chat

Any superstructure and expression of it is going to have unique characteristics of the conditions and history of that specific country and its ruling class, I wouldn't argue the US individualism isn't unique in its ways, just as it is unique in other places in different ways. I don't think profiteering healthcare and the hoodwinking of poor people about "but muh wait times" or what have you is an expression of individualism though. That is a straightforward capitalist interest in maximizing profits, particularly with having some elite hospitals being worth-travel for big bourgeois elsewhere, meaning you get the (probably racistly-named) "Arab Sheik problem" where they charge for the highest payers that will pay, and that is more profitable than charging normal prices, even when accounting for all those who never pay. And this dictates the general healthcare "market." But then people are miseducated and kept from political education about healthcare and are told straight wrong information by their corporate bourgeois media and so believe it. They're not saying "it's my god given right to die not being able to afford an ambulance." The majority of the US is in favor of single payer. And even those who aren't it's not individualism, there was that thing where people were cheering for Trump to dismantle Obamacare but then were pissed when they found out that ACA is Obamacare and they actually relied on it (as garbage as ACA is). Bad education and being propagandized is not an aspect of US individualism. And it's not only the US that has privatized or partial private healthcare.

'Thoughts and prayers' is a Christian thing in general. Maybe a western Christian thing idk about Orthodox if they do that kind of thing. Christianity is a deeply individualist religion with a long history in Europe through Feudalism of the church ensuring its subjects develop in a way where they individualize all of their problems and internalize them, kept meek and modest and passive and accepting of bad things, kept separated, and made to idealize keeping their thoughts and wants and needs between them and god and repressing themselves and never making trouble in society (and paying their tithe!) in order to be granted freedom when they die. It's not unique to the US. The more modern prosperity gospel trend of it is certainly a particularly individualist trend, but rooted in the same thing I mentioned, a superstructural expression as the typical bourgeois individualism of "I have this which means I earned it which means I'm good and should have this."

There were terrible lockdown responses all over Europe, this was absolutely not a US-specific phenomenon. And it all came from the same roots, a base in capitalist interest and the liberal individualist superstructural outgrowths of it came after and was also not unique to the US. The covid response being temporary and feeble all over even in European countries who 'let it rip,' and even half or more of the anti-lockdown protestors too, were economic in nature. It was the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeois wanting profits and not being able or wanting to tighten belts to deal with lockdowns and associated costs, and even workers wanting to work and not being paid enough to survive and support families compared to the gouging of rents and costs of living including price gouges by grocery stores and other companies.

Where there was lockdowns, there was economic lobbying by capitalists to open it back up, which was not out of individualism but out of base material interest. In tourist states and cities in the US for instance there was heavy heavy lobbying by restaurant and hotel capitalists and their cartels (I mean, 'professional associations boards') to ram things back open because of their bottom line. That isn't an expression of individualism but of material interest, a base and not a superstructure. A basal interest, which is furthered socially in superstructural outgrowths, in narratives from that base interest, rooted in what I described before, the bourgeois liberal individualism as a natural consequence of capitalist relations; where they express (and even convince themselves), that their individual freedom to run their business which they 'worked so hard to achieve', and others individual freedom to engage in tourism and dining and commerce 'to spend their hard-earned money (at my restauraunt)', are impeded by the lockdowns. That base creates superstructure, which then reinforces the base. It's not a 'trick' but bourgeois ideology, which is the dominant ideology in bourgeois society; which has its own character in its own conditions and histories, but is itself not unique to the US.

Coal rolling is a specific spiteful individualist asshole exclusive to the US

an expression of this same root of European bourgeois liberal individualism from the same origins, but its form and character and expressions shaped by how it came out of the US' material conditions and history, such as its particular car culture which grew out of its specific historical powerhouse capitalist monopolies (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Studebaker, Chevrolet, adjacents like agricultural vehicles from International Harvester Company and John Deere etc.) which was at the forefront of global industrial machine production with, and in which, it achieved its dominance in the early automotive and industrial-agriculture markets

from which also the war industry was built by retooling existing infrastructure, from which the US empire became global hegemon out of the World Wars.

Coal likewise has its own basis in this history, with similar the world's richest people being coal and railroad tycoons; and the "coal towns" and the like; which in the earliest years was basically commodity serfdom, heinously criminal and caused things like the coal wars

but afterward while still flagrantly criminal and exploitative in many many ways, also became a very high-paying stable trade for workers in which much pride was taken in their work (which happened in the Soviet Union too, Stakhanovites movement and such, but of course a different system under better conditions and without capitalist exploitation, there are still important understandings of peoples connection to their labor) which when that was lost created a lot of alienation and poverty and ravaging of their communities as all post-industrial towns, and anger/resentment with no class consciousness to replace it, as a legacy of bourgeois-initiated red scares white terrors and anti-communist propaganda the pervasiveness of which would make the Nazis swoon. And so environmental/green tech movements and protestors are a point of false-conscious conflict in regards to that legacy which gets emanated into wider culture.

It is a unique expression of spiteful individualist assholery in the US, but only as a form of the general European bourgeois liberal individualism which came from the unique US material conditions, as a natural superstructural outcropping of its bourgeois class interest, which gives rise to bourgeois liberal ideology in its form, which becomes the dominant hegemonic ideology as bourgeois ideology always does, and in a dialectic way then gets taken-and-changed by the working class to their own conditions and perceived interests in whatever level of political consciousness they have. It is, agreed, a spiteful manifestation and expression of liberal individualism which is unique to the US, but it is that just as there are other spiteful manifestations and expressions of liberal individualist assholery in other European countries in other forms from their history and conditions.