• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, August 12, 2025

Ask anyone who comes from somewhere else to the United States what attracted them. The most common answer is “Because anything is possible here.” The U.S. is a nation of “doers.” It has been that promise that has attracted wave after wave of immigration, made of those chafing at the restraints and restrictions of their homelands.

The concept of getting things done was embodied in a quote often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy, which originally appeared in a George Bernard Shaw play: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were and ask, why not?” The U.S.  -- more than anywhere else in the world -- is the place to make those dreams come true.

But that comes with some baggage. Doers are individualists by definition. They are driven by what they can accomplish, by making something from nothing. And with that comes an obsessive focus on time. When we have so much to do, we constantly worry about losing time. Time becomes one of the few constraints in a highly individualistic society.

There are other countries that score highly on individualistic traits, including Australia, the U.K., New Zealand and my own home, Canada. But the U.S. is different, as a highly hierarchical society obsessed with personal achievement. And in the U.S., achievement is measured in dollars and cents. In a “Freakonomics” podcast episode, Gert Jan Hofstede, a professor of artificial sociality in the Netherlands, called out this difference: “When you look at cultures like New Zealand or Australia that are more horizontal in their individualism, if you try to stand out there, they call it the tall poppy syndrome. You’re going to be shut down.”

In the U.S., tall poppies are celebrated and given god-like status. The ultrarich are recognized as the ideal. And this creates a problem in a nation of doers. If wealth is the ultimate goal, anything that stands between us and that goal is an obstacle to be eliminated.

When Breaking the Rules becomes The Rule

“Move fast and break things” -- Mark Zuckerberg

In most societies, equality and fairness are the guardrails of governance. It was the U.S. that enshrined these principles in its constitution. Making sure things are fair and equal requires the establishment of rules of law and the establishment of social norms. 

But now in the U.S., the breaking of rules is celebrated if it’s required to get things done. From the same "Freakonomics" podcast, Michele Gelfand, a professor of Organizational Behavior at Standford, said, “In societies that are tighter, people are willing to call out rule violators. Here in the U.S., it’s actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. “

There is an inherent understanding in the U.S. that sometimes trade-offs are necessary to achieve great things. It’s perhaps telling that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fascinated by the Roman emperor Augustus, a person generally recognized by history as gaining his achievements by inflicting some significant societal costs, including the subjugation of conquered territories and a brutal and systematic elimination of any opponents. This is fully recognized and embraced by Zuckerberg, who has said of his historic hero, “Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace. What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today …(but)…that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.”

Slipping from Entrepreneurialism to Entitlement

A reverence for “doing” can develop a toxic side when it becomes embedded in a society. In many cases, entrepreneurialism and entitlement are two different sides of the same coin. In a culture where entrepreneurial success is celebrated by media, the focus of entrepreneurialism can often shift from trying to profitably solve a problem to simply just profiting. Chasing wealth becomes the singular focus of “doing.”

This creates a paradox: a society that celebrates extreme wealth without seeming to realize that the more that wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, the less there is for everyone else. Simple math is not the language of dreams.

To return to Augustus for a moment, we should remember that he was the one responsible for dismantling an admittedly barely functioning republic and installing himself as the autocratic emperor by doing away with democracy, consolidating power in his own hands, and gutting Rome’s constitution.