I would not be surprised if the US is one of the few countries to end up like Mad Max if the world order should fully collapse due to climate change or other large scale events.
US charitable giving alone suggests your view of the country as individualism run amok is likely not the whole story.
A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing.
The proportion that goes on direct no-strings plain simple humanitarian work is not all that huge.
Most of the US population lives in cities. If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year. (For example.)
And I don't think it's totally fair to exclude religious donations as somehow "not valid", especially in the context of the critique that Americans don't value community with each other. Religious charities tend have less access to alternative funding sources, so rely on these donations more. Note: I'm very much not religious.
> A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing.
I get a little mixed-up on whether donations to non-tax-deductible non-profits "count" in the metrics (e.g., does my donation to the ACLU which has a lobbying arm count just as my donation to the ACLU Foundation which cannot be used that way?). Nevertheless, I think it's wrong-minded to discredit charitable giving to organizations that influence public policy given the multiplicative impact that policy has on the lives of people and communities. Some of the biggest impacts to the lives of people came out of organized efforts to influence policy.
> If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year.
This feels like a pretty uncharitable and over-simplification of very complex issues that also get into inter-state dynamics. I also think there's an error made in treating US culture as some sort of homogenous cultural construct. More than many other countries, the US is constantly at war with itself culturally.
All this has fallen to the wayside in the US as we have some weird form of individualism permiating on both sides of the political spectrum.
It is peak collectivism to accomplish this without requiring the monopoly on violence and the taxation that comes with it.
There’s always a few bad apples but there’s always some counter pressure, too. The story of the deuce and half owner who drove into a hurricane comes to mind.
I'm not really seeing how that counts as "friendly and collective", but I live in the EU so perhaps I just don't understand these things.