Taking the Selfish Out of Selfhood — Part One
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Taking the Selfish Out of Selfhood — Part One
All hell broke loose when egotism infected American individualism. Time to reexamine what that really means.
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I never met Grandma Mary; she died of cancer when Dad was 21, seven years before I born. A Smith grad, she was one of the first to get her master’s in social science from The New School for Social Research. It was a radical institution at the time founded by a personal hero, the polymath educational reformer John Dewey who, like Grandma Mary, was an Anglo-American Yankee with the sort of staunch values that founded this country, which in my view have since been irreparably corrupted by a perfect storm of factors.
Grandma was apparently fond of two quips that were popular in the 1920s. One was a riddle of sorts, “Time flies? You can’t — they go too fast.” The other was a motto for the Yankee outlook on this new America rapidly taking over the old: “E pluribus unum means ‘Every man for himself.’”
It was the sort of jeu de mots among educated Northeasters who were taught enough Latin to get it, and an example of wry Episcopalian humor. It bends the motto of the United States, which means “Out of many, one,” to comment on the corruption of American individualism into its traditional nemesis: egotism.
It’s easy to see why people not raised in the hundreds of implied protocols and principles of Anglo-American culture might confuse our take on individualism with selfishness, self-promotion at the expense of others, and greed. But it’s their interpretation, not our intention.
I don’t need to sound off again about the holy terrors of the Selfie Age to underscore how the cult of identity, spawned by critical social theory’s many inquisitions, has exponentially worsened the commodification, advancement of, and entitlement to, egotism over the past twenty years. I imagine John Dewey biting into a cookie over tea with Grandma Mary in the afterlife reading Twitter and saying, “What the fudge, Miss Hunting.” The New School is as guilty as the rest of Northeastern establishment academia in advancing this distinctly un-Anglo-American monster in our midst.
The road to Woke Hell is paved with our good intentions for mankind. However mendacious and manipulative, the grievances of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are like catnip to the majority of a people for whom privilege is onerous, an unwelcome burden for which we are perpetually atoning.
I’m no historian. I simply observe and process events and information through my experience with the purpose of giving people another point of view. To proselytize one dogma to counter another would, according to one of those hundreds of protocols and principles of Yankeeness, be an unseemly breach of correct conduct on my part.
It is human nature for a tribe/community/culture to gather around and erect protective boundaries that ensure the survival of their ways that preserve ease of access to their places of worship, children, schools, the comforts of home, and people who share the same language and culture. Every urban and suburban area in the world has communities that form naturally primarily because of those reasons, not prejudice-based exclusion.
Fear of outsiders is a human instinct that we try our best to overcome, not always successfully; Anglo-Americans are humans, too. It’s not segregation or “restriction” as much as it is a combination of a sensible survival instinct that mistrusts the outsider until proven otherwise, especially when everyone’s after your Lucky Charms while claiming to hate them.
Still, I would be hard-pressed to think of another socio-cultural group in world history that has shared so much of themselves and their accomplishments with the rest of mankind as Anglo-Americans.
I’ve told the story before of a Mexican Uber driver who was forced to take a detour around BLM’s occupation of my neighborhood, the LGBT enclave of Los Angeles, of all places, in June 2020 while driving me to a doctor’s appointment. After asking me if I knew what an inquisition was — rightfully assuming that, as a primarily Hispanic phenomenon, I might not understand how similar the unfolding crypto-Maoist terrors were to it — he said,
La razón por que Dios ha bendecido ustedes con tanto es porque todo lo que han logrado lo han compartido con el resto del mundo.
The reason God has blessed you [the gringos] with so much is that everything you have achieved you have shared with the rest of the world.
When the social justice movement’s pressure cooker of identity-based stew exploded all over America, I pushed back against the “Whites don’t share” insult by insisting that people keep in mind the words of the Declaration of Independence and the aforementioned quote inscribed on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France in gratitude for the inspiration for their own “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
My reality is that the interpretations of critical social theorists, who tend to have no experience of the realities of Anglo-American culture, are motivated by a need to prove that the constructs and intersectionalities of their Ph.D. dissertations are real when they are nothing more than chimeras of the Selfie Age. Few people are more dangerous than the wrong determined to prove themselves right.
As I was drowned out by the mayhem of a new religion based on identity and egotism, I realized that there was one critical component of American individualism that is part of our hundreds of protocols and principles but has never been properly imparted to those raised without them: American individualism is balanced by equal and opposite altruism. What we have witnessed over the past twenty years is an example of what happens when that yin-yang relationship is upset.
I sum up our reflexive ethos as, “The supremacy of self-made individuals who place all of mankind before themselves.” It’s a viewpoint sprinkled throughout American history, law and lore, most notably in Neil Armstrong’s line after placing the first foot on the Moon, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
THE GILDED LIBERTARIAN REFUGEE
As xenophobic as it sounds, the erosion of Anglo-American values began with the influx of immigrants. As we retreated into safe communal spaces, we were made into something we’s always abhorred, and still do: the same kind of inherited-privilege noblesse whom we shucked off so violently in the Revolutionary War. We became the Auld Ones, the creators and managers of the system that ran the country. We had our schools, our churches, our tasteless food.
That population explosion brought mass consumption, building and movement around a nation expanding like the Big Bang. With that came the enormous wealth of the Gilded Age.
With nothing to spend their money on, those new tycoons turned to Europe. Over a couple of decades, one-third of the House of Lords became married to American heiresses mostly from the Northeast, the “dollar princesses.” The Singer fortune alone propped up many impoverished noble families on the continent, as well. I’m friends with a German prince and a French ancien régime princess whose families benefitted from Singer money, but they’ve never even met.
And so casteism seeped into Anglo-American culture. Exclusive clubs like the Union and the Knickerbocker in New York were established at the end of the 19th century, modeled along the lines of London clubs. The Park, the summer colony where I was raised, and its two sister clubs were founded; the posher, blonder one that I mention in my essay about Ralph Lauren and appropriation was established by a few families of the New York 400.
A couple of decades after Grandma Mary was sipping tea and nibbling cookies with John Dewey after her graduation from the New School, another beast began to gnaw at traditional American altruistic individualism: Libertarianism.
One important phenomenon that most Americans aren’t aware of: Ayn Rand, the high priestess of Midcentury Libertarianism, not only isn’t read anywhere else in the world, even British academics I know aren’t aware of her. She’s a specific kind of American identitarian virus that broke out after the Gilded Age, and the encroachment of casteism within the Protestant establishment upset the balance of our traditional altruistic individualism, effectively splitting us in two: the snobs and the reluctant, perpetually guilty nobs.
The egotism of the self-made man was placed on the high altar of Americanness; altruism was knocked aside as a sign of weakness and incipient socialism.
I have to admit that I was caught up in the vigor of Ayn Rand’s vision; I don’t know an American man who has read her and doesn’t buy into it to one degree or another — I’ve never met a woman who has given it more than a nod and a wrinkle of her nose.
Most guys I know sober up and see her views for the inhumane, distinctly un-American extremism that they are. A quip apocryphally attributed to Jon Stewart is “Everyone is allowed to be an asshole for a few months after reading Ayn Rand.”
Rand’s altruism-exclusionary misconstruing of American individualism comes from the fact that she not only wasn’t Anglo-American, she was Russian, our cultural polar opposite. A refugee of sorts born in Tsarist Saint Petersburg, she watched her communal safe space, its traditions, comforts and culture, torn to shreds by Bolsheviks in 1917, then transformed into a nation-sized gulag under Lenin and Stalin. That’s reason enough for some mind-warping PTSD, right there.
Within the top ten Google results for “American individualism” is a sort of eighth-grade-level page from the libertarian group Foundation for Economic Education, founded by Rand devotee Leonard Read in 1946, three years after Rand published The Fountainhead. As I’m writing this on July 4th, with fireworks exploding in the background, I’m intrigued by this sentence:
“When King George III refused to grant them this autonomy, the American Revolution was born, instigated by the Declaration of Independence, a veritable individualist manifesto.”
This is a perfect example of Libertarian corruption of the meaning of American individualism to abuse the halo of the Declaration of Independence and lube up Ayn Rand’s favorite XXL vibrator about the supremacy of the individual over the weaker collective.
The Declaration of Independence is, in fact, the opposite of an individualist manifesto. It’s a proclamation of Anglo-American altruism and egalitarianism that clearly establishes a belief in the supremacy of the collective over the tyranny of an individual with inherited privilege:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people…”
At no point in the document is there a reference to the individual; in fact, it’s entirely in the first person plural. To further set Rand’s crooked Ruskie teeth straight on the intention of our Anglo-American Founding Fathers, the beginning of the Constitution is “We the people.”
EGOTISM: THE KOOL-AID OF THE CULT OF PERSONALITY
The pejorative in historian circles for the interpretation of history through the “lensing” of contemporary critical theorists and the like is “presentism.” The presentist view is that, far from being what it clearly states, the Declaration of Independence was solely referring to landowning White men.
Let me help them understand the ridiculousness of their Enlightenment-exclusionary reinterpretation of the Founding Fathers’ intentions: The only people with any say in local government were, in the Americas as in Britain, landowning White men, with a smattering of Dutch and Germans. Universal suffrage for White men in America was granted in 1860; it wasn’t granted until 1918 in Great Britain. Still, they had the House of Lords as the equivalent of our Senate, hereditary positions.
In 1870, men of all races had the right to vote in the North, which was downright radical by the standards of the day. The South — where the vast majority of Blacks lived, a culture corrupted by slavery — passed Jim Crow laws, which also made it impossible for poor White men to vote.
The Declaration of Independence is not only directed at “the King of Great Britain,” it specifically mentions “Nor have We been wanting in our attentions to our Brittish [sic] brethren.” Again, that pesky “We” — the capitalization is theirs. They were Brits before they were Yanks.
I’m not interested in demonizing interpretations of the Anglo-American mindset from people who aren’t raised with it. I’ve heard it all; again and again, it’s galling and offensive, but above all willfully ignorant, a corruption of our views that is no different from Ayn Rand’s. Offensive and willfully ignorant are two key attributes of all prejudice.
Rand’s twin heroes Howard Roark and Hank Rearden not only share the same initials — for no reason Google can dig up for me — according to their names they’re also Anglo-Celts, which shows how much she understood the nuances of Anglo-American culture and the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons.
The reality is the self-centered, anti-altruistic Randian übermensch isn’t either of those men — he’s Donald Trump.
Anglo-American altruism begat America’s unique and formidable system of philanthropy. Unlike most Western countries, traditionally we haven’t relied on the state to fund charities, educational and cultural institutions. Islamic culture has a similar system that is codified in religious law: the wealthy should give 2.5% of their wealth to philanthropic causes, specifically to help the poor.
To this day, in my natal world the altruistic individualist is expected to give back to society what he or she has taken out, whether the fortune was self-made or inherited; however, they have the right and freedom to choose how their money is allocated and spent. They should also fulfill their civic duty by holding public office. This applies not just to Protestants but to Catholics and Jews as well.
However, because of the corruption of altruist-individualism starting with the Gilded Age and the influx of ethnicities of all races and creeds that didn’t share our hundreds of protocols and principles, it’s now incumbent upon the American government to provide what non-Anglo-America, modern Republicans and their Randian-Libertarian allies will not. If the rich will not provide for the collective, they must be forced to do so by being taxed.
Trump still gets away with not contributing. Even his foundation was a corruption of philanthropy. Still, even if Trump wins another term, the Anglo-American system is now so deeply entrenched that it’s immovable, albeit constantly adjusting.
There is never going back in America, only forward; we are the constant New World. I’m confident Yankee culture will remain intact, always adjusting to change. Wokeism wouldn’t exist without Harvard, Princeton, Wesleyan, which I briefly attended, and Grandma Mary’s alma maters, Smith and the New School. My high school, Trinity, now the number one prep school in America with a 2.5% acceptance rate, has been so woke I’ve barely been able to read emails from the Head of School to alumni. Thankfully, he recently stepped down — I can just imagine why.
The Northeast is vast, densely populated with a 400-year-old culture that is still by far the most influential in the country precisely because of the many top-tier academic institutions funded by generous endowments from wealthy individuals and trusts. Most importantly, our hundreds of protocols and principles are so firmly embedded in the foundations of the country, in that “system” that some all-too-vocal, paranoid people feel oppressed by — merely an expression of another form of social insecurity — that we aren’t aware of them or their origins anymore.
Anglo-American Yankees will always be perceived as the elite, which brings much healthy shame to those of us who aren’t socially insecure snobs clinging to the Social Register like it’s the Bible.
I tried watching The Gilded Age for this piece, and while I recognized it to be an engaging, superbly crafted piece of entertainment, it embarrassed and humiliated me to see Americans behaving like that, precisely because it’s true and too close to home — they might have spoken differently when I was younger, but the meaning was the same.
Imagine spending your life obsessed with the hundreds of protocols and principles that were thousands back then. It was no different from Shogunate Japan, the businessmen ruthless samurai, the women obsequious guardians of perfect, absurd etiquette.
“Turn that unseemly garbage off; it’s making me anxious,” the spirit of Grandma Mary said before we got to the end of the second episode. “That Knickerbocker van Whatnot woman reminds me of my own grandmother — atrocious snob. Terrible times, indeed.”
What I saw in the arriviste Russell family and their Fifth Avenue palace was the beginning of the long corruption of American altruistic individualism, the dawn of the Flying Insect Caste. It quickly became a show that asked me to be sympathetic toward the Trumps. Grandma Mary and I were not amused.
Anyone who has seriously embarked on an Eastern esoteric spiritual path in any of the traditions that begin with Sufism in the Middle East and end with Zen in Japan knows that the greatest obstacle and foe along the path to enlightenment is one’s ego. Without the balance of altruism in the culture, with the focus entirely on identity, it becomes downright dangerous to the greater good. We’ve seen that in the rise of identitarian politics on both the right and left. Neither side is worse than the other; they deserve each other.
As an American dervish in my Sufi order quipped to me at one point during the initial phase of my journey on the Path, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a Westerner to attain enlightenment.” Our worship of ego is entirely to blame.
I’ll expand on that further in Part Two of this piece next week.
Thanks for reading.
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