American Individualism

America is a country of extreme individualism that affect just about every aspect of our life from birth to death. Our devotion to individualism shapes many major social systems like our free market, our democratic government, or our family structures. Sometimes it can be difficult judge the true value of individualistic behavior over the more communal set ups of some other countries since we’re raised to make all of our decisions by ourselves. If we take the time though to really look at how our individualism affects us and those around us it becomes clear how much being an island effect the community.

A great example of how individualism has shaped america is the growth of our hyper capitalist system. The United States was founded at the height of early liberalist ideology in the western world, which was responsible for creating many of America’s views on personal freedom and political structure, as well as founding one of the most unregulated economies in the world. The free economy results in people believing heavily in self reliance fiscally and it becomes increasingly more normal look at those who make it or don’t make it products of a sort of social darwinism. Capitalist culture does change from time to time depending on the state of the economy. During times of recession people support each other often through government action like in the great deal of the nineteen thirties or the bailouts of present day. During prosperity we often turn the other way competition increases and cooperation decreases, everyone should pull their own weights. Success after world war two lead to a long period of extreme darwinism which gave us most of the wealthiest individuals in the world, but created a huge wealth gap and made us a country with far fewer worker protections than most industrialized countries. The reason why america has such gaps is largely due to our opposition to labour unions, unlike countries of such as Japan which has a historically collectivist culture where workers organize in very powerful shunto.

Individualism also play a large role in family life, along with other relationships with those in our community. The size of families in the U.S. is largely based on culture that arose after world war two, with the growth of suburban life and the sudden economic boom. Before the large economic boom of the nineteen fifties americans lived in up to three generation homes similar to those of south american and asian countries, but afterwards developed into primarily nuclear families. Marriages are also largely influenced by individualistic cultures most obviously by their autonomy, but also in their stability. When comparing U.S. marriages to countries that favor collectivist behavior, ignoring those that support forced marriages due to the many addition forces related to it, people stay together longer and much few end in divorce in collectivist countries, likely due to the fact that understanding and helping solving others problems are a large part of their culture. While the previous statement makes individualist sound more callus when interacting with each other, favoring their own agendas rather than working things out, but those who are not part of the normal society integrate much easier with individualistic groups. Cultures with collectivist morals normally work through a series of in groups which, while close to each other, have difficulty accepting differences making people of collective cultures actually much more exclusive to outsiders than the average individualistic society. Selectiveness created by strong collective ideology in eastern european and asian countries may explain why fascism rose there while more individualist countries like Britain and the U.S. it had little effect in nineteen hundreds.

Decision making is also deeply affected by our perceived independence, as I somewhat stated earlier, but it goes beyond a government’s foreign policy. Individualism’s influence has made the democratic process an ultimate decision making machine, and any other way is viewed as archaic or tyrannical. Everyone likes to have their voice heard even if they might not know what their talking about, but this is what’s right and just so that everyone is equal in an individualist society. In a collectivist society however they would not see always majority rule as the fairest system and favor those who seem the wisest to make decisions. Sometimes collectivist model works in small groups, and is in fact modeled in many aspects of corporate america, but more often than not it leads to totalitarian ship on the macro level.