Selection Bias on the 250th
Happy birthday, America. Here's to the choosers.
America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th
Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th
The church in Voltlage is small. Stone walls, wooden pews, a ceiling that has watched centuries of prayer without comment. I stood in it several years ago, trying to feel what my ancestors felt the last time they were here. Before they left for America.
Outside, my cousins showed me Ibbenbüren and Voltlage. Their area, their lives, the local inn. These are the lives my family would have lived. Good lives. Steady. The kind where you know the bakery by the owner’s first name and the cemetery holds five generations of your blood.
Someone in my family looked at all of that and decided to leave.
I don’t know what they told themselves on the walk out of town. I know they prayed in this church, and then they started walking toward something they couldn’t see, across an ocean they might not survive, into a country that was still figuring itself out.
That’s the founding act.
Not of the Republic. That came earlier, with documents and arguments and a war that should have been lost half a dozen times. I mean the act the Republic was designed to make repeatable: choosing this country under conditions of uncertainty, with no guarantee the country you bet on survives.
The framers did it at one scale, signing themselves over to a system that didn’t yet exist while the most powerful empire on earth committed itself to crushing them. Frederick Douglass did it at a stranger scale. Standing in Rochester in 1852, having every reason to repudiate the document, he praised it instead. He called it a glorious liberty document. He claimed a country that had not claimed him. His ancestors had been brought across the Atlantic against their will. He chose the experiment for them too.
My ancestor in Voltlage did it at a third scale.
So did yours. Maybe it was you, walking off a plane with one suitcase. Maybe it was a grandparent, a great-great-grandmother, a refugee, a dreamer, a desperate person with nothing left to lose. Maybe it was someone seven generations back who arrived by boat under terms no person should ever have faced. Or maybe it was an ancestor who was on this land long before the Republic arrived, and whose descendants have had to make the choice to claim a country that arrived on top of theirs. The choosing the country runs on is broader than immigration. It is the act of claiming the experiment as one’s own, and the people who had to claim it the hardest carry it the heaviest.
This is what makes America different. France is France because the French were mostly born there. Japan is Japan because the Japanese share millennia of continuity on the same islands. America is America because people kept choosing it. They keep choosing it. The country is not a fixed inheritance. It is a continuous act of selection.
And that selection is not an act of comfort. Nobody leaves what they know for what they don’t because it’s easy. The calculation doesn’t work if you’re optimizing for safety. Something deeper is operating.
The spirited part
The Greeks understood the soul as three things working together. Reason calculates. Appetite wants: comfort, security, pleasure, more. And between them, something harder to name: thumos. Spirit. The part that drives you toward risk and honor and purpose, even when reason says the odds are bad and appetite says stay home. Thumos is what makes a person stand up when sitting down would be easier. It’s the part of you that would rather try and fail than succeed at something that doesn’t matter.
The people who got on boats had thumos. Appetite stays where the bread is. Reason would have counted the odds of surviving the crossing and recommended staying put. Spirit. The willingness to risk everything for the chance at something you can’t yet prove exists.
Plato thought this part of us came first. We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough. The spirited part is in us before we know what we are.
The Declaration of Independence is a thumos document. Read the closing line: We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Lives. Fortunes. Honor. That’s fifty-six men telling the most powerful empire on earth that they would rather die free than live managed. Appetite would have negotiated. Reason might have waited for better odds. Spirit signed.
The founding was fragile. What survived it was fragile. But the spirit that created it was not cautious, and it was not calculated. It was chosen.
I’ve felt this spirit in small rooms where the arguments got loud because the stakes were real, and the friction was the feature, not the failure.
That’s esprit de corps. Shared direction with permission to fight about how to get there. You argue about strategy. Then you suit up together.
This was the township esprit de corps the series has been circling: citizens governing their shared life directly, arguing about it, building things together because the work needed doing. The friction was the feature. A country of people who chose to be here, choosing again every morning to build something with the people next to them, even when they couldn’t agree on what exactly it should look like.
That was the esprit de corps. Sturdier than patriotism, which can be performed. Warmer than nationalism, which excludes. The felt sense of being on the same team. Wanting the people next to you to succeed because their success is yours, because you chose the same experiment and your name is on it.
What negation sounds like
I talk to people on the left. I hear guilt. I hear that we’re undeserving, that the people in power have made everything bad, that America’s sins outweigh its contributions. I hear a kind of preemptive surrender: the country isn’t worth defending because the country isn’t worth admiring.
I talk to people on the right. I hear corruption, swamp, decay. I hear that everything is broken, that the institutions are captured, that the only option is to tear it down and basically start over. Frustration so deep it has become its own identity.
Neither is a vision. What I hear from both sides is negation. What’s wrong, what’s broken, what we’re against. If you only define yourself by what you reject, you get exactly what you feared. A nation of people listing what’s wrong, with no shared sense of what they’re building toward.
I believe in American exceptionalism. I say that knowing how it sounds, knowing it makes some people flinch and other people reflexively salute. Both reactions miss the point. The exceptionalism I mean is structural: this is the only country on earth constituted by choosing. Every other nation is an inheritance of geography or blood. This one is a bet. A continuous, renewable, voluntarily undertaken bet that people who disagree about nearly everything can govern themselves together if they have enough spirit to keep showing up.
When that spirit gets replaced by negation, the adversaries notice. The information warfare, the discord operations, the algorithmic amplification of division: these work because we’ve made ourselves easy to fracture. A team that knows what it’s playing for can absorb disagreement. A team that’s forgotten will tear itself apart.
Thumos has enemies, and they’re not foreign. The deeper threat is exhaustion. Freedom is a burden. It always has been. Choosing is hard, and choosing every day is harder, and at some point the appeal of not choosing, of handing it over, of just being angry and calling that a position, becomes overwhelming. I feel it myself. I watch myself drift toward the comfortable negation, the satisfying grievance, the thing that feels like a stance but is really just fatigue in a costume.
The 250th isn’t a celebration of perfection. This country has never been perfect. It was built by flawed people who owned human beings and excluded most of the population from the rights they proclaimed. The work they left is unfinished, and it will always be unfinished, because that’s how self-governance works. You don’t finish it. You keep choosing it.
But here is what I want to say on this, the 250th birthday.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people with no guarantee of success pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to an idea that had never been tried at this scale. They chose it. And since then, millions of people from every corner of the earth have looked at their own church in their own Voltlage and decided to leave. They chose it too. They chose the risk, the uncertainty, the bet that a country built on choosing would be worth the cost of choosing it.
That choosing hasn’t stopped. People are still coming. People are still here. The question at 250 is whether we’re still the kind of people who would choose it. Who would get on the boat. Who would sign the document. Who would pray in the church and then walk toward something they couldn’t see.
I think we are. I think we’re better than the negation. I think the spirit that drove our ancestors to leave everything they knew is still in us, buried under grievance and exhaustion and the noise of people telling us what’s wrong with everything. It’s still there. It’s the part that gets angry because things could be better and we know it.
So here’s the toast.
To the choosers. To everyone whose ancestor left a village, a country, a continent, and selected themselves into the most improbable experiment in human history. To the ones fleeing real persecution. To the ones who want personal freedoms, who want to build, who want to change, try, experiment and make better. To the ones who are still choosing. To the ones who argue and then suit up together and lock arms. To the spirited part.
Happy 250th. The experiment isn’t over. It’s ours.
America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th
Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th
Sources and Inspiration
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm