![]() Then, when it became clear that COVID was here to stay, talking heads were trotted out to say that people spreading an infectious disease and suffering and dying was a necessary price to pay to save the economy. At first, the people managing our country at the highest level didn’t even want to acknowledge the existence of the virus out of a desire to keep the economic machine running. However, a closer look brings into sharp focus how this crisis is so devastating because of the American value of worshipping property. A natural disaster that couldn’t have been avoided. At first glance, this disease is a public health crisis. Nearly every problem facing American society, and by extension our global civilization due to the waning but still substantial influence American culture has on the rest of the world, can be traced back to this core value. It permeates every aspect of our culture, consciously or not. Property is the supermassive black hole that American culture orbits. Living things are only valued insofar as what value they can generate, which is just a flowery way of saying what price they can fetch, whether it’s heads of cattle or fields of grain or human lives. Things that are fundamentally dead in the most literal sense of the term. In other words, cash, stocks, commodities, and real estate all fall under the purview of property. And when one examines American culture through the lens of this singular value, things start making a lot more sense.įor the purposes of this discussion, property covers both liquid and illiquid assets. America’s values begin and end with property being the thing that every other facet of life is subordinate to. What does America value? America’s True Values ![]() America as a society and culture doesn’t actually value any of those things. Not in any meaningful capacity, in any case.Īfter all, how could a place whose core value is freedom have more people in prison than anywhere else in the world? How could a place that supposedly values equality have a long history of inequality and exploitation between different groups of people that persist to this day? How could a land of opportunity have little to no class mobility for its most impoverished and vulnerable populations? And how could a democracy not enact policies that reflect the desires of the majority of the population? For most people, there is no such thing as democracy. For most people, America was and is neither free nor equal. Perhaps for some, there is true freedom and opportunity in America, as was undoubtedly true at the country’s founding when only white land-owning men were allowed the privilege of voting for their elected representatives while an entire race of people were systemically massacred to have their ancestral lands stolen from them and another separate race was held in the bondage of chattel slavery. We have been told that America is a land of opportunity. ![]() ![]() The mythologized version of American history states that the values of America are freedom, liberty from tyranny, and democracy. Image Credit: Jan Kameníček, Wikimedia Commons, Edited by Mick TheebsĪt the core of every organized society are a set of immutable values that serve as the guiding principles of how to behave as an individual as well as providing a framework for communities at large.
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