One thing that our European "brothers" lost over time is a correct understanding of Morality. At the heart of every question of government policy or individual action and everything in between is a question of what is "good", what one "should" do, and how we determine whether the results are desirable or not.
Americans, having lived on the frontier and in a state of anarchy for so long, have embraced the same morality as the ancient people. This is the same morality that so many other people outside of the West use as well. It is simply this: Wealth is good. Power is good. Health is good. And so on and so forth.
Somewhere along the lines Christians in Europe inverted morality, and Nietzsche does a pretty decent job trying to explain this. "God is dead" he famously said. "And we have killed him!" Killed him how? Because we forgot what was good, or rather, we turned evil into good and good into evil.
Wealthier Americans tend to be further divorced from this basic morality and so they tend to align with modern Western Europeans and they completely misunderstand the rest of the world. Too often they even pretend people share their moral system when they do not. And that is one of the many reasons why things have gone so wrong in various societies.
What Americans do with this ancient moral code is they temper it with civic duty. Ancient Romans and for the most part the Greeks as well understood that the best thing is to have a well-ordered society where people can work and increase their wealth and trade and obtain healthy food and such, and so it was the duty of every person to render some service to the city or the state. They had a civic duty to participate in politics and government and to subject themselves to the proper authorities. Except, in the case of the Americans, we do not swear allegiance to men or a man. Instead, we take our laws to be sacred above all else.
And what do we mean by law? Not the laws that congress or our state legislatures pass. No, we expect those to be corrupt and wicked. Not even constitutional law is absolute. Yes, that is the governing law of the GOVERNMENT, but not of the American citizen. No, we live by the highest law possible, the laws that God and Nature give us.
We understand and acknowledge and FOLLOW the "Law of the Jungle". This law is simply that some things eat and other things get eaten. That is the way it is. There is no changing that fact. Someone will win, someone else will lose, someone will live and someone will die. If you want to live, if you want to win, you have to do everything in your power to overcome your situation, even putting your own needs ahead of others if necessary.
But this is not the only law -- there are the LAWS OF SOCIETY. These laws make it possible for wild animals to live in close proximity to each other. Things like "Stay off my lawn and I'll stay off of yours" are the hallmarks of this law. It is a sort of "truce" between what should have been antagonistic neighbors so that they can both go to sleep at night. Society is not possible unless these laws are kept, strictly. Those who do not want to keep these laws must be cast out or killed, or society cannot be maintained.
The big struggle in Western civilization right now is that we have animals living amongst us, and we pretend that they are civilized. They act civilized, but behind closed doors they are not. We have no room in our society for people who plot behind closed doors to kill their neighbors. We should not tolerate such behavior at all.
And there is the higher law yet, the laws that say we must sacrifice for each other. "Greater love hath no man than this," said Jesus, "that a man lay down his life for his friends." Such a sacrifice can not be demanded but it is freely given. These laws make life worth living and society worth keeping. They make things like family and friends and church and such possible. The father and mother who sacrifice themselves to form a marital bond and spend the rest of their lives raising their kids and building a future for them are the paramount example of this sort of law and what it demands.
Those who make such a sacrifice, such as Jesus taught us in the parable of the Good Samaritan, are our neighbors who we should love, and not with an emotional love, but an active love. These are the types of people we should hold up as heroes and saints and that we should protect and nurture.
Americans understand these things intuitively, although sometimes they don't say as much. "It's good to give to the poor" someone might say, and yet, they don't. They preserve their own family and friends first, and when the poor come knocking asking for donations, they ask them what they are doing to lift themselves out of poverty, or what they plan to do with their money.
Or we see a company built by a family who sacrificed their lives to make a good company to work for and a good company to do business with, and despite the fact that they made millions upon millions, we still look up to those people as paragons of virtue.
We see an athlete who has put everything he has into developing highly niche talents, and for what end? Maybe he can make a lot of money, but most likely he'll just get a few medals he hangs on his wall. Why did they do it? Americans understand why.
I remember watching a movie back in the 90s about Danny Devito buying up a failing power company. He planned on selling the equipment and firing all the employees. The movie tried to make Danny Devito out to be the bad man, but he explained WHY he wanted to do this. There were OTHER power companies out there that were looking for that equipment, and they had greater demand, and they were better managed. And the employees in that town were trapped in a failing business and would be out of work in a few years anyway, so it's better to fire them when they have a good chance at getting a better job than when the economy goes south. So the family who was incompetent deserved to be kicked out after the buyout. That made a lot of sense. Maybe Devito's character was supposed to be a greedy bastard, but because he kept the rules of the game, and he never cheated anyone (in fact he gave extra money to the family) and he got filthy rich doing it, which is no crime, but actually a virtue. He's the sort of person that makes our economy work.
