You made a statement “We have no tribes or clans”. Actually, i would like to follow Fukuyama here (see _Trust_). Americans, English and some others tend to build strong associations based on business and interest across family, regional and origin divisions. In a sense, we build our own tribes and clans based on what we are trying to accomplish. And in a massively parallel device resources get realigned to specific problems as the overall solution space is explored.

You can’t push the analogy too far – massive parallelism is handled by a central scheduler, at least in current implementations.

But our ability to constantly remake our “tribes and clans” is part of our strength.

We Americans are pragmatists. One of our greatest enemies, Rommel, said the Americans knew less but learned faster than any enemy he ever faced. He also said the Americans had an admirable lack of respect for anything other than what worked.

We Americans lack respect for institutions that do not deliver on their promises. Other cultures continue to defer to such institutions long after they’ve been revealed as farce. The first opportunity we had to duck out from beneath a top-down ordering of society, we took it. That we seem to be unique in this says more about the tenacity of the State than the deference of men for authority.

Not at all surprising.