Listen up, America, because I am going to explain something to you that you are far too self-absorbed to see yourselves.

For all my forty one years, I have heard Americans wonder to themselves (and anyone else who will listen or who doesn’t move away fast enough) why such freedom-loving people end up with sneaky, nasty, secretive, and just plain anti-freedom governments.

The answer is simple. Their governments are like that because they are run by Americans.

Feel free to take a break, pop a brewski, let this idea settle for a bit.

We good? Cool.

To explain what I mean by that weird and very unpatriotic sounding statement, let us start with a basic American citizen. We will call him Bob, both because it’s a common enough name and because I love palindromes.

For five years now, Bob has been a low level paper pusher for the American Federal Government. (Fun fact : Did you know that every country has a federal government? Most Americans don’t. )

Bob has pushed paper reasonably well. Like any freedom-loving American, he doesn’t like to be told what to do and doesn’t like having to follow a lot of rules. So he makes fun of his bosses behind their backs and tries to get away with not following the rules whenever he can.

Some of you will have already seen where this is going by now.

Then Bob gets promoted. Suddenly, Bob is a boss, with twenty paper pushers working under him. He has responsibilities now. And he behaves differently. People who know him think that being in charge has changed Bob.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that being in power has not changed Bob enough.

He is still a freedom-loving guy who hates being told what to do and doesn’t like following the rules. He is still, fundamentally, a person who thinks they not only could but should be able to do whatever the hell they want without a bunch of people telling him it’s against some set of rules.

But now, those rules are the rules that restrict a boss. Rules like, say, a rule about how many hours you are allowed to make people work in a week, or rules that say how he can treat his female underlings, or rules that dictate how he earns bonuses.

So he looks for ways to evade those rules. Bob hasn’t changed… and that’s the problem.

Or take Randy the cop. When he is off duty, he is just a regular American who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like authority, and doesn’t like following a lot of rules.

And when he’s on duty…. he’s exactly the same. Only this time, those rules define a thing we call freedom.

That’s not how Randy sees it, of course. He’s still a myopic American who is way more concerned with his own right to do whatever he wants than anyone else’s. To the American mindset, there is no conflict between being a freedom loving American citizen and a cop who violates every letter of the Constitution because what is a Constitution but a bunch of rules?

And Americans don’t like rules. When they are thinking of their own precious snowflake selves, they like the idea of being protected from the mean ol gubmint by the Constitution.

But give them any kind of power, and suddenly that Constitution (and its necessary restrictions on what the police can do) is just another set of rules to evade, ignore, or defy.

And that goes all the way up. From the junior manager at your local McDonald’s to the President of the United States, at every level, you have people who do not want to have to play by the rules and who can’t understand that the same rules that protect them from those above them have to apply to them and those under them as well, even though that means you personally having your freedom curtailed.

The President, like any other American, doesn’t want to have to play by the rules. That might sound cool until you realize it applies equally to Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.

Americans talk a lot about freedom. But when you really look at it, they are talking mostly about their own personal freedom. Give them power, and it becomes the freedom to avoid accountability, ignore the rules meant to keep power in check, treat those under them exactly how they see fit, and to hell with all those pesky ‘rules’.

The fact is, freedom depends on rules. You are only as free to the degree that others are prevented or dissuaded from using power to take your freedom away. Rules are the only way to accomplish this. There has to be rules that restrict the strong from preying on the weak and from the powerful from becoming dictators over the powerless.

And what Americans don’t seem to get is that this applies to them, not just the other guy.

So that’s the answer to your Big American Mystery, folks. Americans have this bizarrely oppositional relationship with their governments because nobody wants to follow the rules, and Americans as a people tend to be too individualistic to grasp that one person’s freedom is another, more powerful person’s inconvenient rule.

In both cases, it is the fundamental nature of the American character at work. On both sides, the governing and the governed, you have passionate people who don’t want anyone to tell them what to do.

More mature, less radically individualistic countries understand that when everyone follows the rules, you get civilization. We are all working together to make that civilization happen. We accept restrictions on ourselves when we are in positions of power as the price to pay in order to have a free country.

The American character is unique in its inability to grasp this very simple point.

Well sure, all you other people should have to follow the rules. But surely that doesn’t apply to me, right? Rules are something that other people follow.

Well grow the fuck up, America. Because that is just not how it works.