No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.
There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.
Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges.
The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.
Speak of change, and the world is in alarm. And yet where do we not see change?
Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.
Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.
One of the issues facing us today is that there are countries where there is a serious lack of resources, the standards of living are very low, and this creates a fundamental unease and discomfort in entire populations.
Society is becoming less and less transparent. People no longer know where decisions that substantially affect their lives are taken, nor by whom, nor how.
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?