America Has No Culture

Only crapitalism

What is “American culture?” I dare you to describe it. If you think you can, make a mental note before reading on.

Other cultures are easily recognizable, at least in stereotype:

1. European Culture: Intellectual, bureaucratic, and wine-loving. Passionate about history, art, and debating politics. Efficient Germans, romantic French, reserved Brits, and fiery Italians.

2. Mexican Culture: Warm, family-oriented, and fiesta-loving. Deeply Catholic, loves tacos, tequila, and long celebrations. Machismo meets strong matriarchs.

3. Japanese Culture: Polite, disciplined, and obsessed with order. Workaholic by day, anime-loving by night. Bowing, bullet trains, and Zen serenity.

4. Chinese Culture: Pragmatic, ambitious, and family-first. Ancient traditions and a communist government meet ruthless capitalism and mass surveillance. Tea, dumplings, and never losing face.

5. Indian Culture: Spiritual, chaotic, and tech-savvy. Spicy food, Bollywood, and arranged marriages. Sacred cows, karma, and a booming startup scene.

(Don’t @ me, I said it was stereotypes. 😬)

Now for American culture. It doesn't exist in any traditional sense. Unless you consider this painful description:

Americans are loud and obsessed with “freedom” (even when it doesn’t make sense). We love guns, even when they’re used to murder children. We gorge ourselves on fast food, junk TV, memes and ridiculous short videos full of fluff and lies. We treat women and minorities like dirt. We think we’re the best country in the world but we barely know where other countries are, and most of us have never visited them. We shun civics and refuse to understand how our government is supposed to work. About a third of us don’t vote or read books. We're a mix of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, innovation and ignorance, diversity and tribalism. We’re a branding exercise, a collection of consumer habits and myths masquerading as a nation.

In fairness, this doesn't fully account for America's best and brightest, or our real contributions to the world. These include the internet, the power grid, space exploration, protest and temporary improvements in civil rights, polio and mRNA vaccines, Hollywood, jazz, blues and Hip Hop, among others. But really, those are things we invented and none of that describes anything about our actual dominant culture.

We're so fragmented and diverse, that calling someone an “American” tells you almost nothing about them. Some of us embrace European or Mexican or Japanese or Chinese or African traditions. Some of us are defined by our religions and cults. Some of us are obsessed with “Western Civilization,” whatever that means. So what’s the one thing we have in common?

Generally Americans are defined by our unshakable belief in individualism, which neuters any attempt to form a common, inclusive society. It’s the opposite of a culture. “Live and let live” becomes “live and let die” when we stop caring about each other—when we start considering our fellow citizens to be not just tribally suspect, but subhuman and expendable. Our nation began precisely this way, with slavery. Then we tore ourselves apart to get rid of outright ownership of human beings, and replaced it with only slightly less odious wage-slavery. We simply deny most citizens their dignity and any opportunity for real financial security. We lay traps instead of building ladders. And then we blame people when they fall into the very traps we set for them. We’re all trying our damndest to take advantage of each other. How do so many of us fail to see ourselves for who we truly are?

What passes for “American culture” therefore prevents us from working together, and leaves us ripe for exploitation by the worst among us. Then instead of rolling up our collective sleeves to punish the bullies and build a better society, we wait for saviors, whether political or religious. This is nowhere more obvious than in our obsession with superheroes and dystopias.

When's the last time you saw a hit film about a positive future that didn't involve superheroes? When's the last time you saw a non-dystopian sci-fi film?

I'll wait while you think about it. But don't think too long, because you're likely to struggle. And that's the point.

I asked ChatGPT to come up with some positive near-term future films, and it listed The Martian, Hidden Figures, and Tomorrowland. Well, Tomorrowland was a widely-mocked flop. The Martian is a decent example, but Hidden Figures is actually a sad tale of our still-incomplete civil rights struggle and unsung heroes. (I'll never forget the scene of a crucial Black NASA engineer having to run to a different building to use the bathroom. How could we?)

As for non-dystopian sci-fi hits, ChatGPT came up with Interstellar, an unscientific dystopia set on a dying Earth, Star Trek, which is a good example, and Contact, a vanishingly rare gem.

Overwhelmingly, Hollywood mythology embraces what David Brin calls “suspicion of authority.” This is uniquely destructive because it often portrays all institutions—government, science, and public officials—as inherently corrupt or incompetent. It casts lone mavericks or vigilantes as the only source of truth or justice, saving the day by accomplishing what the best of us couldn’t. This feeds cynicism and makes audiences more susceptible to authoritarian demagogues and conspiratorial thinking.

We constantly think we’re being “lied to” by all media, while failing to distinguish between real and bogus sources. We mock education as elitist and cooperative problem-solving as doomed by unintended consequences. We believe we’re headed for inevitable apocalypse while resisting any and all collective efforts that could prevent it. What is the result? We have no idea what’s true. We don’t know how anything works, so we can’t fix it. We elect strongmen. We despise governance, taxes, and civic engagement. We mistrust the very experts who could save us. And we fall for every possible scam.

Consider the Ponzi scheme, in which investors are recruited with promises of big returns, and then paid off with funds from new investors. Eventually, Ponzi schemes always collapse, with only early investors getting paid.

Does that sound like anything familiar?

How about multi-level marketing programs that have never been more prominent. Though Ponzi schemes are illegal, multi-level marketing thrives while doing exactly the same thing. Only the earliest members of multi-level marketing systems ever get paid. Really. 99% of everyone who gets involved in MLMs lose both money and time.

Sorry to disappoint you. You won’t get rich that way.

Crypto is the same: People betting that someone even more stupid than they are will come along after them and inflate the price of their worthless tokens—that they can then sell to some other sucker for actual dollars. Instead of doing any actual work.

The stock market is a similar gamble. Although stocks do have inherent value tied to real assets, gains and dividends aren’t assured and many retail investors lose more than they can afford. Insider trading remains a persistent threat that tilts the playing field toward the wealthy and connected.

Ultimately, capitalism writ large is just a bigger version of the same systematic Ponzi scheme: privatizing gains and socializing losses. All while pushing the same tired myth of the lone individualist hero who pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps and makes a killing by overcoming insurmountable odds.

But no one beats old money. Well, maybe once or twice per decade a Gates or Jobs or Bezos or Zuckerberg comes along. For the rest of us—just as with Ponzi schemes and MLMs—the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, every single day.

That is why there are no good billionaires. None.

Billionaires should not exist—period. They should simply be illegal. There should be a maximum amount of money anyone can have. After someone reaches that limit, any further income goes to the public treasury. We can debate whether the limit should be $10 million or $100 million or some other amount. But it’s simply untenable to argue that such a limit should not exist. Because wealth is inherently opposed to democracy, and wealth-concentration can never be made safe. Money is the power to command others to do one’s bidding. Too much money turns ordinary people into corrupt monarchs who rarely face the law.

Who is the richest person in the world? Elon Musk.

Who is the most corrupt person in the world right now? Same answer.

What about capital formation, you might ask. What about incentives? Why should anyone work hard if they can’t enjoy the spoils?

Capital formation for large projects can be solved in several ways: Public banks, sovereign wealth funds, worker cooperatives, state-led venture capital, decentralized blockchain financing, and tax-based redistribution. These can democratize capital and direct investment toward worthy public and community-driven priorities. But that will never happen so long as billionaires remain in control of our political system. Power never concedes without an enforceable demand.

And please, tell me why you think anyone deserves more than $100 million in personal wealth? Because you can never say they “earned” it. All such wealth relies on vast public infrastructure, including government investment in a high-quality public education system.

Some of you will push back against the idea of a billionaire ban—citing one example or another of billionaire philanthropists. But what are the odds? Far fewer than 1% actually make it to the top under capitalism, and fewer still engage in real philanthropy—which itself is a terrible policy failure. Philanthropy remains yet another shameful avenue of billionaire control—putting them in charge of determining priorities for social spending—rather than those decisions being made through the democratic process.

So why do ordinary (broke) people choose to defend billionaires, secretly believing the fantasy that we live in a functional system in which anyone can somehow beat the odds and (even more unlikely) manage to do good? Why do people think private wealth is a solution to anything other than insatiable greed? What is wrong with setting sensible limits on financial excess, and building an inclusive system where everyone wins?

Make no mistake, individualism remains opposed to the idea of a social contract of any kind. Individualism allows us to justify poverty and suffering by blaming victims for their plight. Individualism allows us to declare our fellow citizens the enemy. Individualism delivers a blissfully-false clear conscience, allowing us to pretend we have nothing to do with the suffering of others, and no responsibility to cure it.

But that's not even the worst of it. Individualism also encourages rent-seeking behavior.

And therein lies the fatal paradox: The American mythology valorizes hard work, while simultaneously holding up rent-seekers as the ultimate “winners.” Think about the concept of “making it,” or being “independently wealthy.” Another term of obfuscation is “early retirement.” What does that truly mean? It means you’ve made enough money that you can live off the interest from your investments and never have to work again. And what is interest? It’s rent other people pay you for using your money to accomplish something you couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Does that sound like a solid work ethic to you?

Of course not. Why then, do we worship the idle rich, but save our endless scorn for the poor and homeless?

Look at it. A person who lives off their interest contributes nothing to society. I'm not talking about someone who starts and builds a business that employs people, or who truly innovates. I'm talking about someone with a high-yield savings account or bonds, or who owns rental properties, who makes enough passive income that they never have to work another day in their lives.

That’s Thomas Piketty's description of a rentier, a French word that simply means “rent-seeker.”

It would be bad enough if such people simply spent their money on luxuries. But that's never the case. The more passive income someone has, the more dangerous they become to democratic society.

Because after someone amasses more than about $100 million, there's not much else they can buy to enhance their lives. Such a person could have several mansions, a yacht, a private jet, and a personal staff dedicated to fulfilling their every whim.

So what does someone do with obscenely more money? Say a billion dollars? $10 billion? $100 billion?

They seek POWER—to literally control everyone else. And that makes them your de facto enemy, and the enemy of all citizens. No exceptions.

If we did the right thing and confiscated all American fortunes over $100 million, we could raise $11 trillion—which would pay off nearly a third of our national debt.

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty documents an even worse social outcome tied to extreme wealth. He coined the simple formula: r is greater than g. Meaning that the average rate of return on investments is always greater than the rate of GDP growth. This is universally true with only rare and short-term exceptions. It’s a principle that guarantees wealth concentration.

If investor wealth grows faster than the rate of the overall economy, that means that labor has to compete for a smaller and smaller slice of the economic pie, every single year. In order for investors to continue growing their fortunes faster than the economy, they must suppress labor movements and oppose regulations—both of which would reduce the rate of growth of their investments. In short, rent-seeking billionaires put us on the fast-track toward fascism. And now their bill is coming due, as they destroy our government and slash our benefits.

It’s a closed system. Ordinary people can't access top-quality investments with near-guaranteed returns. These are only available to those who can afford to use hedge funds, the best of which require at least $10 or $100 million to invest. So in effect, the odds of any citizen joining the ranks of the billionaires remain about as low as winning the lottery. The only thing that improves those odds are—you guessed it—inherited wealth and connections.

In spite of these hard truths, the myth of American individualism persists. It might be our worst contribution to world culture. Because now we're exporting this lie, and billionaires are proliferating everywhere. There were 2,781 of them in 2024, including 24 with a net worth over $50 billion each. If you think any of them are going to help build an inclusive society or fight for democracy, you're as brainwashed as any cult member in history.

Piketty has a solution. And you're not going to like it. And the reason you won't like it is because you must believe at some core level that restraints on wealth might one day impact you. Which would mean that you had joined the top 0.1%—with a net worth of about $17 million. If you think that's likely to happen, I'll put you in touch with a Nigerian prince who has a fortune to give you, if you will only send him $1,000 first…

Piketty’s solution is an annual wealth tax of between 2% and 5%, depending on economic growth rates. Yes, that means every wealthy person with a fortune of over $10 million would have to send their government a check for 2 to 5% of their entire fortune every year, including any unrealized gains. Any successful wealth tax would also have to include a global crackdown on tax havens to prevent capital flight.

Heresy, you might say. That is, if you’re still in the cult of capitalism.

What would such a wealth tax do? It would simply mean that the top 0.1% would be getting wealthier more slowly. Because most of them know how to get returns much higher than 2 to 5%.

Such a tax program in the US could raise between $800 billion and $2 trillion per year, funding vast social spending including healthcare, food and housing assistance and public investment in new businesses and basic income programs. This would revitalize our society while still allowing the wealthy to stay very, very comfortable. It’s win-win.

Instead, Trump wants to give the wealthy yet another tax cut.

Why do we refuse to tax wealth? Why isn’t there a groundswell of popular support for spreading universal prosperity? Why can’t people who promise to do this get elected?

Because it's firmly against American culture, which answers the riddle I posed at the beginning of this article. So, boiled down, exactly what IS our culture?

• Wealth and rent-seeking.

• Poor-shaming and victim blaming.

• An absolute disdain for the social contract.

• Hatred of experts, science, education, and knowledge.

• Wage-slavery and social murder of the poor.

That's it. That's collectively who we are. Selfish fantasists. Enslavers.

250 years into our democratic experiment, that's the outcome America has produced. Too many, even on the so-called left, get queasy about any talk of simply ending billionaires. We’re all complicit to a greater or lesser degree.

So let’s stop pretending.

American culture, as we might imagine it (“liberty and justice for all”), never existed. We have no unifying ethos beyond greed, no foundational principle beyond consumption. We don’t share history—we wage ideological wars over its meaning. We don’t share values, because too many of us refuse to sacrifice individual gain for the common good. America isn’t a culture. It’s a grifter economy backed by a military, controlled by billionaires, and designed to stay that way—unless we can somehow manage to end them.

---

Thank you for reading ExoProphet, and for your support! If you find this article valuable, please subscribe, like and restack to help this publication grow.