We got a lot of feedback and responses to last week’s intro, mostly positive. Here is one from our valued member, Parker Johnson, looking at the topic from a different angle:

After reading the first sentence of Sina’s intro in last week's newsletter, I thought (hoped?) he was joking/lampooning, and then to my horror and sadness, I realized he was serious. Is it possible that he is unaware that the very term and notion of “American Exceptionalism” is a global joke, branded on all of us by the behaviors and rhetoric of the worst of us? The term itself is pure hubris. An alchemy of self-inflation, self-aggrandizement and privilege. Smug, pompous and unified in delusion.  

For certain, this great nation is responsible for vastly more than it’s fair share of innovation of (and impact on) global culture. From The Declaration of Independence to The Constitution, from electricity to the light bulb, from the automobile to the airplane, from the mainframe to the iPhone, Americans have risen to the challenge and the call unlike any other nation in world history.  We have had exceptional leaders, exceptional inventors, exceptional entrepreneurs, exceptional scientists - it’s a long list of which to be proud. But we have left a wide swath of scorched earth in our wake, of which there is nothing exceptional about whatsoever, but for our arrogance and convenient denial in the face of inconvenient truths.Yearning for American Exceptionalism is the Spiral Dynamic equivalent of the Mullahs in Afghanistan harkening to subvert the course of evolution, and maintain some grasp over their conjured reality in an attempt to keep their culture in the Dark Ages. Same energy is driving both.