The deal we Americans generally try to make with the world is not having to know, or seem to know, or be seen to know, and not having to spend time with anyone who will call us out for knowing.
As a result, we can't have certain conversations, can't even stand to know these conversations are underway. There are just too many things we don't want to acknowledge in words, in newspapers and magazines, even in movies.
As a result, we can't think and talk very deeply about ourselves. When we describe ourselves, we might as well be talking about a cartoon drawn by a child in an idle moment in second grade.
Not wanting to acknowledge the world, we surely can't acknowledge our own character in the world.
That's our pathology.
See, for example, Anthony Bourdain's 2014 account of the space Mexico fills in the psyche of the United States.
See, for example, James Baldwin talking in The Fire Next Time about his fellow Americans as a people trapped in a labyrinth of attitudes, unable to renew themselves at the fountain of their lives.
And today Timothy Snyder writes, at the end of a long post on "Antisemitism in the Oval Office," that "Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see."