American culture has many commendable attributes. Extreme individualism is not one of them.
Individualism was the core of the frontier psyche. The pioneers were, in many ways, self-reliant and self-reliant. At the same time, early Americans were also keenly aware of the common good. That awareness was reinforced by the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. However, in the expansion of the late 20th century, and especially in recent years, individual rights have prevailed over group responsibility. As every society struggles to balance individual freedom with the common good, America has lost its balance. Our survival now depends on restoring it.
I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel to 48 countries and teach in eight of them. A graduate student and I conducted cross-cultural research in 28 of those countries. We compared societies on eleven generic social priorities, including “Individual Freedom.” Social priorities vary widely between countries, and our various analyzes did not always yield the same result. However, there is a worldwide perception that “individual freedom” is excessively high in the United States.
While people of other cultures view our individualism as dangerous, we are proud of it. We are proud of it until it seriously damages the common good, like the financial system that we all depend on. Then we get angry that the government, as a defender of the common good, has not prevented such destructive individual greed.
The Wall Street mess is a logical extension of the boundless American individualism that we hold dear. CEOs simply pushed the pendulum farther from center when they demanded obscene salaries and took wild risks with other people’s money while only considering their individual wealth, power, and ego. Due to his position, his extreme greed has had a dramatic negative impact on the common good.
CEOs of other cultures act differently. For example, in 2005, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the chief executive of British Petroleum (BP is the second largest oil company in the world) earned an attractive $ 5.6 million. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell (the third largest oil company) earned a handsome $ 4.1 million. The CEO of Exxon Mobil (the largest US-based oil company) raised $ 69.7 million and the median salary for US oil companies was $ 33 million. That discrepancy represents a huge cultural difference between the United States and Europe.
The comparison with Japan is even more staggering. American CEOs have been earning about 400 times the average earnings of their employees in recent years. In other words, the CEO earns more each day than the employee earns in a year. Japanese CEOs earn only 11 times what their employees earn.
No one who has traveled extensively would say that European and Japanese CEOs are less competent than American CEOs. The difference is not in intelligence, training, or experience; it lies in the ethics of their respective cultures: the balance between individual rights and the common good.
Candidates in this election differ on the proper balance between individualism and the common good. One candidate (McCain) recognizes the need to put “Country First”, but then usually begins his sentences with “I” to focus on his personal history as a war hero and nonconformist politician. The other candidate (Obama) talks very little about himself while focusing on “us”, our historical moment and our common future. So McCain chooses to partner with Palin of Alaska, America’s last frontier of strong individualism and self-reliance. Palin has the strongest orientation toward individualism of any national candidate in my life, stronger even than Barry Goldwater whom I supported in 1964. She can even gut a moose on her own.
None of these candidates tolerate the excesses that have become commonplace on Wall Street. Yet McCain and Palin cannot get rid of their Republican affiliation and bias toward excessive individualism, for example, deregulation of the banking system. They are loaded with the same cultural curse that is causing our financial system to collapse: too much “me” and too little “US”.
Editor’s Note: The research referenced in the article was published in the Journal of Human Values 5: 1 (1999)