Observance of American Values
As Memorial Day approaches, we appreciate and mourn all of the servicemen and women who have passed serving this great country and what this country has stood for since it's founding - liberty.Instead of a rally call or a cry for political leadership change, I wanted to pose an intellectual question I've been fumbling about in my mind and see what you guys believe.What would you say are the values of America today?What are the 3 to 5 most commonly upheld societal values amongst majority of Americans today?To challenge your answer to the previous question, what would you say is the music genre of choice for America today? How does that influence societal values and thus norms? If you thought of America and then the music genre that Americans enjoy, what would that be in your opinion?For example, if anybody were to be asked this question from the late 50s all the way through the 90s and early 2000s people would probably say Rock n Roll, even as rock n roll changed in itself throughout that period.I'm taking a broad view of the country today and finding the relationships between our liking in music, media, pop culture, and the behavior and values of the people. The follow up to that thought is, which is influencing which?You can keep it high level, opinionated, or you can become granular and treat this as a problem to be solved, providing argument for solution (should you find problem within the American value system to be solved).Thank you to all who have served.**Edit: The assumption is that music has played a role in shaping society in the past and that it still does to this day, should the level of music consumption or economic utility of such consumption by Americans, remain the same or increase since 1950 - the birth of rock n roll.
I'm not sure there really are "American values" in 2022 given the state of the country. I remember in my youth (2000s) and even early 2010s the country was far more cohesive and we were proud of it. Everything these days is about separation vs unification (gender, race, sexuality, generation, etc) in a way I've never personally seen before. Was speaking to a European guy and asked him what he liked / disliked about living in the U.S. and he noted that everything was politicized -- he tries to stay away from all this jazz by only paying the minimal amount of attention. It's honestly something I've considered doing as well
This isn't meant to poop in the U.S. Degradation of pride in one's country & lack of national unity in the U.S. is something I've lamented to friends. Maybe one day we'll find this pride again, but history suggests that with declining empires it's virtually impossible to go back to the state of things without massively shaking up the system (i.e. revolution). Perhaps whatever springs from the ashes of America will have its own values
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'd have to say I agree. Not sure how old you are but I was old enough when 9/11 hit to remember the day vividly and the frenzy the country was in for the subsequent months to follow. I was young but your timeline of the early 2000s and 2010s being a time of unification I definitely remember feeling growing up. Somewhere between Obamas 1st and 2nd term the political atmosphere in this country just went nuts. It probably started with the invasion of Iraq but at least there was some intellectual and "factual" debate about that decision. The internal and foreign policy discussions have become so short circuited and vapid now. We've gone beyond character attacking to now just outright blatant lies and short circuited media clip like conversations proxied by crowds on talk shows that show emotional support for whatever is said.Although I wasn't born yet in the 70s and 80s, I noticed a difference in talk shows of then and now. I noticed this by researching old Milton Friedman tv appearances (seriously, he became my favorite intellectual in my late teens young twenties). Back then in the 70s and 80s there were day time talk shows he appeared on to explain (at length) his economic policy rationale. There's even shows of him and a contrarian Keynes economist (forget name) on the same show for one hour debating for the crowd of people and ofcourse the world watching from afar. You never see a committed segment more than 2 minutes towards a subject matter today. You have to go searching for the truth and full story today. The average person gets led to their own demise in lies and half truths celebrated naturally through our mediums of information.Like any major problem, it is complex and multifaceted. The media environment and politics that feed it are only part of the problem. But it's a fair start, in my opinion. I'm gonna go to a country bar shortly and throw a few back as I think about this country more at length. If you got perspective, add to it brother.
It's funny you say everything is politicised.
You literally created a thread yesterday criticizing liberals and generalizing a large number of people.
Aren't you contributing to that environment yourself?
There could be validity to that statement if it were true but I'm not recalling which thread I created "yesterday" criticizing liberals. What're you talking about? nonu-r
A country and culture where half of the population support abortion up until birth does not deserve to survive imo.
Show me a single poll that has 50%+ of Americans supporting abortion literally up until birth. One single poll. Take your right wing bs talking points elsewhere.
I like the core values of the Navy and Air Force.
Navy:
- Honor
- Courage
- Commitment
Air Force:
- Integrity First
- Service Before Self
- Excellence In All We Do
Also, my priorities are the same as Chris Kyle (SEAL, RIP):
1. God
2. Country
3. Family
I volunteer on the side helping immigrants practice for their naturalization interviews, and it's nice to get a refresher on the Constitution. Personally though, my favorite set of priorities are from the Polish military [wikipedia]:
Genuinely can’t tell if this is a joke or not - do you sincerely believe that the US military (of all organizations??) preaching honor and integrity has any meaning?
You sound like someone who has never been in the military.
This is a very good topic but I am too lazy to address the multiple question oriented parts of it. As a kid, I did not appreciate any of my English and history classes and this topic reminds me of the assignments from those classes. As I got older, .I developed an appreciated for writing but still do not like to read non investment related books or articles.
All Americans value the concept of personal freedom more than others around the globe.
We GREATLY disagree on how to define that.
See:
Freedom from living in fear of gun violence vs. freedom of gun ownership
Freedom from oppressive federal taxing agencies vs. freedom from oppressive local police forces
Freedom to make choices about bodily autonomy vs. freedom for the unborn
Freedom to marry who you choose vs. freedom not to act out of line with your religious beliefs
We all want freedom from Taxes and small government right? Can I get an Amen!!!??!!!! 8)
A freaking men. We all want roughly the same things I believe. I think everyone could agree we want a safe and prosperous future for all. If we only just slowed down the national conversation a bit and had televised segments to debate raw data bit-by-bit for the people to see and understand, I think that would be a good thing for the population. But instead it's lies and tik tok clips. Just like the idea that a disproportionate number of black men are killed by police each year. Straight lie. Repeated again and again from our leaders. Source? The fucking FBI crime statistics from the last 5 years of release date.
I don't want freedom from taxes, I want my taxes to increase. I mean that sincerely. I make a ton of money, and that's off the back of a community which allows me to get there. I'd like to give back to that by helping others have the opportunity to where I've gotten, and that doesn't just mean people within my small local/ethnic/religious community, but all Americans.
The most interesting and strongest parts of everything you listed out is that neither half of those sentences are entirely opposite or exclusive to each other. They can both exist equally. To your point, the discussion needs to be about how to find that balance between them. I think the disappointment and frustration that's really starting to show is that certain people are trying to make ultimatums of only allowing for one half of those statements to be "correct".
I'd argue America's core value is liberty. This is evident by the intense debate that we Americans have pertaining to what constitutes a violation of individual liberty, whether it be on the topic of guns, abortion, etc.
That’s a good argument actually, there’s evidence for that sure
1. charge they phone
2. twerk
3. be bisexual
4. eat hot chip
5. lie
this is correct but lying is the core value of the current US government, so it should be number one
It sure seems like more and more people in this country live like that. Who’s to blame here or better yet, how did many of us get to this point? Greed, lust, inflated egos, and the platforms that turn an entire country into “Hollywood stars” all in a pursuit of some artificial fame through followers and likes. The more and more you remove yourself a bit from all of that crap and just observe the behavior of the human race in 2022, the more you see how absurd we’ve all become with this crap. I deleted all social media except my LinkedIn, and WSO ofcourse but I wouldn’t really call this social media, this is more of a blog and outlet for intellectual expression. Deleting social has been good for myself.
Sometimes now I’ll just be walking in the city and objectively looking at the people just walking stuck in their phone crossing busy intersections and shit barely looking up at all which is both physically dangerous and/or just strange behavior. Sometimes it’s people scared to look up and around for whatever reason could be anxiety, I get it all good fix things up then come back to reality but then there’s everyone else . . . the drone like people. The healthy people that just enjoy walking everywhere with their face down in a phone. And I’m not talking about people looking down briefly for directions. I’m talking about the people that watch videos and shit or scroll while they walk. Or the ones stopping weirdly to take a million pictures all over the duckin place. You could be upstate hiking and the few people you run into on the trail on the mountain are taking pictures of themselves. I understand you want to capture moments yada yada, it’s more so the weird obsession of taking selfies that’s the strangest of all behavior. You get to the top of a beautiful mountain range and everyone reverts right back to their tick, pulls the phone out starts taking selfies and pictures. The more you kind of take a birds eye view of what’s going on around you the more strange things seem lol
Alright that sounded pretty bad. I don’t think we’re THAT bad but there’s definitely some strange behavior. If you were to walk around in the early 2000s with a disposable camera and take selfies of yourself doing a duck face everywhere you went, we’d probably have sent help for you.
It’s easy to criticize others but I’d argue you are way too stressed over politics and macro issues. Remember when we had that debate regarding sports on another thread? That’s something I’d argue has changed dramatically over the past decade or two. The 24/7 news cycle and access to enormous quantities of information and events over the globe. More and more people have fear and panic over events they cannot control rather than just living a normal life. Agree with you that people should step away from their phones, but I think you should turn Fox/CNN off and try to get away from it as much as possible.
1. Faith
2. Family
3. Work
Letting lunatics buy assault rifles and taking away womens rights.
also spray cheese in a can.
Your comment is not very deep but you do have a point. A reasonably high percentage of people in the US place a high value on the right to bear arms, despite the unfortunate consequences. These same people bitch and moan about aborted fetuses but do not seem to be all that concerned about the US having more guns than people as well as children being slaughtered in schools. People are oblivious to the peripheral problems that gun ownership has created for the educational system. When kids see these shootings in the media, this has to have detrimental consequences on some of them. If the pattern continues, we also could potentially have a teacher shortage.
The gun control debate was settled back in 2020 - people should be allowed to defend themselves. The reason why a civilian might need an AR-15 with a high capacity magazine was on live TV all of 2020 and I will not be gaslit otherwise.
People can't pretend that 2020 didn't happen or that it was just a couple people peacefully marching and singing songs and holding hands. We've got plenty of video footage and we haven't forgotten.
Also "all cops are Nazis" and "only cops should have guns" are not logically consistent ideas, unless the logical conclusion of your thought process is you want an authoritarian regime. I don't but you do you.
Oh yeah, that is right. I forgot
I'd say these are some quintessential American values, when you look through the history of our culture. Not a comprehensive list:
I'd say though that perhaps more important than what's on the list of values is that we actually establish that list of values. When you care about something, you take better care of it. That applies to anything, and I think it applies to countries as well. Over the last couple decades there was a phrase that really irks me which is that "America is an idea", well no, it's a home for 300+ million people. If we're just reducing what America or American culture is to just a line on the map to conduct business, i.e. extract as much wealth as possible, get your own and not worry about anything else, well maybe that partly explains the downward trajectory we've been on.
I think a long term solution that we'll need though is to get back to more power on the state/local level and less power on the federal level. I'm pretty right wing, but if California or a municipality like San Francisco wants leftist policies, or even far left polices...I don't really care, as long as it's what their people actually want. The problem of why things get so politicized is when you have concentrated power at the federal level, all you need is 51% to push policies that aren't wanted by or even are outright hostile toward the other 49%. I think if we push more power down to the state/local level, we'd all be better off. Even the name of our country, United States, refers to how states operated semi-independently for most of our history and just came together for common foreign policy and so forth.
people shit on the humanities and then post brain dead shit like this. Open a book you don't have to color in for once.
Simmer down socrates, I think the reason people shit on humanities is because peeps like you are out there thinking you're an oracle for spending 4 years in sociology.
That plus it’s usually financially ludicrous to study at the undergrad level.
Neo-Marxian Woke values are the current values of 2022 America. That is why there is so much chaos. We’ll see if the Silent Majority is able to push back enough to change this but that is unlikely given how inundated with technology we all are.
That’s literally nazi propaganda
Classic far left take, brand anything you dislike with an 'ism'
How so?
You are the modern equivalent of a Nazi with your intolerance of any non-far left viewpoints
America isn’t a Marxist or communist country, and there is no ‘silent majority’, only a vocal minority. Republicans lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 elections, and things like climate change, basic gun control, etc. have 70% approval.
Freedom first and foremost.
After that,
Hard work
Accountability
Passion
We are in the age of decadence.
We celebrate ugliness and obesity now... that's where we are on the timeline.
Ride the Tiger.
This is obviously super tough to answer. The quick version is that America's core value, or at least self-identified value, is freedom/liberty, in the very narrow sense of personal freedom to do what one will. Obviously the counter to that is that for most of American history, that's also meant the freedom to enslave or oppress or steal from or murder others who don't look like us. I think a lot of the polarization today can be traced back to a growing awareness of that hypocrisy. The American right wing is still dedicated to the idea of personal liberty, in a selfish sense by which they want the right to exclude. The American left seems to have learned the lesson of history, which is that a demand for personal liberty is not always (in fact almost never) accompanied by a desire to extend that right to others, especially others from different social, ethnic, or religious backgrounds.
Wanting more personal freedom is great, and a worthwhile goal. And that's obviously still the core promoted value of this country, because anything that infringes on personal liberty is immediately challenged. The problem is, of course, that we don't do enough to ensure a minimum degree of liberty for everyone else, just a maximal amount for oneself. A society in which no one is free to rise to the best of their abilities and circumstances is a shitty one to live in; one in which some people are kept at the top by oppressing others is objectively worse. Unfortunately, a solid minority of the country seems to not realize that the former often is accompanied by the latter.
Great. You do what you want with your plot of land. You just don't get the right to exclude someone from buying the neighboring property. No one and nothing is stopping you from doing this at this exact moment.
Nominally, no. And you know what? It took a bunch of liberals a long time and a lot of fighting to get that. You think it's southern conservatives who decided all of a sudden, "hey, maybe black people deserve equal rights"? No, it was black people taking action for themselves, along with liberal support (often too lukewarm, frankly) that gained equal rights in fact as well as name.
We still see redlining all over the place. We still see disinvestment in communities of color. We know that the "justice" system hands out harsher sentences to people of color. So while everyone may nominally have the same "rights" how those rights are enforced and overseen in practice is very much unequal, as anyone with eyes or ears and half a brain can see.
And the only reason we even nominally have equal rights, as I said, is the constant vigilance of the left wing. It's literally within the last few years that gays got the right to marry. We see constant and unending attempts to roll back voting rights for the poor and minorities.
Maybe not the 1820s, but certainly the 1950s.
And give me a fucking break. Republicans don't want to be "left alone" which is why they campaign to take their personal beliefs and impose them on the public sphere. What the American right wing wants is for the status quo to be left alone, and very specifically a status quo which elevated the rights and beliefs of straight, white, Christian men at the expense of all others. I'm sure the fight against letting gays get married was asking to be "left alone". Frankly, fighting against abortion is the opposite of being "left alone". At it's most reasonable, it's a fight to impose a specific definition of personhood on an unborn fetus. In something closer to reality, it's an attempt to control the procreative choices of women. But at no point is it about being left alone - after all, if you don't like abortion, don't have one. No skin off your teeth.
I could go on and on. But anyone who looks at any issue, or just about any issue, in modern American politics realizes that at its heart is a conservative attempt to enforce a specific value system on others, instead of accepting what you are claiming, which is that you want to be left alone.
Modern American values are pornography, fast food, prescription opioids, and gay pride parades. It's basically what we export to the rest of the world.
Log off of 4chan and touch grass
Go jerk off to another marvel movie you urbanite cockroach
Glad to see you’ve adopted the “touch grass” phrase that’s now the mainstream approved response when arguing online
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