[terranstyler]

"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

IOW, it's a fundamental problem of Western democracy and any other "representational" system that is not based on voluntary agreement and/or immediate feedback.

Unfortunately, people do not have a sufficient degree of control over authorities, hence a frustration and its emergence in culture.

[bildung]

"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states.

In my experience "the society never works" feeling is by no means uniformly distributed in Western societies, but mostly a phenomenon in the USA. When I started reading American political discussions on the net 10 to 15 years ago, I was really shocked how widespread this randian view on society is in the US. OTOH that could be a self selection of a certain mieleu of people...

[pluma]

This. This attitude feels most alien to me as a European in discussions about gun control ("the cops can't protect you"), freedom of speech, social welfare, public health care, public education and so on. As an outsider it feels as if individualism is valued over the common good to an almost impractical extent sacrificing innumerable benefits to some ideal of personal freedom.

But of course this perception isn't unbiased. It just feels strange to observe a culture that seems very similar but then and again shows facets that couldn't feel less natural to me.

[jerf]

I'd submit that a better lens to understand what is going on is to understand that the culture of the United States really is very diverse, whereas European cultures often sit on centuries of history and cultural inertia (not necessarily in a bad sense of inertia). What in a European culture can be simply unspoken must be explicit in the discourse of the United States. What a Frenchman may expect from his police may be quite uniform between both the police and the policed (at least relative to the US), whereas in the US it must be constantly spelled out in the culture. Some of the individualism is probably also a reaction to the fact that we can't all just settle into a pluralistic culture, because in the US, the first question would be "which one?", followed by "why that one?" for almost everybody who doesn't come from that culture.

Remember, a "European country", which may still consider itself to have several distinct subcultures within itself, is generally only the size of an American state, and even within that division, a great deal more culturally unified than any American state.

In a way, telling Americas about how they need to be less individualistic is putting the cart before the horse... there's no way to make that happen without massive, massive changes to the substrate of the entire country first. No matter how desirable or undesirable it may be, it simply isn't an option open to the United States. Nor, for that matter, would I really go around wearing your cultural pluralism as some badge of pride as if it were some deliberate choice.

(BTW, keep trying to grow the EU and you'll create the exact same dynamics within it, if they don't already exist.)

[disputin]

I'm seeing this in London with the influx from Europe. I've come to the conclusion that the sacred concept of diversity, handled ham-fistedly, is more like the power of the atom, very useful, and very dangerous. Lose control of the balance and you have a problem. A little random noise is beneficial, but too much, too fast creates subculture conflict. There's a very slow integration speed limit which is ignored.

[arethuza]

"the society never works"

It's a fairly common view in the UK - notably Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" thing - which isn't actually as bad as it sounds if you listen to it in context (and I'm probably to the left of most people on HN and I'm not a particular fan of Thatcher).

Personally, I constantly struck by how the public sector here in the UK seems to contain both the absolute best of society (military, emergency services, a lot of NHS front line staff) and some of the absolute worst (mostly self serving bureaucrats).