Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America

It's pretty interesting to read an account of a foreigner doing "cultural studies" of your own culture. On the one hand to see what interests him (and what light that sheds on his own culture), but also to learn to take with a grain of salt some of the things our own "cultural studies" people say.

> But why? What’s the point of such people? Why don’t we just hire a Chinese person (maybe an immigrant, if we don’t trust the ones still in the PRC) to tell us what the Chinese National Character is? Why do we sent smart Americans to China to figure out what it’s like? There are literally over a billion people who already know that!

Honestly, a Chinese person (for instance) won't look at his own culture with the same eyes as an American, and there's some value to that American perspective for an American audience. This is a kind of translation task that seems intrinsically hard: you need a foot in both worlds, but one of those feet will inevitably be planted more firmly on one side than another.

That view from Iowa in the 1980s is useful.

He notices how weak the US political parties, as organizations, are. They were once far stronger, especially in big cities, where political machines outlasted individual candidates. But that had run down by the 1980s. Partly because of television. Once candidates no longer depended on the party to promote them, parties became far less important. Parties don't really pick candidates any more.

The self-organizing thing is significant. That's very Iowa, where farmer co-ops are still politically important. The leadership in China is absolutely terrified of any form of self-organization. People coming together in a group to make something happen is usually illegal.

He clearly liked the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and was impressed that it was free back then. It was free when I was a kid. It's US$26 to get in now. US$15 for kids.

Even a barelly educated Commie could easily recognize "racial conflict" was "class oppression" in disguise.

> he’s talking about capitalism and the Invisible Hand, which his Chinese readers aren’t necessarily familiar with

k12 education in China makes the "invisible hand" theory mandatory.

> “We all thought America was this shining beacon of prosperity. It is indeed very rich. But somehow it also has all of these terrible problems. The wealth and the terrible problems coexist. This is concerning and we must study it further.”

I too went through this realization. I think this is a very common phenomenon in many parts of the world.

We watch the US and its prosperity from afar. Ever since we were kids. The reach of the US is so vast, we grow up a little bit american ourselves whether we want to or not. Through the culture it exports to us, we learn american values and ideologies.

We learn to see the failings of our own societies through american lenses. Even recogizing some things as "failings" to begin with is proof that we have assimilated conflicting values of a foreign culture, american values. The US is a towering presence in the world, clearly it must be my nation's values which are wrong.

In my country there's this saying "quem não deve, não teme". The innocent have nothing to hide or fear. People repeat it every day. People say this to my face without the slightest hint of discomfort. They post it on social media and receive likes. Today, in 2024, I saw a woman post this in reply to someone else on Instagram. On a lawyer's page, no less. On a post concerning legal matters. They do not think about it, they do not question it, they are not bothered by its implications in literally any way. It's a conversation-ending quip. To this day, I was never able to convince someone that there's anything wrong with it. They look at me like I'm stupid if I try.

Maybe I disagree with my countrymen because I absorbed american values like privacy and the inviolability of the people and their integrity and that of their homes and correspondence, ideas like innocent until proven guilty in a civilized court of law. In light of these concepts, that saying is unacceptable.

These conflicts with the values of my own people led me to yet another trap: thinking that american people are morally superior and that this somehow explains their wealth and their geopolitical and military strength. Americans are who they are because of such deeply held values, and we are not prosperous like them because we hold different values. They're on top right now. What's a teenager to conclude? They're right, we're backwards.

At some point I believed americans would defend those values, their way of life, with their very lives if needed. That must be why they were so strong, they're willing to die for such things. For some reason I cannot imagine my people doing that. Americans were a different breed. They would depose their own government in armed insurrection if it betrayed those values. In fact they guaranteed themselves the god-given right of citizens to bear arms just to keep the authorities on their toes. Here the authorities are openly corrupt and they laugh at our helplessness, judges see themselves as gods and society recognizes them as such. Another saying: "doctors think they're gods, judges know".

Can you imagine my disappointment when I discovered the internet and got a healthy dose of reality? Try to imagine how confused I was when I saw americans parroting tired lines like "I have nothing to hide", americans arguing for gun control and generally undermining all of those values that supposedly made them a great and free people. The years passed by and I saw the US government eroding their rights away like the oceans erode a mountain, and yet they did nothing. Even worse: they were not ignorant, they were not forcibly stripped of their rights, it wasn't the work of some conspiracy that took over the country via underhanded means and imposed these conditions on them. No, they debated all this, very much in public, and they willingly traded those values away for security despite the literal founders of their nation warning against doing so. Their resolve to maintain principles even when the price is high was tested and did not stand. All the government had to do was conjure up some boogeymen like communists, pedophiles, terrorists and drug traffickers and the americans accepted rule by fear.

I have learned to respect my own people and culture a lot more since then. The american pedestal, forever broken. Just fallible humans, trapped in equally corrupt power structures. Just like me, like us. Much richer though, no doubt about that.