The tragic event of Miami’s Surfside condo collapse (June 25, 2021) symbolized an ongoing change contested by pundits for years, the sort of tectonic change that can only be properly acknowledged in retrospect, once a critical mass of expert and popular opinion gathers weight. Of course, symbolized by Miami’s condo collapse, the change in question is America’s decline.

We in the West are unaccustomed to associating high-casualty catastrophes on home soil with falling superpowers. That sort of civic demise is reserved for countries like Romania, whose corrupt hospital system was exposed by 2019 documentary Collective, or China, who refused to immediately publish victim names after its 2008 Sichuan earthquake, despite the 70,000 death toll and repeated inquiry from dissident artist Ai Wei Wei. Though a horrifying visual spectacle, 2001’s 9/11 was an external attack that galvanized America, especially once she envisioned her response through revenge.

To us of the generation born after the mid-eighties, what superpower has meant so far is an America that could not fall. So when the Surfside condo collapsed, so too did an entire generation’s concept of superpower. We will wait anxiously to see what rebuilds.

For the first time in a generation, we witnessed a perfect visual metaphor created by the expert hand of the real. This was no marketing strategy, no rabble rousing, no biased coverage. An ignored reality illustrated America as the hobbled apartment block, whose structure gave way after neglect, crushing the very residents it was built to house. The American Dream is about houses; it’s easy to see Surfside as the nightmare America may become.

Perhaps this is because Americans live in a time of self-imposed public scrutiny, surveilling themselves and the world through news and social media in daily efforts to parse information and obtain truth, truth often framed as the uncovering of nightmarish deeds, of harm and fault. In turn, the world surveils America and itself. And who could deny the vitality of such an urge when monstrosities like Jeffrey Epstein are spot lit?

Who did what wrong? Who defines wrong? How do we rid society of wrong?

The search for truth has become a search for wrong, making salvation (from sin) the arch obsession of the day. This is why the image of the condo collapse may tower as an enduring symbol of American nationhood, because it essentializes the interests of the time: fault, weakness, and collapse. An ontological structure that must be presumed for collapse was already primed in the American and global psyche; we have all been on the hunt for weakness for a while now.

Core to these negative fixations is believing they can be corrected, if not practically then at least theoretically. Deliver me from sin. Americans believe they have it in them to course correct in order to, eventually, they hope, be correct. The next apartment will be made right by right-minded people, they hope, just as they will right the nation’s mistreatment of minorities, institutional mistrust, and economic tensions. This is because the end result of perceiving a wrong and correcting it is to be right, which is the dominant mental model of Americans: I am right.

This belief resonates at double scale: rightness on the matter at hand, and as a fundamental, to be innately right as if one’s very flesh was made of rightness. It’s no surprise that body politics loom so large in the United States of Anatomy. Body size, skin tone and genital fidelity have all become stages for the harsh judgments of intrinsic right, playing out in sociological, psychological and physiological domains—and, of course, the media too. This focus on intrinsic right is deeply baked into the American soul—that their reality is a right one, even if that reality is an insight into wrongs. This need to be right absolves any wrong of being totally wrong, because a vessel of wrongdoing contains glimmers of its own redemption, redemption that always has transferrable qualities, otherwise known as lessons. Think of any recent U.S. president, and the rich lessons offered by their opponents, and how an individual’s wrong can create a paradigm of right. This is how the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Breitbart and Fox thrive. It’s the structure of American discourse to be didactic, forever creating (and commercializing) an implied substrate of rightness, as contrast with discourse that champions empiricism, materiality or agnosticism, to name a few of many alternate modes.

Small countries like mine—Australia—know we can never influence the world enough for our national subjective senses of rightness to matter, so our discourse is often relational and responsive. Secondary superpowers like China and Russia sometimes rely on overt nationalistic fervor without any recourse to morality, and while this is extremely troubling and dangerous in itself, by averting moral frameworks moral inconsistencies are also eschewed.

But in America, as individuals and nation, they believe that a right mental approach is one that channels rightness into them, and that they are the sole purveyors of this channeling. It is not the cockiness or misjudgment of mere arrogance. Hubris is the only concept in English that comes close to describing such a way of being, because counterintuitively, hubris comes with surprising humility, the earnest humility of misplaced faith.

The greatest plight for a contemporary American is a wrong that has no channel for enlightenment, a sin incapable of delivering ecstatic feelings of transcendence and redemption. Their faith in moralization denies them from delivering their own salvation. This is America’s Jesus delusion.

What makes Jesus Jesus is his relation to humans. When mere mortals come into contact with Jesus, Jesus induces their divine awakenings. Americans perennially seek to be touched by Jesus. The most ambitious Americans seek to be him (Kanye West). It’s convenient for Americans that Jesus comes in spirit form—in other words, unempirical.

From preliminary investigations it looks like Surfside’s tragedy are discursively plain, in that the contributing factors are likely to be structural and environmental. There are hints at corruption, but this is unlikely to come in a morally redemptive form, as whatever its shape, neglect will still be relevant. Corruption—such as mercantile corner-cutting—whose unintended consequence is structural instability is a very separate matter to the intent of bringing a building down, and what’s unlikely to ever surface is discourse about unskilled corruption, guys who didn’t get the scam right. To a meaningful degree, the Surfside tragedy is extremely likely to have been unintentional, which means a revolutionary interpretation of wrong is not at hand. The only public lessons are ones everyone already knows, lessons without ecstatic revelation, lessons about water damage or steel corrosion or land subsidence analyses eschewed during mismanagement.

A nation obsessed with epiphanic discourse cannot be expected to get details in engineering right. The theatre of university platforming is irrelevant. But when no higher insight is available—and therefore no ecstatic emotion—American senses of right-making and self-importance quickly snap onto something else. Catastrophes as palpable as the Surfside collapse will not dominate the news cycle despite the high chance infrastructural mishaps will take many more American lives. At the time of writing, the Afghanistan pullout has now overshadowed the media, an incident interpreted with visceral emotions and moral indignations that would benefit from clearer strategy and more precise engineering. My antidote to global problem solving is, if indeed we do need to act, there is no rule that says we must weep before we act; in fact, weeping can be a wasted act for all the efforts it takes, though, naturally, at times, being stirred can impel action too. But it is my deep hope, Americans commit more mental energies to the concrete and not the celestial, and to derive moral resolutions from concrete advances beyond individual emotions. For serious issues, feeling is not of the most important end goals.

Gun violence is another American disaster that requires cool analyses, but it brings me little faith. While occasional meta-analytic critiques pepper liberal news outlets, bullet-by-bullet accounts are simply too commonplace to hold the focus of a country whose norms prescribe that daily homicides are a tolerable status quo. Though police reforms framed by Black Lives Matters sentiments rightly attempt to hone a narrow agenda for justice, if most BLM goals were achieved, the nation’s internal violence would still dwarf an international tally, internal violence that is largely believed to be inescapable, and rooted in America’s origin story.

For many Americans, this view that nothing can change is the right view to hold. The permanent second-class spectacle of TV shows like Cops reflects this, running for 32 seasons, even receiving Emmy nods. No one seriously bats an eyelid at this exploitation of one’s own national misery, despite its perfect potential to function in raising awareness for those encountering the harsh side of the law. With the critical term poverty porn comes the belief that sensational framing renders the cultural value of shows like Cops as low, but this is a symptom of social numbness. A mind is always free to watch the TV, see something distressing, (even laugh at it cruelly,) and (still) hope to put in practice practical ways to improve that social misery, rather than submit to the theatrical tugs made by commercial producers, or the dizzying windmills of internet irony. Cops is a good example where the feelings produced by the show—callous comedic relief—should really invite an opposite practical reaction. We can feel one thing—something immoral—and act better.

Maybe it feels too affirming for Americans to go on thinking, “This is who we are”? Being told who you are by a screen that sells you stuff you kind of like is a lot more comfortable than deciding for yourself, or even scarier, creating a good identity anew.(When Greek life college bros beat their chest and chant their nation’s name, do they have any idea what they even mean?)

The Bible does not easily provide guidance on these matters, and the older it gets, the harder it is to observe its links to reality. Revelation, epiphany, ecstasy, and redemption are relatable to individuals, but the context of the Bible is not 21st century cities. The Bible understands tribe psychology, but not technology or capitalism, so we shouldn’t turn to its heuristics when thinking about town planning. It also doesn’t mention America. Even if God were a divine author, the unchanging word count of the Bible relative to the changing population size insists that a change in relationship between the Bible and reality must be true as the world grows. I advocate that this change means reserving heightened emotive states for human affairs, not the affairs of concrete molecules like tricalcium silicate, the ones responsible for its strength. Tricalcium silicate doesn’t have epiphanies and it doesn’t give a shit about reincarnation. Biblical emotions are best saved for practitioners of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) writhing at the altar, but only under the conditions that the altar is firmly set on a leveled ground, built on strong foundations, and housed under a roof that won’t fall in, preferably not sawn by a carpenter who speaks in tongues on the job.

America’s seemingly atheistic entertainment culture mirrors its religiosity, where celestial themes obfuscate real horror. Their highest bar of entertainment programming echoes an absence of horror’s realness. Think of masculine output like Tarantino, South Park, and Grand Theft Auto, all hugely successful cultural institutions, worthy of respect, that harness creativity to popularize, they would argue, fictitious horror, as distinct from the warm and awful bloodshed of the mortals they reflect. Tarantino, South Park and Grand Theft Auto all shift intense violence into toy realms of comedy through fantasy, with fictional characters who live on beyond their deaths through episodic reincarnation (South Park), outright respawning (GTA)—otherwise known as resurrection—and savvy invincibility (Pulp Fiction).

“God came down from heaven and stopped these motherfucking bullets,” says Tarantino through Samuel L. Jackson. And I wonder whether Tarantino—the creator—means something different to the character, who is amazed the bullets dodged him. Is Tarantino parodying the naiveté of faith, or is his ideology synonymous with his own fiction, tantalized by the prospects of Americans who can bend reality’s will, not to mention the will of bullets, a conceptual precursor to Neo from The Matrix, otherwise known as The One.

Such examples from culture all provide Jesus figures who exude and experience immortality, then extend that immortality into our psyches as memory while simultaneously bringing us religious emotional enlightenment. So have we been feeding on religious texts this whole time?

Above all, this repackaging of religious ideas as entertainment makes viewers feel. We trade desirable feelings for an opportunity to be sold something. Each pang of laughter is a small ecstasy; each moment spent getting a punch line is a revelation (not to mention every unfolding plot); each controversial moment of I can’t believe they went there teeters on the sublime. The (commercial) entertainment of immortalization might bring pleasure, confidence or even educate on risk, but it seems likely that in some small part, when Americans think of their friends as Cartman thinks of Kenny, their neighbors like the agentless victims of GTA San Andreas, and themselves as cool antiheroes in Pulp Fiction, the value of being alive drops (as the value of commercialization lifts). Numbness to harm coupled with an epiphanically motivated discourse may render a new generation of Americans indifferent to gross neglect and death. Sadly, in harvesting some of religion’s seductions, it abandons others, like sacrifice and charity.

Thought experiment: what would a successful movie about Surfside look like? Would it be a rags-to-riches story of redemption about a poor person of color who grew up with a passion for engineering overcoming a corrupt cabal of oily land owners? That might be the sort of story fans of Slumdog Millionaire chew popcorn to, and if they can raise funds for impacted victims, all the better. But perhaps the thought experiment is gravely flawed, in that entertainment narratives are no solution for a construction mishap. What would it take for Americans to live in a world where the community around Surfside had the knowledge to ensure proper construction standards were met? In that universe, there is no story, and no movie. Entering that universe is the true thought experiment, and the path won’t come through the mere raising of awareness, or artistic commentary, no matter how resonant.

For now, us lowly residents of the rest of the globe tend to follow a path America trots out, so as an Australian, I have vested interests in the matter. But I feel for America too. It’s not an easy road for a nation with an undeniable lust for adventure. A true American adventure means conquering harm. That very of act of conquering strengthens Americans, but it numbs them too. Coronavirus reminds the world every day.

If Americans see the preservation of their country as the preservations of their lives—and many may not—they should opt out of the biblical mythologies of transcendent individualism that are bringing their great country to its knees. This is the other reason Surfside may endure as a symbol, because its toppling architecture represents the frailty of American discourse and its rubbled mental constructions.

Culture should never be tweaked ad hoc let alone censored, but a change in national religiosity and a more grounded approach to thinking will reflect changes in American expression. Maybe one day people will come around to how overrated faith is, then crosscheck that belief with the data?

Devotion to grounded thinking not only staves disaster, but prolonged urban dejection, which sadly is already rife in countless cities, some very close to my heart, like Atlantic City and Detroit. I will never be American but I have a great admiration for your project. To keep the country stable, rebuild your culture.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash