The closest thing to a homegrown religion in America is the belief that “you’re just as good as anyone else, and nobody’s any better than you.”
And no it’s not redundant. The two clauses are distinct dogmas. It’s the standard by which “justice” itself is judged.
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A product of the post-Revolutionary era 1787-1824 that set the stage for Jacksonian democracy. Socially it was an ascendancy of Scots-Irish yeomen artisans, small farmers and “independent” men. Property qualifications for vote fell away, north abolished slavery, 1812 war fever
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I guessed as much. The interesting thing is that I see versions of that idea in black culture too. It's a minority tradition (Luke Cage? James Baldwin...?). A tendency to judge structural iniquities by a gold standard of the *average* human rather than the *exceptional* human
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Theres cultural interplay between yeomen and free blacks in the 19th C that planter elites were keen to stop both antebellum with laws against whites fraternizing with slaves and postbellum with Jim Crow. Huge elite fear of Farmer’s Alliance unifying poor whites and blacks
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Lot of Scots-Irish values of bootstrapping, personal independence, pride in skills that began as ethnic identity became a generic lower middle class and working class American ethos rolled later into American Dream beliefs
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As a religion it's got a weird mix of strengths and weaknesses. Compared to say Jewish or Asian immigrant cultures (which shares the pride in skills, bootstrapping, self reliance, but not egalitarianism or personal independence) it seems to build weaker, shallower institutions.
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Well, the reason is that the Scots-Irish subculture retains elements of pre-nuclear family antecedents which we see in the predisposition for feuds, fighting and preference for martial professions. Gravitate to military as an institution in outsize career numbers. Also LE
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The military notably reproduces an honor culture and tough structure that keeps ppl from leaving at will. Which BTW Scots-Irish tended to do - ie westward expansion in America and colonization for the British Empire.
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Very good point. You need strong anti-defection enforcement or religion-like apostasy strictures to stabilize that kind of culture. It's not quite honor culture though I think... more a subset. I think Arab/Afghan are more stereotypically honor cultures.
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Yes it’s diluted. There’s actually an anthropological theory that the old Scots-Irish folkways became part of the antebellum Southern honor culture that got passed down eventually to inner city street gangs via the grandchildren of the Great Migration. A book on it I believe
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Isn’t that Thomas Sowell theory of black inner city culture post various shutdowns of ‘black wall street’ etc?
Heh yeoman power and monarchical power allying against feudal power since Robin Hood something something
Switzerland has a closely parallel culture: William Tell as founding figure, but stabilized by siege of geography.
I suspect Edo Japan maps too.
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