Your story is wonderful and sparks many thoughts in my mind. It seems to me that people, especially Americans, seem to conflate ownership and responsibility. For example, we as a collective must be responsible for one another yet we do not own other people. Responsibility to a collective is why we value our National Parks. No one individual owns our National Parks yet we collectively pay for their maintenance through out tax system. Each one of has a little responsibility for our National Parks like not littering, helping out by picking up litter we see hanging around, making fires only in designated places and watching our fires carefully, not bringing firearms, etc. In this way we share responsibility with one another for the benefit of visiting our National Parks. No doubt there are many other examples. In our society we have a collective responsibility to protect children from Social Media abuses. We have a collective responsibility to ensure AI systems are not misused. Indeed, acting as a collective we work as a unit. America slowly slipped into the trap of “individualism” over the decades since WW II. This has been intensified by the words and actions of the current Trump administration. Along with individualism comes selfishness for the collective “we” gets pushed aside. Following selfishness comes ownership and greed. After that comes policies and laws reinforcing selfish individualism, and mechanisms to enforce that which usually amounts to force and coercion. This is what happens when everyone is in it for themselves, or their family, or their tribe. The idea of working together for a collective good is disintegrating before our very eyes. We must wake up to the fact that some of us may be deluded regarding some of these inevitable facts of life in America. Thank you for your time.
Your story is wonderful and sparks many thoughts in my mind. It seems to me that people, especially Americans, seem to conflate ownership and responsibility. For example, we as a collective must be responsible for one another yet we do not own other people. Responsibility to a collective is why we value our National Parks. No one individual owns our National Parks yet we collectively pay for their maintenance through out tax system. Each one of has a little responsibility for our National Parks like not littering, helping out by picking up litter we see hanging around, making fires only in designated places and watching our fires carefully, not bringing firearms, etc. In this way we share responsibility with one another for the benefit of visiting our National Parks. No doubt there are many other examples. In our society we have a collective responsibility to protect children from Social Media abuses. We have a collective responsibility to ensure AI systems are not misused. Indeed, acting as a collective we work as a unit. America slowly slipped into the trap of “individualism” over the decades since WW II. This has been intensified by the words and actions of the current Trump administration. Along with individualism comes selfishness for the collective “we” gets pushed aside. Following selfishness comes ownership and greed. After that comes policies and laws reinforcing selfish individualism, and mechanisms to enforce that which usually amounts to force and coercion. This is what happens when everyone is in it for themselves, or their family, or their tribe. The idea of working together for a collective good is disintegrating before our very eyes. We must wake up to the fact that some of us may be deluded regarding some of these inevitable facts of life in America. Thank you for your time.