> Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe.
Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.
What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")
It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?
Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed than the average American.
Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.
What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")
It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?
Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.