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Comment on Why does it seem like many Americans have an arrogant personality trait?

I’m a Canadian who has lived and worked in the US, so I’ve got some familiarity with it.

There is a pervading sense of exceptionalism buried deep in the American zeitgeist. It runs so deep that most people don’t even notice it - even on the outer edges.

Case in point: My closest friends down there were staunch leftists. In a land of gun owners and meat lovers, they were vegetarians and pacifists who marched in protests against the government. Most of the time they were quiet, charming, soft-spoken, but firm in their beliefs. Pretty much the polar opposite of the “loudmouth American tourist abroad” stereotype.

And yet if you asked them if the US was the greatest country on earth, they’d say “well yeah, which is why we have to fight for it.” An admirable sentiment, but the “well yeah” speaks volumes for how the country sees itself.

The protest singers who lived through McCarthy are the same. Woody Guthrie and his son Arlo would probably say that for all of its flaws and horror, the US is still the best nation we’ve got so far.

When you know deep in your soul that you’re the best, it’s hard not to let some subconscious arrogance show through.

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chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

buried deep in the American zeitgeist

I think you mean American psyche. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the times. It usually refers to the present way of thinking or the way things were at one time.

The American psyche is much more of a timeless thing, stretching all the way back to the attitudes and beliefs of the founding fathers when they drafted the Declaration of Independence. Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Robert Frost’s poems, John Steinbeck’s books, the games of baseball and (gridiron) football. These are just some of the cultural artifacts said to be part of the American psyche.

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- swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I actually has psyche written down, and changed it.
  
  It’s not exactly the normal use of zeitgeist and maybe volksgeist would be a better term (except tthat we don’t use it in English), but I feel that this is a relatively new aspect to Americanism, starting in WWII. It’s still more of a growth on their psyche than a fundamental part of it.
  
  It also has some parsllels with British exceptionalism up to the endnof the 19th century
  
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vonbaronhans@midwest.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

“Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”

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