From Firmin Debrabander's "Deluded Individualism" post at
NY Times' Opinionator blog:
Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth. But the notion of self-reliance is also a fallacy.
Debrabander invokes America's ethos of rugged individualism, placing self-determination and self-reliance at the center of this myth-yearning. Sometimes I wonder if there is not a more damaging force driving our country's pertinacity. Jonathan Franzen, in
Freedom, a novel that addresses this vague ideal in more ways than one, does not shy away from his own speculation when describing the actions of Walter, his novel's protagonist:
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.
I suspect Franzen was simply aiming for satirical hyperbole here, but I lately find myself wondering a lot, when considering the raging debates surrounding the ACA, taxation, and government aid in general, why it seems that many Americans just don't care about their fellow citizens.
