictive covenants imposing them were a way to replace de jure public racial discrimination and segregation with technically-private-but-legally-durable racial and cultural discrimination. The explicit racial aspect has since been made legally unavailable, but they remain a tool to enforce outward cultural conformity, which has a strong racial valence.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Or they provide for maintenance of the common areas (mowing, plowing) and maybe some minor amenities. Or the houses are basically built into a country club. I find that the places where there are insane HOAs are just as insane in the houses that aren't under HOAs.

stronglikedan 2y ago

Considering that America has contributed much more good to the world in general than any other country, I'd say whatever attitude America has is the right one. But I can say that it's not the attitude that you claim it is.

chrisdhoover 2y ago

The US had civil defense, air raid sirens and fallout shelters. Students practiced duck and cover. The paranoia was real. It led to the star wars defense program and out spending the Soviet union until they collapsed. Switzerland is surrounded by belligerents who have historically been at war with each other. France vs Italy. Italy versus Austria and Germany against everyone. Your take ignores the history of accomplishment in the US. The founding, the constitution, settling the continent , building great cities, industrialization, defeating Nazis, building the Interstate highway system, landing on the moon and placing satellites in space, creating world changing technology to name but a few.

rapjr9 2y ago
This raises a question in my mind as a US citizen. The US is planning on spending a trillion dollars to update our nuclear weapon stockpile. Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other. No. I did some research around the start of the Ukraine war. IIRC, the US Civil Defense program was always half-ass and has been pretty much non-existent for my entire lifetime.