Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
are not especially impressed by Employee of the Month schemes, or chief executives who
wear “Rage Against the Machine” T-shirts and ask to be called Sweetie Pie.
Failure and Success
Unlike the British, Americans do not generally take a doleful delight in breakdown and fail-
ure. This is because they are trained to admire achievement. They can thus be less envious
and begrudging than those for whom good fortune is as rare as humility in Hollywood. At
the same time, societies like the United States which insist on success are bound to produce
large amounts of human wreckage. This, however, has been efficiently taken into account.
There is a dynamic, fabulously profitable machine for mopping the damage up, all the way
from psychotherapy to the churches, mystic mud baths to Indian healing rituals. One part
of the system reduces people to burnt-out shells by seeking to pump too much profit out of
them, while the other part reaps a profit out of trying to stitch them together again.
The behaviour of a nation is influenced by how big it is. When it comes to a civilisation,
size matters. One can speak freely of one's triumphs in the States because success is gen-
erally applauded, but also because there are so many Americans that a lot of other people
are likely to have chalked up achievements as well, and envy is thus less of a problem. In
small nations like Ireland or Norway, backbiting and resentment are rife, since there are
not enough people around for many of them to stand out as exceptional. The few who do
excel are thus at dire risk of being cut briskly down to size. Egalitarianism in the States
is a virtue, and so it is in Sweden, but in smaller societies it can be a negative value as
well. It means that nobody should have the nerve to get above anybody else. Getting on is
regarded as rather suspect, and if you are ill-starred enough to be a billionaire banker or
world-class clarinet player you would be well advised to conceal the fact. The more you
soar, the more you should keep your head down. The best policy is to rise without trace.
Familiarity breeds scepticism: people know their neighbours too well to believe that their
good fortune is truly deserved. You should fit in with your fellows, not seek to outshine
them.
The British habit is to efface the ego, whereas the American one is to assert it. This, at
least, is what the formal ideology of each nation requires, however remote it may be from
the behaviour of their citizens. There are plenty of arrogant Brits and self-lacerating Tex-
ans. De Tocqueville remarks that Americans have turned egoism into a social and politic-
al theory. In Britain, self-effacement is bound up with the ethic of service. You are not to
consider your own selfish interests, but to subordinate them to the Crown, the Empire, the
defence of the realm or the common good. Those who do so are a privileged elite, and the
ethic of service, while real enough in one sense, is also a way of masking this privilege be-
hind a cloak of selflessness.
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