Dissolving our nation’s bootstrap bias
I’m supposed to be writing every week in Grok Systems, but my next post has been particularly harder to write in the context of my busy life. Part of this has been my obligation to write about the GDC, which I’ve only just recently started getting out of the way. But this got me in a writey mood and when inspiration hit, this came out. It’s not in Grok Systems because to me it’s really more patriotic than anything else.
The Unites States is probably one of the largest and most rewarding experiments in human history. There are lots of ways to look at it, being the largest experiment in our history it is a very multidimensional and complicated experiment. The core of it lies in freedom and self-governance (democracy)… what it means, what it implies, the challenges that come with it and ultimately what happens.
What led me to this thought was looking around this coffee shop here in my hometown and feeling like the ethnic minority. I’ve thought this before, but being caffeinated, a bunch of thoughts popped into my head including “it didn’t used to be this way” and also “this is America.” More significantly though, looking around, I was surprised to realize there isn’t really an ethnic majority! I may be in a minority, but so is everybody else. So there is no minority. It’s balanced, and in that way resolved.
Now diversity is common in large cities, and America is not special in that regard. Looking at a lot of other countries, particularly ones in Europe, there is a lot of diversity and integration of other cultures into the culture that is the national culture. However, America was one of the first to really accept this, at least in ideals.
I know that growing up I associated American culture with white people. There were more of them around me, and of course American history is full of white people. Only in high school did I fully realize this country was founded with no ethnic or cultural bias. In fact, it was based on freedom and democracy, allowing and even encouraging the integration of cultures and values of people other than even the founders.
But only when you look around and really see the dynamics of that in motion do you really understand that. People can see things as they are or as they were, but you really miss a lot, especially in your unconscious expectations of the future, when you don’t fully understand the intentions and implications of the founding values encoded into whatever is devised to maintain them… in this case the constitution.
The idea that white people “are immigrants too” is a great reminder of this. Common interpretation sees it referencing the fact the United States was founded on already occupied territory. But I think more importantly it should remind us the way our nation was framed in values and ideal was done in a way that made no implication of entitlement to the early members.
And it wasn’t done by explicitly saying so. It was done by making freedom and democracy the real first-class citizen. The only reason white people had “dominance” for so long was because they were what bootstrapped the system. The rules of the system gave bias to the majority, which just happened to be white people.
Thinking anything else is confusing emergent behavior with the mechanics of the system. I think most white Americans at least subconsciously make this mistake about what I’m talking about, but in general it’s not an uncommon mistake to make. The limited perspective of what you see and experience of especially large and long running systems can bias your understanding of the real nature of the system.
Despite this majority bias from bootstrapping, I think that because of the true mechanics of our country, it will also be the first country to achieve a true cultural balance like I experienced today… someday. Maybe sooner than we think. I think this presidential campaign both symbolizes and catalyzes the tipping point where our legacy bootstrap bias is dissolved and our true national mechanics will become obvious.
And the idealists will have won.