The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Life's Greatest Mystery: Understanding Americans || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

We're going to group therapy today, and on the docket for discussion is what makes Americans so difficult to understand? Not in a weird accent kind of way, but in a "why are we the way that we are" kind of way. *This video was recorded during my backpacking trip through Yosemite in the end of July. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/lifes-greatest-mystery-understanding-americans

Hey everybody, Peter Zeyn here coming to you from Upper Spiller Canyon in Yosemite, just in front of me is Horse Creek Pass, which sucks. Anyway, this is Spiller Canyon behind me. That's much better. Anyway, we're doing a number of videos while I'm out backpacking. This one, we're going to talk about why Americans are so manic depressive, or as most other countries refer to it, why Americans are bat-shick crazy. It has to do with geography. when the original settlers started laying claim to the eastern seaboard of what's now the east coast of the United States, we were just another colony. And even when the United States got its independence, its opportunity for growth was very limited.

You basically had a thin coastal strip that wasn't even particularly well connected. And there was the Chesapeake Bay right in the middle, which was valuable. But if somebody as somebody happened to take over Baltimore, like, you know, War of 1812 kind of thing, it cut the United States in two. So we discovered that Americans had a very regional approach to everything until we started penetrating inland. Part of the Treaty of Paris that gave the United States the eastern side of the Mississippi basin, basically going up to the Appalachians.

And then later the Louisiana purchase, which gave us the western side, provided a change and one that really has shaped America's mindset ever since. Because when you had people taking the national road, you had people. people get into the Ohio River Valley and starting to explore what they soon found out were the best farmlands on the planet overlaid by the largest natural navigable waterway system in the world right on top of each other. Anyone for the price of a Conistoga wagon, which in modern times is like $14,000 could basically go out to this interior zone and within eight months be exporting grain through New Orleans for hard currency. And we saw this last for five.

generations which the notable interruption of the Civil War. So for five generations, Americans found more and better lands. They got richer and there were really no security concerns from their point of view. You do that for 150 years and you develop a series of national ethoses and mythoses. And for the United States, that mythos was that the world is ultimately a kind place and that you just have to work hard and security will take care of itself and well will take care of itself, because that is what we knew for 150 years. Now, as we have all learned, that is not how the world actually works.

From time to time, the world reaches out and punches you in the face. And for Americans who went for five generations without a serious adjustment, well, we lose our mind because we can convince that the covenant with God has been broken and that our days are over. and we start a panicked recreation of everything about ourselves in a desperate attempt to survive. Now, is this an overreaction? You bet you. But does this have an upside?

Absolutely. Because if you respond to negative stimuli with a reinvention, then the sky is the limit. And so, I'm going to give you a few examples here. Kind of the quintessential one is Sputnik. I mean, let's be honest here. It was a beeping aluminum grapefruit. And the Americans were head of the Russians at the time in rocketry, in metallurgy, and electronics, but because the Russians were able to launch something that went, beep, beep, beep, we lost our shit.

And we completely overhauled our industrial base. We completely overhauled how we handled public education. And we then coasted on those advantages for the next 50 years. 9-11 is another really good example. It was a tragedy by any measure. I don't mean to talk people out of that. but as a side effect of the war and terror, Americans ended up having the sharp end of American power

astriding every major waterway on the planet, something we have yet to use. And when that time comes, all the hard work is done. Vietnam, another great example. We lost a war to a post-colonial power that was a rice producer, and we were the world's largest rice exporter at the time. As a side effect of our reaction to Vietnam, we took about a decade off,

we completely overhauled our defense industry, marrying technology to our weapon system and what has become known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. That gave us everything from satellite communications to cruise missiles to J-dams. Our reaction, our overreaction to stimulus is one of our great advantages, but it does mean we're a little when we're dealing with the diplomatic side of things because when something goes down that we think is too much, we have to remake everything. Now, our closest cultural cousins, the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians have something similar to this. Let's start with our Canuck neighbors. Actually, the Canucks and the Australians both.

Unlike the American settlers who found more and better lands, the Canadian and Australian settlers basically found a dead heart. The Aussies found the outback, which may be good for mining, but it's certainly not good for the average person to start anew. And the Canadians found the Canadian Shield, which is forested land with a broken crust where you might be able to, again, mine, but you're never going to farm. And so you had a very different approach. In the case of Canada, this is where the passive aggressiveness comes from, because they've always seen the country to their south doing very, very, very, very well with absolutely no planning. With the Australians, this is why they have a tendency to be very, very forward thinking, because they know at the end of the day, their capacity to leverage their own geography to achieve this route is somewhat limited. And so they have to have good relations with someone else.

It used to be the United Kingdom. Now it's definitely the United States. And then they were the Kiwis. Similar situation to the United States a little bit, in that they pushed inland and they found more and better lands, especially relative to the size of the country. But there was one big difference between New Zealand and the United States. New Zealand's remote.

The Americans have a massive coastline on two ocean basins. And so you take the size of the United States and you combine it with its resources, of course it's going to be a global power, which is one of the reasons why we punched in the face every once in a while. The New Zealanders never had that. The Kiwis could exist in a degree of splendid isolation should they really choose to. And as a result, they kind of have all the upsides of what goes on in the American mind, but none of the downsides. because, you know, the last time that there was a war on New Zealand's shores, it's, you have to go back to like the 15th century, I think that's 15th, 16th, 13th, mid-teen century, when the Maori settled there in the first place and went to war with the natives

who were already there. The result is a very, very different political culture. Okay, that's it for me. I will, uh, that's my next stop. I'll see you guys there.