The American blind spot
The hegemonic mental space
There’s a characteristic of American mentality that has always caught my attention. It’s hard to point fingers at it because it lies deep beneath how Americans experience the world. When I bring it up to my peers, I usually get an awkward silence, followed by a stare that looks like I’m speaking some alien language. For a long time, I thought I was bringing up some kind of taboo. Later, I realized that my words were truly nonsense.
Why something so evident to me is, at the same time, so elusive to others? I realized that what I was describing is something that doesn’t exist in this culture, a true cognitive blindspot.
The first time I noticed it was while getting to know an American while we lived abroad. For him, one of the most shocking things about moving out of the US was that people didn’t speak English. To his surprise, only a few people spoke the language. When I asked why he made this and other assumptions he explained that Americans are not raised to be interested or even aware of other cultures. Why would you go somewhere else? people asked him. In his friend’s minds, there was no reason to leave the US, and most certainly no value in it.
Sometime after, I met a self-proclaimed traveler. I asked him where he had been. In a very bro accent, he replied: California, Vegas, Utah, Colorado, and a number of US states. To my surprise, this traveler had never been outside of the US. I asked him why. He’s reply supported my theory quite well. He said: I’d like to go abroad eventually. But why would I? There’s so much to see here. Without going into the details as to why I disagree with this point of view, I do think it sheds a light on a broader characteristic of the American mentality.
The American blindspot is the difficulty people raised in the US have to recognize there’s a mental space outside of the U.S. That there are different cultural values, different motivations, that American moral values (or lack of) are not universal, and that American exceptionalism is an illusion. The U.S. is like a self-contained box. A big box, no doubt. But a box nonetheless, and it’s people have real difficulties thinking outside of it.
Except for rare exceptions, Americans tend to share an islander mentality that is much more profound than the mere disregard of other cultures. Even looking down on a foreign culture requires some level of acknowledgment. This is a much deeper behavior. It is a cognitive blind spot in which people don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of different mentalities. This goes beyond the coexistence of diverse opinions. In simple words, the cultural blind spot is the inability to acknowledge that information can be framed in ways that don’t correspond from the US unique cultural narratives.
I think this blind spot is a truly American characteristic that is shared across different social and racial groups. Somehow even the children of immigrants acquire this mentality. Through the process of assimilation, past nationality and origin become mostly social and racial identifiers, that only have meaning in the internal social dynamics of the US. The mentality, culture, and subjectivity of the country of origin vanishes. In this Americanization, only the visible elements of those identities seem to remain acknowledged, like for example race, music, and food. Identifiers that serve either a political or commercial purpose.
I’ve been asking myself where does this very uniquely American trait come from. Is it an islander mentality inherited from the past colonial masters or a trait that evolved within the confined space of the United States as a result of its past hegemonic power? Regardless of where it comes from, I think recognizing this blind spot is a necessary step to understand the problems and challenges this country faces.