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Comment by vsareto | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think it's healthy that America drops this exceptionalism attitude. We can't keep living off of the WW2 laurels forever. And other nations are clearly approaching our "world's best" status in various sectors: China builds a shitload of stuff, Canada has pandemic payment support and healthcare. We're very clearly not united against something like fascism and we're more fragmented, so yeah, we kinda can't do the WW2 things any more.

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American exceptionalism isn’t just “we’re the best”, it’s also our (historical) optimism that we can solve any problem and that tomorrow will be better than today. There’s a baby in that bath water.

Take a look around. That baby has been gone for a while now.

When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy.

The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.

This is extremely frustrating. Every time I try to discuss big issues with my dad, his side consists basically of "its too difficult". This man witnessed the transition room sized memory to 1TB SD cards, the growth of the internet infrastructure, the development of international flight - all things which would have been considered magical miracles just a few decades before he was born, but now everything is just too difficult to bother implementing. I don't understand how he can have that attitude after everything he witnessed being built and even participated in building.

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