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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
My feelings on America are much like Cicero had of Rome. The state is in decline from its heights and the Republic is a zombie waiting until someone reveals that it’s been dead a long time. She’s a pretty corpse, don’t misunderstand, but she’s a corpse shambling along and what remains of the glamour is makeup on a zombie corpse.
Her government has long ceased to be the government that needs ask permission before meddling in the affairs of her citizens that she considers subjects. If there were any doubts of this fact, I’d simply need point out the entirety of 2020, when a supposedly “free” country took upon itself to dictate the movements and activities and business transactions that her subjects were allowed to take. And all of this without the fig-leaf of a debate or vote or (heresy for any government) a sunset date certain beyond which the state could not interfere. Likewise, this same state was and still is telling and coordinating with social media and the press on what stories the state considers “misinformation” to be labeled and suppressed. We are seeing the birth of the neurostate (https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/on-neurogovernance) in which the “free” people are managed like cattle, their opinions shaped and managed for them, and so when they’re allowed to vote, they can only vote as the programmers told them to.
But even if there is a dissident vote, the professional technocrats of the deep state can easily bypass the vestigial electoral state and just, go do whatever it wants to anyway. Our Supreme Court has declared an end to affirmative action in state run university. They have no intention of going along with it. When Trump (supposedly the elected head of the government) wanted to change nuclear policy, the deep state refused to obey. The deep state also gets to make and enforce rules that hamstring businesses beyond any sort of logic or practicality (https://fee.org/articles/warning-osha-can-be-hazardous-to-your-health/) and inspections are done by people who have never worked in that industry.
Honestly, there are times I wish the zombie republic would kick off so that we didn’t have to make believe that we live in a free country.
Is it possible that the US has peaked? Sure, depending on your metrics I can grant that.
Does that mean that it's not worth living in?
Heavens no, even by the standards of liberty you espouse, you'll be hard pressed to find places that compare.
If you're concerned about government overreach in the affairs of its citizens, come have a look at what we have to deal with in India. Or the UK for the matter.
Much like democracy is the worst form of government but for all the others, the US is the same to its own ideals.
More importantly, while I appreciate liberty, it's not the only concern she or I share. I'd happily live in Singapore too.
Except when people say things like "it's worth living in," and then they point to things like medical technology or supermarkets, they're trading on the term 'America' as a proxy for simply talking about 'material wealth' and modern society. Of course, who would want to go back to times without modern anesthesia? And without Deng Xiaoping's hat tip to neoliberalism, the average person in China would be a subsistence farmer in 2023 and wouldn't live in the relative material exorbitance that they now have.
If this was your experience growing up in the US, maybe rolling the dice as a relative middle class person in Bulgaria may not look so bad. That's not to say I don't appreciate what I have, I'm not complacent, but America isn't exceptional in this regard. Countries that are fairly materially well off, don't look with so much envy to the US. They're as equally content where they are in their home country as I am here.
That’s my thing too. Right now we’re cruising on the inertia that was built 100 years ago. Yes, it’s still a good place if you’re wealthy enough that you can avoid the slums in the cities, you can afford a decent private school that bypasses state schools that are more interested in teaching propaganda than literacy, numeracy, and scientific literacy. But I don’t think it can last when we must import the majority of our engineers and computer scientists from abroad, when we’ve stopped inventing, when generations are incapable of understanding the modern world due to poor education, and where infrastructure is bad enough to cause derailments. Sooner or later, as conditions in India and China improve such that importing our brains doesn’t work, and our native kids are too poorly educated to maintain, let alone build or create modern civilization, when our kids are too obese to fight to protect shipping lanes or allies, and when bridges and roads are no longer useable because we can’t maintain them, the makeup won’t hide that.
We're cruising on the inertia of the 1990s - early 2010s, the various tech booms and the great decline in crime.
Being poor sucks anywhere. The slums were much worse in the US from roughly the race riots of the 1960s to the early 1990s (later in some places). They're getting worse again but they haven't reached those lows.
That's what suburbs are for. Maybe small cities without much of a progressive problem.
We don't see table 5. Software developers are the highest at about 40%.
A section of I-95 collapsed (due to a major fire, not lack of maintenance) in Philadelphia and re-opened (granted, a temporary fix) within 12 days. We're decadent, not incapable. At least so far.
This is something every wealthy society becomes in danger of losing knowledge of - overtime. People have always looked at me funny when I tell them there are places in the US that resemble third world countries. I'd rather be broke in the US than broke in India, but I'd probably much rather be rich, living as a middle class American in Russia, than a well off Russian trying to live in the Bay Area; if I really took the time to sit down and do the math.
I've actually thought about this and wondered how the surge in remote work made by COVID, will turn the major cities into economic superstructures that are built on quicksand. Especially when the service sector and technology that's less reliant on physical inputs (but rather the quality of fewer inputs) continues to eclipse even more of the industrial sector. You're already seeing people take tech jobs and moving far out of state.
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Must? To the extent that having more engineers and computer scientists is better, it seems weird to complain about having more of them. You're starving your competition of the best intellectual resources after all and enriching yourself.
Dunno about China, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for India to catch up, unless the country literally bans emigration, which is not on the cards.
Leaving aside that even in the absence of transformative AI, most wars as far in the future as you're assuming will be fought with drones, obesity is the least of your concerns. Maybe you might get better drone operators if they're all chubby gamers.
I'm bullish on ozempic and co myself.
I’m not complaining about too many engineers. My complaint is that we aren’t producing our own engineers. I’ve gone to lots of graduations, and the engineering department in most schools is graduating far more Chinese and Indian students than native born American students. This is a problem because they’ll only stay here so long as our lifestyle is substantially better than what’s possible in their home countries or in other countries. If European countries are a better “get rich” location for them, we aren’t going to keep them. And thus having a good enough education system to create native born engineers is critical to our future as a civilization. Unfortunately our K12 system is so bad that most graduates of that system are simply too far behind to go into engineering.
To quote myself, see table 5. Also table 6.
Europe is moribund, having taken up leveling and socialism to a much greater extent than the US ever did. The more likely danger is that the US follows Europe down that path, not that Europe somehow becomes a better place to get rich.
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