On America’s Obsession with Freedom
Assessing the damage we’ve done by respecting
freedom more than duty
In the years since I went on my first, big international trip as an adult, I’ve thought a lot about what defines American culture.
In particular, I’ve spent a ton of time wondering why our lifestyle expectations seem to differ vastly from many of our global neighbors’. I came up with self-determination as the fundamental principle that sets the stage for a uniquely American mindset. Everything Americans do is in the pursuit of freedom and independence.
We learn to expect certain liberties without question.
That behavior makes sense; it’s what we’ve been taught to do forever, really. From the time we take our very first social studies lessons in elementary school, we learn to expect certain liberties without question. Freedom from oppression and violence. The freedom to express our opinions and faiths without retribution. The freedom to exhaust every opportunity we’re given to create safe, healthy, and happy lives for ourselves.
What I’ve wondered about lately, though, is how this value of self-determination seems to corrupt as it permeates new facets of American culture. As we step into modern life where we are increasingly connected in superficial ways rather than meaningful ones, the very reasonable freedoms from authoritarianism that we learned in school seem to have shifted. Americans’ unwillingness to compromise on freedom—even as we indulge in more physical comfort and pleasure than humanity has ever seen—has allowed this honorable value to take a gloomy turn.
We started demanding an unprecedented level of freedom from inconvenience, challenge, and responsibility.
We started to take for granted our (rightful) political and religious autonomy, and developed some new, far-reaching assumptions. In particular, we started demanding an unprecedented level of freedom from inconvenience, challenge, and responsibility.
This manifests in little ways. Like when we don’t have patience for courtesy with the grocery store cashier because we have somewhere more important to be. Or when we cut someone off in traffic because our time is the most valuable of anyone’s on Earth.
It also happens in bigger, more insidious ways. Like when we turn a blind eye to media companies’ sly tactics to kidnap our attention. Or when we opt for same-day delivery of a product we don’t really need, from a business that we know exploits people and resources.
All this for what? So that we can use liberty as an excuse to satisfy our cravings for gratification and comfort—and then completely disregard the consequences?
It seems to me that freedom and individualism have devolved into aimlessness and selfishness. Anything that makes our lives easier or takes less time, we want. As a result, our expectations for how we interface with the rest of the world have changed.
We don’t just ask others to respect our boundaries or help us to get what we need. We demand that they give us what we want too. And it doesn’t matter whether other Americans, nations, or the environment at large are trampled in the process.
We’ve made more space for mercilessness, ambition, and desire and less for understanding, generosity, and camaraderie.
I don’t mean to sound grumpy. In fact, Americans’ emphasis on freedom and individualism is a strength in many ways. Expecting lives unburdened by oppression is of course what we should strive for. But we’ve allowed our values to be contaminated by an illusion of ultra-self-sufficiency. We’ve forsaken our sense of community. We’ve made more space for mercilessness, ambition, and desire and less for understanding, generosity, and camaraderie.
We can’t shy away from how deeply intertwined our lives are with other human beings’—and frankly, with the rest of nature, too. Whether we like it or not, our decisions have consequences that we have to consider. Making a choice that eases your life in the short-term at the expense of another—even your future self—is inexcusable.
Scrolling provides us with brief euphoria, but it also enables media companies to exploit our brains and make our future selves depressed, anxious, and insatiable. Cutting someone off in traffic seems like a minor transgression, but it usually puts another person’s safety at risk or makes their day a little crappier. Why do we feel entitled, even happy to do these things anyway?
Counting on ourselves to have empathy and foresight should not make us feel weak or shackled; it should make us feel electrified with potential. I don’t know about you, but I want to live in a universe where Americans are defined by compassion, conscientiousness, and respect rather than arrogance, selfishness, and complacency. That America is one that figures out how to reconcile freedom with duty; after all, responsibility is what provides freedom a pedestal to stand on, isn’t it?