Why American Life Is So Bleak

What Happens When a Society Becomes a Place Where No One Wins?

Image Credit: Evan Frost

It’s almost spring. And do you know what my favorite thing is in the springtime? Paris. Avignon. Maybe Berlin. Barcelona. Pick a great European city, and springtime in it’s…beautiful. Breathtaking, even. People pour into the streets. Life roars back to life. But in America…well…things are different.

When I’m back in America, one thing always strikes me. American life is bleak. It’s…weirdly…joyless. Now, if you’ve only lived in America, you’ll be indignant. But come now. Is anybody in America really happy? Maybe… the billionaires? Anybody else?

So why is American life so bleak? What happened? What went wrong, exactly, on the way to building a modern society? You see, it’s not just my random opinion. Every statistic imaginable shows it to us. Young people are in crisis, depression and suicide skyrocketing. Families can barely make ends meet. The shattering loss of confidence in institutions and trustin society and between people is all too real. American life really is bleak. But why?

When I’m in Europe, it always strikes me how different it is from America. It’s not unusual to see art installation on the streets in the summer and springtime. Musicians playing, as irritating as that is for the people living upstairs. People laugh and smile and hug. But in America, that’s not just rare, it’s almost unheard of. There’s a strange alienation about America, and you can see it in the way that people interact. It’s not they’re cold — but it is that there’s a lack of human emotion, contact, closeness. I don’t say that as an insult — it’s an observation. One which begins to point out to me what went wrong with American life. Why are Americans like this with each other — almost suspicious, aloof, not reserved, like say, the British, but…

It’s hard to put into words. Like I said, you feel it better if you’ve lived outside the States. Just cross the border into Canada, and people are famously “nice.” But what does that mean, really? Well, if Canada was in Europe, Canadians would just be normal. It’s because they’re right next to America that they’re “nice” — not that they aren’t, but that the juxtaposition is so striking. Cross the border the other way, go south into America, and suddenly — nobody’s nice. Being nice is something wrong. You can’t be nice as an American — what the hell is wrong with you? You’ve got to be tough, cruel, cunning, self-reliant, individualistic, or else. Or else what? You don’t make it. 

Maybe you see what I’m getting at. So let me now put it a little more formally. Why is American life so bleak? Because it’s a zero-sum game. That means: for me to win, somebody else has to lose. When I say that, maybe it doesn’t even strike many Americans as something particularly strange or odd or bad. But it is. Because, well, the entire point of a modern society is to create a positive-sum game, where when I win, you win. But in America, that’s not true.

Let me start with a few very, very simple examples. Why doesn’t America — famously, by now — have any of the advanced public goods that the rest of the entire rich world has? From healthcare to high speed trains to universal higher education to retirement? For me to win, somebody else has to lose. Americans don’t back these things — not enough of them for them ever to become major social institutions, or the basic constitutional rights, that they are in Canada and Europe — because at a social level, enough Americans don’t believe that everyone should have these things. But the only way you believe that people don’t deserve basics is if you first believe: for me to win, somebody else has to lose.

The right wing became expert at triggering that in Americans during the Reagan years. All kinds of code words were employed, “welfare queens” and so forth, to instill in people the idea that for them to win, someone else had to lose. Their neighbors weren’t just people like them — they were liabilities, parasites, sucking the money right out of their wallets, costing their families their futures. I won’t pay for those people’s healthcare or their educations! They have to lose, in order for me to win!

This belief, this feeling, goes so deep in America by now that most people don’t even recognize it as one. Too many think it’s really true. They don’t stop to examine and question it — and reveal it for the myth that it really is.

Let me give you another example. Why are American kids so miserable? Well, it’s not just climate change and the world generally going to blazes — that’s true everywhere, in many places more so than America. It’s because from they day they’re born, this zero-sum belief is beaten into them. I’ll give you my own example — as a “gifted” kid, psychologists and teachers immediately started me on this bizarre diet of “games.” But they weren’t really games — they were exercises in zero-sum logic. Only one kid could win. I recoiled. I didn’t want to play these games. They struck me as wrong. Why couldn’t we play games where everyone could win? They were trying to teach me a lesson, mold me into a certain kind of person. I didn’t want to become him. They labelled me difficult. Don’t cry for me. See the point. From the day American kids are born, this belief is beaten into them — only the strong survive.