I don't know why you're getting so much hate. Individualism is a bad thing, and collectivist societies get things done. Simple as.

Usually to make that theory fit the facts, the facts of who is individualist vs. who is collectivist need to be massaged greatly. I would think, however, that most people would say that the USA is much more individualist than most. And we're coming up on about a century of America as the world's pre-eminent power and perhaps the half-century of America as the undisputed world hegemon.

In the end, all the smartphones, and the second amendment, and the male loneliness crisis, and all the terrible terrible signs of a society in decline did not stop the US from building 1100 F-35s, or creating all 3 of the world's most recent paradigm shifts (the Internet, the smartphone, LLM-based AI).

I think one model that has some use here (I lie - really it's just one I'm fond of) is that in an explore-exploit scenario, during the periods where exploring has greatest returns individualist societies perform better because distributed search is more effective, and in periods where exploitation has greatest returns collectivist societies with simple execution structures lose less to interaction costs and therefore outperform. The poor man's Coase's Theory of the Firm.

The biggest problem with it, however, is that only China has demonstrated this. Therefore, we're faced with that fun tweet:

> cars have windows and can move. houses have windows and can’t move. so it’s not the windows that make the car go, it’s something else entirely