Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Americans prize freedom over everything. This is the bedrock fundamental of the American culture. This isn't a negotitation point with Americans, it's a "get out your guns and shoot back" point. It's the underlying reason why so many Americans have guns. At least this is true of a large swath of Americans.
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I am an American and I strongly disagree with this characterization. I can thing of several virtues that I place above "freedom," justice being one of them. But I suspect RSE and I would disagree on definitions of both freedom and justice.
A distinction I have noticed between American and European culture, related to the outlier/bell curve emphasis, is that I think Europeans are more inclined to trust the results of scientific research as a tool for long-term planning, even if its results are personally inconvenient to them, whereas many Americans are inclined to disregard scientific research for planning purposes, assuming that any problems can be dealt with by cleverness if they get big enough (i.e. they start to impact the American in question's standard of living).