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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.
I dunno. I've visited America a couple of times (three months as an exchange student in Oregon, one week in New York), and what struck me, in the end, was that these places where much like any other place I visited; nice to see, many exciting sights, but not someone where I'd want to live if I had the choice...
...not that, objectively speaking, they were somehow worse than Finland, but simply for the reason that this is the only place where I can function in Finnish language and in accordance with the rules of the Finnish culture, and transmit them to the next generation, the ensuring of which is indeed the sole reason for this country to exist as an independent country. If I somehow had to leave this country, America would surely be one of the main choices, but in that regard the whole "anyone can be an American" assimilatory spiel is a negative, not a positive.
Realistically I suspect it has everything to do with the contrast, or with where you're coming from?
I've never understood the magic hold that America seems to have over the minds of many, but then, I'm from Australia. Every time I've visited America, my reaction has been that it's a perfectly nice place and the people are friendly if exhausting, but the whole place is just... slightly dirtier than Australia. Everything is just a little bit poorer, or a little bit more garish, or a little bit, well, scuzzier.
But then, both Australia and Finland have a higher HDI than America. Of course it isn't going to have that magic for us. While there's immense regional variation within America and while personal taste counts for a whole lot, it's hard to point to objective metrics where these countries do worse than America.
There are bits and pieces of culture you can argue - there are things about America I envy! - but as a complete package, it is pretty clearly a close judgement call that's going to be a matter of taste.
HDI is a meaningless number. It combines the America I live in with the part of America that lives in third world squalor and violence. I don't live there, and they barely affect me. The meaningful comparison is the America a mottizen lives in, compared to the Australia a mottizen lives in.
Those two places are almost identical. Australia may be the only country more culturally egalitarian than America. The Australian cultural values of loyalty and fairness may be my favorite memeplex on earth, and I think the culture encourages a sense of decency, unpretentiousness, and integrity that is sadly missing from my country. We are, as you say, a bit garish and a bit shallow and flighty besides.
There's only one problem with Australia, and that's the tall poppy syndrome. For the median Australian, that's not a problem. For the dreamers, it is.
If you want to be average, Australia is unquestionably the better place.
If you want to be a surgeon, the two are equal. If you want to be a good surgeon, America may have more opportunities. If you want to be the absolute best surgeon on the planet in your subspecialty, you're moving to America. Substitute nearly anything you want for surgeon, from actor to programmer, and you'll get the same result.
When little Australian kids dream of being astronauts, they know they only way they'll ever do so is to train in America to fly on an American spaceship, launched from America.
Most Australians, of course, will never become astronauts. Most Australians (and perhaps most Americans!) would be happier in Australia. But if you want to dream, your dreams will be in America and of America.
I'm not sure how much any of that is attributable to culture? Yes, if you want to be world-class in something you probably need to move to America, but that's because America has a much larger population and a lot more of the world's wealth flows through America. It's just location. It's no different to the way that, for instance, talented and ambitious New Zealanders tend to move to Australia - not because Australian culture is better than (or even very different from) New Zealander culture, but just because it's bigger. There are more people, more jobs, more network effects.
I think it's probably true that a particular image of or sense of ambition is more prized in American culture - though I also experience this in part as Americans tending to come off as selfish or arrogant more frequently than Australians. One of the most shocking things I noticed in America was the near-total absence of self-deprecation. If an Australian says "I'm the best!", there will always be some sort of self-deprecating smile afterwards, or gentle laughter at one's self, or something to undercut it. You can't let that judgement actually stand, and if you try to let it stand, you're an arse and you deserve everything you're going to get. An American, however, will say "I'm the best!" and genuinely mean it. No matter how absurd or obviously false it is - they tend to get wrapped up in their illusions more.
Does that make them more successful? I doubt it. The British self-deprecate in the same way Australians do, in contrast to that weird brand of earnest selfishness the Americans have, and yet it didn't stop the British building the largest empire in history and creating the international framework that the Americans later inherited. There is still a large and visible cultural gap between Empire/Commonwealth Anglos and American Anglos, but framing that in terms of the Americans just being better at achieving things seems wrong to me.
And on the purely subjective level - yes, America has massive diversity, and you can't treat it all the same. I understand. But it's also, well, true, that every American city I've been to, even the famous centres of commerce and technology and progress, has struck me as, well, a bit nastier than its Australian equivalent. It's possible that it is just an artifact of where I've been. I'm told that the Midwest is actually much nicer than the big coastal cities I've visited, and maybe that's true.
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