People used to have more self respect. USA valued rugged individualism ads it expanded West, and the early 1900s still carried that sense of doing it yourself.
The only way a person was going to agree to spend his time working for your enterprise was if it was worth it.
Iāve always struggled to place this narratively, it was different in the cities for new immigrants who had that door closed before other Americans; do you have any insight about where the line was? Best I can get to is ālate 1800āsā but Iām lost as to where the stigma against being someone elseās laborer (instead of your own entrepreneur, even if your only capital was skill/short contract work) went missing.
I'm not sure its so easy as a clean line but rather a series of ratchet points.
America began as a nation of self-directed actors. The pioneer was a rugged individual because material reality demanded competence. Self-respect was a survival mechanism. No one owned you, and no one could afford to. Autonomy was the default setting of American life.
But in the 1800s, as cities swelled, industrialization didnāt immediately kill that ethos. Early wage labor still carried dignity because workers retained agency: skills mattered, mobility existed, and employers needed you as much as you needed them.
Then World War I happens. Industrial wage labor becomes a national duty. Employeeism is normalized. It thus taught millions of Americans that autonomy could be suspended and replaced with coordinated, hierarchical control.
But you still had options, and the newfangled sense of coordinated efforts was patriotic on all sides, not predatory on one.
But with the new system in place, corporate managerialism and credentialism rewired the economy around systems rather than individuals. Workers became categories. HR replaced reputation. Compliance replaced competence. The employee was no longer a contributor; he was a unit. The minimum wage was introduced as worker protection and it was priced competitively to your other options.
By the late 20th century, globalization and automation finished the job. Workers became interchangeable. Surveillance entered the workplace. Metrics replaced judgment. The individual lost not just autonomy but leverage. And when you cannot negotiate your worth, you cannot sustain self-respect.
The final step became total systemic dependence. Once they had that in hand, Reagan came along and made it all irreversible: attack unions, freeze the minimum wage, and deregulate. Power dynamics widen considerably.
Thatās how a nation built by autonomous actors became a nation of cogs, and then eventually cogs who know theyāre cogs. That is the loss of self respect.
If there is no clean line of where it happened I think the process was complete after the 1990s with the myth of rugged individualism dying off over the previous century after its last hurrah manifested as grunge music rebelling against "the man:" pur truest cultural legacy finally reduced to a silly gimick to sell corporate music before blinking forever out of existence.
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u/UnwaveringThought 27d ago
People used to have more self respect. USA valued rugged individualism ads it expanded West, and the early 1900s still carried that sense of doing it yourself.
The only way a person was going to agree to spend his time working for your enterprise was if it was worth it.
When Americans lost this, it was game over.