It’s due to the cult of individualism and a media-ecosystem that re-enforces the “only a single strong man can save the world” idea with endless superhero movies, TV shows, and the like. Doesn’t even have to be superheroes, honestly. Anything where magically problems are solved by the actions of one person.
It has everyone in this mode where they won’t organize not only because they don’t know how but because the lone-hero narrative is so deeply ingrained in the culture (going as far back as The Lone Ranger) that Americans struggle to think outside that narrative. “Organizing” is literally a foreign concept to 99% of us.
Source: Am American. I try to talk about parallel systems and building new governance from the bottom up but literally all anyone wants to do is “buy guns” like that solves anything. Organizing just to take care of each other is too big of an ask apparently, let alone organizing to risk your life for the betterment of society. We can’t even get organized when there isn’t a functional risk to society.
EDIT: Also my personal pet conspiracy theory is that “group projects” in elementary and high school are designed to make people think working in groups is pointless since it’s a group grade and one person can just bail on doing anything… Yeah, because we incentivize bailing as a culture. I wonder why kids are so primed to do it.
It’s due to the cult of individualism and a media-ecosystem that re-enforces the “only a single strong man can save the world” idea with endless superhero movies, TV shows, and the like. Doesn’t even have to be superheroes, honestly. Anything where magically problems are solved by the actions of one person.
It has everyone in this mode where they won’t organize not only because they don’t know how but because the lone-hero narrative is so deeply ingrained in the culture (going as far back as The Lone Ranger) that Americans struggle to think outside that narrative. “Organizing” is literally a foreign concept to 99% of us.
Source: Am American. I try to talk about parallel systems and building new governance from the bottom up but literally all anyone wants to do is “buy guns” like that solves anything. Organizing just to take care of each other is too big of an ask apparently, let alone organizing to risk your life for the betterment of society. We can’t even get organized when there isn’t a functional risk to society.
EDIT: Also my personal pet conspiracy theory is that “group projects” in elementary and high school are designed to make people think working in groups is pointless since it’s a group grade and one person can just bail on doing anything… Yeah, because we incentivize bailing as a culture. I wonder why kids are so primed to do it.