A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
It’s weird though that this seems to be the case mostly in the US. I can’t say that I know all cultures but most of the ones that I know of, or have experience with have a lot of compassion, especially towards people who have had bad luck or made bad choices. The US seem very brutal in that area
Oh, most of the fellow Americans I’ve encountered in my life revel in the bad luck or “poor decisions” (in hindsight, and often just good intentions and bad luck like student loans) of their own neighbors as if it were blood and they were a vampire. It’s like a chain of everyone getting exploited by our oligarch class getting a little relief by punching down to people who were more screwed by our oligarch class to feel superior to someone.
That is what it means to be an American 🇺🇸🤮