What is one aspect of American culture which distinguishes the mentality of being American more than anything else?
Competitiveness is in my opinion one of the aspects of American culture which you don't see expressed in the same way anywhere else. In my opinion you do not see this level of competitiveness (particularly on the individual level) in Europe, or Asia, or anywhere else. In my opinion this competitiveness comes from the fact that many people struggle just to even get to America and have to go through a lot of intense adversity after they arrive. I'm sure many of you heard the stories of the poor immigrants, or the slave trade, or the Revolutionary or Civil War that shaped the mentality that America now has.
This competitiveness in my opinion is one of the reasons America developed so quickly into a technologically sophisticated nation. In specific this individual accomplishment was richly rewarded throughout US history where novel invention, athletic excellence, artistic creativity or beauty was highlighted. In the west such as Silicon Valley it is the innovation and innovator who is richly rewarded for example. In Hollywood it's the artists who get the big rewards for producing timeless motion pictures.
Beauty itself has been rewarded along with artistry if you for example look at Marilyn Monroe in her role Gentlemen prefer blondes. If you're athletic and willing to fight for a better life you may find inspiration in Jack Johnson or Sugar Ray Robinson who literally went from being among the poorest in the society to one of the most popular richest even with the misfortune of being born into the wrong race at the wrong place and time.
Win or Die
Because America has these extremes (extreme adversity, poverty, high cost of failure) juxtaposed with extreme rewards on the other end of the spectrum, I highlight the foundation of the mentality as win or die. This win or die mentality is behind the hustler atmosphere you find. It's behind the hard work of many immigrants who come here and start businesses, or people who for example like Michael Jordan seek to become the best who ever did something, or the first to do something like Jackie Robinson or Barack Obama, or even to be first to get a man on the moon. Winning the Cold War in my opinion was an example of American channeling this competitive mentality into something militarily strategic and the space was was a perfect example of where the American win or die mentality was able to shine.
There are also some problems associated with this mentality which it is only fair that I highlight as well. These problems from this mentality in my opinion could explain at least partly why Americans have higher rates of depression, of anxiety, of drug abuse such as opioids, than many other countries which don't have the same fast paced win or die environment. In America people chase individual accomplishments in a way which may even be considered unhealthy psychologically and or physically because winning is everything and mistakes are harshly punished.
The ideal of perfection is impossible to reach yet as a society with a win or die highly competitive atmosphere there is also the atmosphere of comparing ourselves to others, of trying to find the flaws in others and point them out, to expect excellence, perfection, all the time, from everybody. In some instances you will have some percent of the population who truly are the best at some particular thing and everyone else wants to chase the perceived best. In reality most people no matter how much they practice or how hard they try, will never be perfect, will never be able to surpass their idols, etc. The pressure to do so and to be perceived as the best in my opinion is part of one of the negatives or costs associated with the highly competitive atmosphere in the United States.
The American culture has the belief that the individual is responsible for themselves. This is not necessarily thought of in the same way in for example China or some other places in the world. In my opinion this believe in the power of the individual may in fact be a potential problem. In my opinion this virus spreading around highlights exactly an example of the problem of this individualism and to give an example we can discuss the topic of vaccines.
Are the sick individually responsible for being sick? If you believe in individual responsibility and in the individual in the absolute way then you may believe the individual let themselves catch a virus. You may then simply punish all who get sick with lower pay or fire them from their jobs. COVID-19 shows how this concept of "individual responsibility" in healthcare is mostly an illusion. You don't control what you get infected with, you don't control what is in your environment or what effect those chemicals could have on you. You don't have very much control even of your own thinking because your microbiome has a lot more control over than that current science understands.
Yet the approach in America is to blame the individual when something goes wrong and reward the individual when something great is accomplished. The truth seems to be (my opinion), that individuals and behaviors actually come from the environment they are in and the genetic lottery that determines what they inherited. Since most behaviors come from factors people don't really have control over how can we appropriately think about or talk about this?
I'll give another example beyond COVID-19 and apply the concept of virus to a social problem like racism. In the current atmosphere those who want to fight racism think that the way to do it is to fight the faces of racism. The faces of racism could be seen as individual racists and punishing these individual racists. Racists getting fired in my interpretation is like the sick with COVID-19 getting fired. It's not in my opinion going to cure or rid society of the virus (yes indeed I consider racism to be a kind of virus). So you cannot really stop an infection by firing the infected or even by punishing the infected, as the only way to stop racism is to stop the spread of the ideas, or the memes which actually infect people and turn them into racists.
How do you stop the spread of bad ideas? You have to make people immune to these bad ideas by giving them stronger better counter ideas. So you cannot in my opinion stop racism by punishing racists. Nor can you stop sexists by outlawing or punishing sexism. In my opinion to change these behaviors will require coming up with incentives for people to learn what they need to learn to make themselves immune to these sorts of ideas at the foundation level. For example if you find what all racist memes have in common and counter that then you can provide a sort of immunity to the memes which depend on a certain false belief to catch on.
Conclusion
The conclusion of this post is that America is a great country partly because it's the most competitive country. This competitive and particularly individually competitive identity in my opinion explains some of the accomplishments of many great Americans throughout history. At the same time this adversity, and the extreme darkness and light at the ends of the spectrum, produced in my opinion the win or die mentality which for some people provides the fuel to do great things. This fuel to do great things of course can backfire in many ways, producing envy, producing fear or competition , and these things also may contribute to social epidemics like racism.
Finally I expressed my opinion that the individual isn't some absolute thing but is more an illusion of convenience to fit into the American mentality rather than something clearly established and definable scientifically. The current understanding of the cause of behavior does not indicate that the individual has any more control of their emotions or behaviors, any more than a person with flu can control how much or how little of a fever they will get, you don't. You get infected by something in the environment and it produces effects in your body which then expresses as some behavior.
This infection in the environment could be your culture, it could be your air (air pollution causing asthma or heath disease for example), it could be something in your water (lead in the water in Flint for example), it could even be a virus.
In my opinion, to get more desirable behavior from the environment requires creating a better environment, which would mean less air pollution (lower rates of asthma), remove all neurotoxins from food and water, remove the negative influences such as racist memes or at least counter them with memes which provide immunity at a very young age (to the children), and most importantly find more ways to reward teamwork rather than just individual accomplishment in order to promote cooperation.
References
2 Being an American.