Americaaaaaaaaaa!

Steve Jobs and American Exceptionalism – By Edwin J. Feulner

Here’s another puzzle I don’t understand: why do smart, articulate people who've been through the best universities in the world - who spend their lives analyzing facts, disregard obvious realities? It seems universally understood among the relatively educated population of the world that it is important to question your beliefs and subsequently change them if they do not reflect reality (not including religious convictions because we all know those shouldn’t be required to pass the test of logic). But time and time again I read an article like this one that makes me wonder how universal my assumption actually is.

There are so many logical fallacies in this article it is difficult to read, but his most glaring error is employing a single anecdotal success, namely Steve Jobs and Apple, to prove the sweeping claim of American global preeminence.

Granted, the success of Apple may only have been possible in the U.S. because of the innovative genius and resolute competitiveness that is unique to our society, but that is far from ensuring our spot as the top dog. In his first paragraph he denies the claim that “we’re falling behind others”. What confuses me most is not the validity of his denial, since it is patently unsubstantiated, but how a highly educated person can think this way. How does he react to statistics such as this one by the ICPS that shows America on top of the world in incarceration rate, or this one by the WHO that ranks the U.S. health system 37th globally, below Dominica and Costa Rica, or this one by the OECD that puts American students at 30^th in math, 23^rd in science and 15^th in reading, or this one from the CIA World Factbook, which ranks us just slightly ahead of Uganda and well behind India, Cambodia and Burundi in income inequality (not that income inequality is entirely bad for this author’s Randian, selfishness-is-a-virtue worldview), or this one that puts us atop the world in drug use? Maybe the statistical analyses are poorly done or the WHO, the OECD and the CIA are subsidiaries of the Chinese and Costa Rican governments, but I find that unlikely?

I know that every Democrat I will speak to about this will casually brush this article aside as being another example of a conservative ideologue scrapping logic to convince himself and others that he still lives in Winthrop’s shining city upon a hill. Maybe I’m giving this guy too much credit, but he has degrees from Wharton, LSE and Georgetown.  This is not some religious fanatic waving signs about the apocalypse while proclaiming the most entertaining sections of Revelations as if they were lucid truths. He was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal. So why does he blatantly disregard facts and write mythic stories of American supremacy that serve perpetuate the sense of entitlement and superiority for which the world hates us?

My favorite part of the article, though is when he teases his reader with the abhorrent and treasonous line, “we are indeed falling behind”, but quickly reminds you where his allegiances truly lie with the qualifier - “not behind other countries but behind our promise and potential.” I don’t know about you, but I laughed out loud at that point. What a hero.

If anyone read my post a few months back, you know that I genuinely appreciate America and believe that it far exceeds other countries in some of the most important areas: innovation, religious freedom, musical expression, governmental transparency, standard of living and tolerance of incredibly obnoxious social groups like hipsters and twitter enthusiasts, to name a few. Other than our more-than-disappointing foreign policy and the few things listed above, I think America does pretty well. But I would not go as far as to say that a single outstanding orphan who started a fruit company that changed the world is evidence to verify a theory that every American, regardless of race, gender or socio-economic status, who is willing to work hard, has the opportunity to prosper. This claim, like many others made by the Heritage Foundation president in this article, simply reflects an age-old fairy tale told by American adults to American adults to embolden a dwindling sense of eminence in the face of a healthy global race to the top.