Enough About Me: Americans Need to Tone down Their Individualism
The bootstraps mentality will just not go away.
When Donald Trump promised that “I alone can fix” the United States, many people were horrified by the statement’s authoritarian tone. Days later, Hillary Clinton warned a crowd that “When someone says ‘I alone can fix it,’ that should set off alarm bells….That is not democracy.”
These concerns now seem justified. However, our dear leader’s “braggadocious” statement flirted with an equally dangerous idea: that one individual can be successful at singlehandedly achieving something as complicated as fixing a nation.
That sort of trust in the individual is clearly rubbish. Laughable even. However, many Americans don’t see it that way. Intoxicated by a proverbial “dream,” we honestly believe that hard work is the “primary predictor of life success.” Or, as social psychology would coldly put it: we “place undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent…rather than external factors” to explain why someone or something is flourishing.
This “bootstraps” mentality makes us an outlier in the Western world. In a Pew poll a few years ago, almost 60 percent of “Americans disagreed with the statement ‘Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.’” Pew found that no other nationality polled attributed success to the individual more than Americans.
That’s problematic for a big reason: it’s wrong. External conditions matter far more than personal gumption in determining success—especially in the United States. The chances of escaping poverty here varies widely depending on where you live, and while overall social mobility trends have stayed relatively flat over time, the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in this department.
Yet it’s understandable why we’d like to ignore these rational explanations. People would have little reason to do anything if they thought their actions didn’t matter. Our perception of control “is not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity.”
Matthew Stewart articulates this perspective well:
Human beings have a simple explanation for their victories: I did it. They easily forget the people who handed them the crayon and set them up for success.
I fear that Stewart draws with too thick of a crayon here, however. As the Pew study illustrated, humans writ large are not as self-aggrandizing as Americans. Our economic, religious, political and cultural ideologies relentlessly reinforce the importance of “self-oriented values.” There’s something about our particular blend of individualism which makes us blind to outside contributions to our success.
It follows then that American businesses see themselves through this individualist lens, too. That’s certainly what we witnessed from big businesses in Seattle recently. When they there were asked to contribute to solving housing problems caused by the city’s economic boom, they complained — a considerable amount. In their mind, the city’s unparalleled growth, infrastructure, and tech community had nothing to do with their superb performance. They alone earned their profitability. So why were they getting stuck with the bill for a collective problem?
Warren Buffett offers a wonderful rebuttal to this question:
I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil…
Buffett’s point is an important one. By emphasizing the importance of the soil we highlight the factors that truly make us successful. It is time to check the biological and cultural impulse to credit ourselves for everything we achieve. Like it or not, we are all tangled up in an increasingly complex society. Disentangling yourself from this web is an exercise in selfishness, not empowerment.
We have to remember this the next time corporations and the very wealthy stamp their feet and sulk about having to share their prosperity. It is not solely “theirs” to claim and it’s time that we call out this viewpoint for what it is: a self-deluding fantasy.
