The American personality

[undergroundpanther]

Or part of why we are so fucked up,.


What caused America? What was it that changed a group of totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting and witch-hunting Englishmen into a nation of fiercely independent Yankees in but one century? In a world accustomed to glacially slow change in historical personality, what sudden shift of psychic forces cracked open the frozen feudal mask of European man and released the powerful individualism which fashioned the world's first modern democracy?(1) Something new had happened to the human personality in America - - Condorcet thought Americans had "stepped out of history", Turgot called them "the hope of the human race" - many agreed on what happened. But what caused it?

Historians over the past 200 years have answered this question with a single theme: trees caused America. Trees, and all that open space, giving the American colonists the freedom to start anew, substituting an institutionless American simplicity for the hierarchical European complexity they left behind.(2) Unfortunately, there are two problems with this environmental thesis. The first is that the most important social institutions were brought over to America intact - in the heads of the colonists - and two generations after the first Puritans landed New England was as totalitarian, hierarchical and intolerant as anywhere in Europe. Despite all those trees. And the second problem is that if trees, open space and a fresh start could produce democratic men, why didn't it do so in Brazfl or Mexico, or in Siberia for that matter?




http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p105x115.htm

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. Oscar Wilde said it best.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

[hfojvt]

2. funny to think of America as "decadent" in 1880

Wouldn't we think even the richest robbert baron was deprived? Did they have running hot water? Did they have air conditioning? Did they have reliable transportation to send them thousands of miles down the road in a dozen hours, or to London in six hours? Did they have refrigeration? Weren't their houses drafty and heated with wood or coal? And that is decadent? Not to mention the vast majority of Americans who were rural farmers, quite far away from big city "decadence or foppishness". In 1880 my hometown in SD was just being founded. Doubtless it was still pretty barbaric by our standards. Did it make it to decadence by 1900?