One thing our otherwise USA struck visitors for the world cup seemed not to get was the… permeability of American society, compared to any other society on Earth.
As bound up in status and monkey games as we seem to be at times — and as much as I b*tch about that — we are absolutely loosey goosey and easy-going compared to the rest of the west which is in general far more amenable to take people as individuals than the rest of the world. And as crazy as our reliance on credentials and the proper programs and stamps on the proper papers was — I think we’re walking back from a lot of THAT crazy — we have nothing on the rest of the world on that front. We never had.
No? Well, while where I come from seems to be a country of obsessive autists, they don’t take themselves seriously. And they don’t take their obsessions seriously. They might know a thing or two beyond the standard things they learned in school, but no one will take them seriously at it, because they don’t have the credential, and the stamp.
While here… Well, here… The best guy I ever found to help with my civil war (particularly weapons and uniforms) research, back when I thought I was going to do a novel set in that time period was… my plumber. Okay, he was a pretty special plumber, the one guy in the city willing to work on Victorians that had been messed about five ways from Monday by previous owners and had who knew what happen to them. But still… my plumber. He came in, saw some books on my desk (which was in the master bedroom, next to the bathroom) and we started talking. And I found the depth and breadth of his knowledge. He published a newsletter. He had thousands upon thousands of subscribers. And some of them were probably, low key, academics who were plagiarizing his research for papers, wanna bet?
And how many times, on an online discussion, do you ask the world’s weirdest question. Say “Does anyone here know about the pickling techniques for the lesser Georgian peanut (I MADE IT UP. STOP LOOKING IT UP) and get someone who tells you this is his hobby and he’s researched it for the last ten years, because he finds it fascinating? And he’s done real experiments in his kitchen, and–
Do we ask for his credentials? Where he studied? No. We might ask for references, at least if we know we just made up the Lesser Georgian Peanut, but that’s all. And if their references check out, we are sure as shooting going to make them our source for this thing.
Look, part of this is that we are so wealthy — no seriously, in lifestyle just about any American state is better of than 99% of the world — and have been for so long, that we had time for people to develop interests and hobbies away from work. Most of the time — until recently — most people weren’t coming home so exhausted from work that that they couldn’t function. And we eat enough and are healthy enough that we have energy to devote to things beyond mere survival.
Now, if you do the deep dive into this, you’ll find we have other things, mostly derived from the fact that we’re a consumer-oriented society. Just about everyone is trying to sell you something, and they try to push where you’re weak: things that make your life easier and more convenient. Every time I go abroad, one of the things I’ve found is that daily life is less convenient. Even accounting for the fact that of course we don’t know how things work there, it always seems harder to get hold of say ingredients for making dinner, or implements you need to cook, or whatever it is you’re used to being an absurdly easy task.
Granted, our life became a little less convenient after 2020. I’m still salty over the fact that all night diners no longer seem to exist anywhere, or that it’s almost impossible to find a store open at midnight. But still, traveling internally if you forget something, be it underwear or a hairbrush, we can find it at the nearest Walmart. But abroad, even if you know the equivalent of their Walmart (they don’t have an equivalent, not really) it is impossible to find it with any sort of expediency because the store that sells that is only open between three and five PM on even Wednesdays and leap Saturdays. (What’s a leap Saturday? No one knows, so it’s never open.)
Anyway, making our life way easier left us energy and time and enough curiosity to go poking about various hobby horses. All of which of course got exponentially easier with the internet.
But beyond that, there is an attitude that goes with this. It’s not “Well, so and so is an important man. He knows everything about ancient Greek nose picks because he majored in ancient Greek nose picks at uni” but “Hey, this guy has done a deep dive on ancient Greek nose picks, and he has all the references and receipts, and he’ll tell you all about it at the drop of a hat, or even if all hats are glued to heads with hot glue.”
In other words, we Americans recognize people who know things. It’s like “Nerdmaste, the geek in me recognizes the geek in you.”
I think this is why the the internet here has a completely different texture than in the rest of the world. Why we discuss current events, economics, politics and the underpinnings of our society on line. Why places like instapundit exist, aggregating a view of the world away from the MSM. Why… well, why we’re ourselves.
You see, this is important, this willingness to both research anything simply because it interests us, and to respect others for their obvious achievements/research/knowledge, regardless of official approval of such things, is what creates our current society. It is in many ways what made us too hot to hold after the color revolution of 2020. What made our come back work without going hot.
Is it something that can be exported tot he rest of the world? I don’t know. As I said, it has its roots in prosperity and in convenience, and in us being ourselves so long.
But maybe … just maybe, with Elon’s freeing of twitter, maybe we can export a bit of our ability to be unexpected.
Time of export the weaponized tisms. If anyone can do it, we can.
Let’s teach the world what is actually worthy of respect.
According To Hoyt 
Chuckling and nodding knowingly at Nerdmaste.
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Wow, this entry is already indexed – when I searched for the lesser Georgian peanut, it was the only hit.
(What, you expected anything less?)
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Lesser Georgian Peanut (LGP): a fictional variety of hybridized legume developed by George Washington Carver by crossing the peanut with the sweet potato. While the LGP was wildly successful in growing peanuts the size of sweet potatoes, it had the unfortunate effect of growing a peanut shell of proportional hardness. It took the ingenuity of a group of housewives in northern Georgia to come up with a pickling technique that softened the shells sufficiently to be mechanically removeable. Unfortunately, the pickling process also sterilized the seeds. Since the entire crop was subjected to pickling in 1953, that particular hybrid has since become extinct and no one has been able to reproduce Carver’s breeding process.
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I’ve actually seen the results of local enthusiast researchers sifting into the footnotes and references of professional scholars. I run a tiny micro-local publishing concern which has been around now for more than 40 years. One of our specialties was publishing and printing local histories, most usually researched and authored by an amateur historian with an obsessive interest in some aspect in their little home town, or an ancestor of theirs. They have mined and refined the historical aspects, doing the initial groundwork in various archives or personal documents which they happened to have access to or an interest in.
For example: There is a detailed two-volume history of a little town to the north of here which goes for quite astonishing sums on the rare-book market. A biography of a WWII Army nurse who escaped from Corregidor in 1942, the memoir of another WWII veteran who flew transport planes over “The Hump” in the CBI theater. A series of books on the ACH massacre of German Unionists on the Nueces as they tried to escape from the Confederacy. A republication of a volume from 1935 marking the centennial history of the town of Goliad.
And so – our books turn up in footnotes or as references in books by the professional historians, which gratifies and amuses me no end.
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Americans started having hobbies pretty early, because tinkering and small piecework could be useful. Maybe because the US didn’t have lords and landlords demanding extra bits of work? Maybe because the frontier was boring when not deadly?
And you could trade little hobby things with people, or give them as gifts, when you did not have money for storebought, or lived too far out. Whittling, making toys, making dolls.
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US universities /still/ seem to have some thing that you can learn inside certain ones that you would not learn the same way outside of the university. However, some of those are ones that the military, for example, can also teach very well. If in also a different way.
I recently learned that John Ringo’s mortar adventures were against the recommendations of the recruiter, who really wanted to make him a satellite tech the way that the ASVAB said.
(This is funny in hindsight to me, because I think Ringo had been a formative experience in my early attempts to understand the adult world. )
Anyway, maybe an advanced degree in satellite tech topics could be worth that, instead of getting the undergraduate degree, and going directly to OJT. And maybe the basic degree might be worth getting directly instead of doing a term as a military tech first.
But, when you look at weird obsessives, some times what you can directly test indicates that they are worth more than some of the degrees in that area.
Arguably the original source of evidence for the utility of degree was partly or wholly weird obsessives, who participated in formalizing it that way.
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“Nerdmaste, the geek in me recognizes the geek in you.” That’s so beautiful I may cry.
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Michael Bellesisles (“Arming America,” 2000) built his academic career on asserting that “gun culture” was a product of the Civil War, that private gun ownership was rare in the colonial era, and therefore the 2nd Amendment should not apply to private gun ownership. Clayton Cramer, an amateur historian with few academic credentials (although I believe he was working on his master’s thesis in history at the time) thought “That doesn’t sound right,” and spent hundreds of hours in research to expose Bellesisles’s fraud. He discovered, among other things, that the records Bellesisles had claimed to consult either didn’t exist, didn’t exist where he said they did, or said the opposite of what he claimed. To their credit, the history establishment actually listened (eventually), and Bellesisles is now considered an embarrassment. Moral: People whose living depends on their expertise often lie; passionate amateurs seldom do.
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