I sat there with a cheap cigar in my left hand, and my ass planted in an enveloping and well worn leather lounge chair. When a question was brought to me. How do you save something you have no control over?
In a cigar bar you can find me at most days between 12 and 4, I lit my house blend and got 10% down the first third, with a smoking buddy sitting to my left equally as entranced by the endless infomercial to our front and the soft leather to our back. We were at the tail end of a conversation about rhinos in South Africa when he brought forth the statement, ‘This isn’t going to make me any friends but, I’ve been a lot of places and cannot confidently say America is the greatest country in the world’
The small child in me that grew up on ice pops and American flag fireworks in a sleepy rust belt town outside of Pittsburgh shed one tear. A short lull and I added, “Hmm I’d half to push back on that”. He was happy I offered a counter and gleefully responded “Please do!”
For clarity sake he added “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, but there are lots of amazing places” I don’t want people to blunt the edge of their opinions so I bit on to the original statement only.
I scanned the route ahead and began to think of how I can convey a balanced perspective while accounting for bias and build on facts. It went like this.
I believe that America is the greatest country in the world. When you make that statement the first thing 9 out of 10 people present is “What is America number one in exactly” suddenly these people are very big on singular objective rankings (bring up IQ with these same people and they melt).
They point to Asia’s academic superiority, Nordic countries egalitarian policies and Switzerland’s quality of life metrics. They don’t point out Asia’s communist regimes, or concentration camps, cause to hell with it the kids can read real good. What about the Nordic countries endless hoops to jump through on new business, immigration issues, or Switzerland’s rape statistics?
Nonetheless the goal isn’t to get offended and call them ugly too. Instead we steelman the opposition’s argument and build ours better yet still. So why? Why do I think America is the greatest country in the world?
I could say I think the Constitution written by our founding fathers is the closest thing to magic I have ever seen on paper. I could say that freedom and faith served as axioms to a greater extent than any previous land in history, or that the free market we built made us the center of the world for innovation in tech, medicine, agriculture and more. Or if you were to drop anyone from anywhere in the center of a land they did not know, that in a year’s time there is nowhere else they would feel more welcomed or more likely find fulfillment then in America. But I won’t.
I continued to ramble to the gentlemen next to me as a form of synthesis happened inside my head. I won’t present any of those arguments although good and valid.
I think America is the greatest country in the world because it is mine.
That argument is circular, subjective and presents no evidence. A complete failure in traditional debate. But it is all I need. See I believe anyone that considers themselves a thinker, someone who puts forth ideas for the better of his fellow man has a responsibility to run the experiment to scale, to see if it truly works for a society at large.
So I present ownership. I believe it is the essence of being a good man and a fundamental tenet to building community. I say love your wife because she is yours, your children because they are yours as well. Tend your lot and make your home beautiful, not because it makes sense or because you ran the numbers but because it is yours. That is enough.
As I looked into my friend’s eyes I realized I gave a lecture instead of opening a dialogue. So out of courtesy I say “Tell me if i’m wrong”, although in all transparency I was not looking for a differing opinion. Afterwards I was happy I did, he threw me a question I quite liked. He said that he understood what I was getting at but it didn’t much ease his worries. He exclaimed that we were seeing the country we love sieged, rights stripped and culture changed.
“How do you save something you have no control over?”
He revealed the necessity to separate the definitions of control and ownership. Colloquially known here as follows. Control is the dictation of outcome whereas ownership is an individual’s claim to something.
I spun my tires in the mud for maybe thirty seconds and realized, this is a meta argument. Culture. We have raised a generation that can make no such claims. Why is there a new generation penetrating governments and the greatest country in the world capitulating in a seemingly easy fashion. They have never seen the perspective of ownership, so when some vagrant brings up arbitrary statistics out of context. It would in fact be really easy to convince someone that this place is rather shabby.
In closing, “How do you save something you have no control over?” Love it. Relentlessly, illogically, because it is yours.