There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are found in your philosophy.

I was recording a podcast earlier and mentioned my disdain for American culture generally. However, I didn't actually spell out the nature of that disdain, and I suspect my listeners wouldn't really guess at what troubles me about America, which has little to do with some political perspective.

Why I hate American culture is that the country is largely made up of materialists. Now, I don't mean materialism in the economic sense, the sense in which it is usually used (though our obsession with buying and owning every damned thing under the sun is probably related to what I do mean), what I really refer to is materialism in the philosophical sense.

Americans are obsessed with objects.

We only see the surface of things. We only touch that which we can wrap our hands around. We only have a sense of exteriors.

We worship function, not significance, because we do not believe in significance (some of us do claim that we do, but those of us who do are usually the worst offenders).

There is something regressive, retrograde, and primitive in the way that we idolize the "security" of the presence of those things that we can only recognize with our senses. We only trust in things.

We are a country of realists, and philosophical realism is a position that is bleak and fatalistic in the long run.

There is no hope in things.