The Spectacular Failure of American Morality

How the Perverse Idea that Selfishness, Cruelty, and Greed are Good Fuelled Collapse

Here’s a tiny observation: America developed a moral philosophy that’s utterly unique in the world, and in history. One that’s solely its own, not used anywhere else — and is fatally, weird, gruesome, and backwards, when you think about it.

It goes like this. American morality says that what’s good for everyone is acting aggressively in our own self-interest. Bang! Collapse. History and human nature say exactly the opposite is true: what’s best for us is doing good for others. Don’t believe me? Very good. I’ll make my case, and you be the judge.

Now. We might preach kindness and gentless in church — and even desperately believe it — but the daily reality of American economic, social, and cultural life is that an absolutist, totalizing, atomizing self-interest has prevailed, isn’t it? We’re instructed, maybe indoctrinated, to believe that to be aggressively self-interested is what is good — not just for us, but, strangely, for everyone. Economics teaches it, psychology teaches it, business practices it, culture celebrates it, politics institutionalizes it — America is built on it. (Hence, we’re told to “take responsibility” and “be self-reliant individuals” and so on.) We fight the system — norms, bosses, codes, rules — if we want to genuinely care about anyone else but ourselves.

And yet the limits of this moral philosophy are becoming clearer by the day — as, thankfully, American are beginning to reject it. People crowdfunding healthcare. “Active shooter drills.” Kids buying bulletproof backpacks. Elderly people who’ll never retire. Young people saddled with life-crippling debt just for getting an education. These are just some of the self-evident failures of morality as aggressive, naked self-interest. These things enrage us as much as they aggrieve and frighten us. They cannot be good, we are realizing, deep in our bones, these days.

But those failures hardly stop there. When you think about it, almost every single one of America’s catastrophic problems can be traced back to this fatal error in moral judgment. Loneliness, depression, suicide. The lack of a public interest. The decline of the common good…