If you want to boil down the American problem to a single issue, then that issue is solidarity — or the lack of it. First, though, it is important to establish context, and that can be explained by paraphrasing Karl Marx (from The German Ideology, 1846):

The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.

People talk quite often about elite propaganda, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is important to understand that elites (in any context) usually believe their own propaganda; they see it as fact. They aren’t usually lying to you when they tell you lies, in the sense that “lying” requires intent and “lies” are anything that isn’t true.

The lies of our era were most coherently expressed by arch ghoul Ayn Rand (Alice O’Connor). Rand was originally named Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a child of bourgeoisie (capitalist) parents born in Russia at exactly the wrong time to be a capitalist in Russia. The revolution stripped them of their ownership of capital, but they were allowed to be free otherwise (as was often the case, despite what our propaganda says), and after completing school in Russia, she chose to go to the United States. There, she did what most ex-capitalists do when the arrive in a capitalist country — she complained loudly about how she had been oppressed in her home country, despite the oppression consisting of the state stopping her family from oppressing others.

Based on the content of her writing, my guess is that Rand had been made incapable of empathizing with other people, either through the random actions of nature, a neglectful and traumatic upbringing, or perhaps both. In any case, the main thrust of her writing is the idea that selfishness is a virtue and that, conversely, altruism is a lie perpetuated by those who wish to trick you into “sacrificing yourself” for their benefit. She explicitly called altruism “evil” and the highest betrayal of self. This should sound very familiar to you because the ultra-right-wing thought leaders in American today are repeating these very sentiments (even those who claim to follow Jesus Christ).

Furthermore, Ayn Rand equated the morality of altruism with the authoritarian system that stripped the ownership of capital away from her family, and concluded that anyone who advocates for altruism is the real evil (in contrast to all traditional moral systems that see selfishness as evil). It’s much like fascists calling anti-fascists “the real fascists”. Like all self-aggrandizing people, she believed that her own beliefs were objectively true, and called her worldview “Objectivism”.

Rand’s worldview (most philosophers don’t see it as a legitimate philosophical paradigm) was instantly popular with the capitalist class, at least partially because she connected it directly to capitalism (she advocated for completely unregulated capitalism as the societal reflection of individual selfishness) and, in her fiction books, portrayed the successful capitalist as god-like in both moral virtue and technical skill. Rand went on to form a cult around herself, and when she died at 77, her funeral was attended by a who’s-who of powerful men (including Alan Greenspan) and influential libertarians. Rand had articulated the ideas of the ruling class perfectly.

From the perspective of a person with a malfunctioning amygdala, the idea that “selfishness is a virtue” can indeed be objectively true. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t true from the perspective of the human species and it isn’t true from the perspective of a psychologically healthy individual with a normal amygdala. In fact, one of the greatest traits of the human animal is empathy, regardless of whether you believe in evolution, creation, or both.

Empathy doesn’t mean that you sacrifice yourself for others. Only a person with psychopathy (or someone trained to think like a psychopath) would believe that. Rather, empathy means that when you help others, you find their betterment satisfying, and that when you witness a person in need, you are unsettled. Having empathy means that when you have relieved someone else’s need, you do not want a reward or even thanks because the removal of that troubled feeling is really all you want. In short, empathy is a basic component of what it is to be human, along with advanced problem solving, the ability to run long distance, language, and so forth.

The best response for anyone who wants to take seriously Neitzche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter gatherer — an Inuit from Greenland who was made famous in Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly. “Up in our country, we are human,” said the hunter, “and since we are human, we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow. Up here, we say that by gifts, one makes slaves, and by whips, one makes dogs.” Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began comparing power with power, measuring, calculating, and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

~ David Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years)

You could say that this cultural shift to imagining selfishness as a virtue is because of capitalism, but I suspect you would find similar ideas in any highly hierarchical society, whether it is a pure slave state, classic feudalism, or something else equally noxious. When such a society reaches its breaking point, those who are engineering a new society are, unfortunately, products of that hierarchical society that valued selfishness as a virtue (also known as “individualism”) or similarly silly ideas which are all linked to some kind of indebtedness.

Solidarity means “unity of purpose, interest, or sympathy” but really what is expresses is empathy in action. Rather than a passive empathy that only exists in one’s head, solidarity is seeing a problem affecting another human being, working to understand the problem, and then working to solve that problem.

People like to pretend that solidarity is better or easier when the other person is similar to you. However, it isn’t solidarity if you’re just imagining yourself in the other person’s place. Futurama (a cartoon for adults) addressed this with Bender, a psychopathic but lovable robot, who can only feel sympathy for people or things who benefit him or remind him of himself (clip here). This isn’t solidarity — no matter how cute you try to make it, it is tribalism.

In a society that runs on solidarity instead of selfishness or indebtedness, the flow of resources is based on an idea that was, again, verbalized well by Karl Marx (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875):

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

That doesn’t just mean that people with solidarity give to others, and it certainly doesn’t mean that people with solidarity expect a handout. Each individual with solidarity strives to pull their own weight, and also help others. In contrast, under a system like capitalism, we are all trained to be selfish, and we then resist work. In fact, the explicit goal of the individual under capitalism is to escape work. The capitalist escapes work by becoming so wealthy that others work for them, and then the working class person escapes it by retiring. People try to win the lottery so they don’t have to work. Meanwhile, if someone analyzes the situation and thinks, “Well, if not working is the goal, then I’ll just start not working right now,” they are villainized.

Finally, the most important aspect of solidarity is that it creates freedom. Capitalists are always talking about freedom, but that is the freedom to oppress, the freedom to starve, the freedom to be homeless, the freedom to be desperate, the freedom to conform. Real freedom is the freedom to do what you want, and that freedom only comes from material security, and you will never have material security without solidarity.

Once you have material security, you can create and innovate for others out of solidarity rather than to achieve material security. To be fair, though, most human beings create for others even in fairly difficult situations, even when no reward is forthcoming, because solidarity is a basic human trait. We are social animals, and when we are not broken, we care about other people.

I mention creativity and innovation because Ayn Rand went to great lengths to emphasize how incredibly creative and innovative her fictional billionaires (who bear no resemblance to real billionaires) were, but that creates a burning question: Why were her fictional billionaires creating at all? What is the point of creation or innovation if you only care about yourself? Why worry about helping or even impressing someone that doesn’t matter? All this is unanswerable because her fictional world is absurd — certainly not “objective”.

Regarding whether selfishness is evil, I’ll leave you with this quote from Noam Chomsky (2018):

I don’t know what word in the English language — I can’t find one — applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t even begin to approach it.

Related:

Followers of Ayn Rand Provide a Final Tribute — Susan Chira (New York Times, March 10, 1982)

Debt: The First 5000 Years (Updated and Expanded) — David Graeber (2014)

FUTURAMA | Season 5, Episode 1: Bender Cares For Turtles | SYFY — YouTube

Part 4: Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & the Stories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era (Democracy Now, July 27, 2018)