Weird how it never struck me until seeing those Canada tweets I just RTed just how strikingly centralized the American cultural imagination is. Even within the majority White+Christian, “All-American” seems to pick out a single archetype (small town football star?) not a spread
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It’s particularly surprising because I grew up in a country that was (at the time) strongly shaped by an actual, rather than theoretical spirit of e pluribus unum. This sort of cheesy essentialist imagery was common in ‘national integration’ public service messaging.
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You can see troubling signs in India now of a shift from a more spectrum-like sense of national identity like Canada to a more US-like centralizing one.
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Humans reduce a problem to a level that is easy to understand. A single identity is always an easily digestible model than one of pluralism which seems like a amalgamation of many.
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I don’t think that’s true. People easily keep track of vast pluralist fictional universes like lord of the rings :)
The key is to live a story together
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Should have qualified that with (A vast majority of humans). Us vs them is a much easier model to envisage when them is a singleton vs multiple thems. No?
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