Is Trump reminding us that sisu is what will transform our society?
Sisu doesn’t translate as grit or resilience, but those are the closest English terms. This Finnish cultural concept encapsulates those words and more. Recently, I read about a study in which Finnish scientists explored how cold plunges might increase or decrease sisu. Not surprisingly, there was no simple explanation for how determination was fostered by plunging your warm-blooded body into ice-cold, near-arctic waters. Many of the short-term impacts were incredibly negative, like anxiety about warming yourself again. Some people avoided those short-term impacts through repeated experience with cold plunges. Others did not.
Other cultural norms pop up in American popular culture fairly commonly. The Danish concept hygge became au courant for a while. In the American media, the concept became translated as cozy or homey. Think of the throw blankets and candles they could sell; I’m sure the e-com gang must have thought. Of course, for the Danes, the stuff is not the point. The feeling is meant to be created, not bought.
Similarly, ikigai from the Japanese or karma from Hinduism have taken hold in the American mind in ways that are much more American than anything else. Yoga was a long-ago mind-and-body practice. In the US, mindfulness is often accompanied by specialty clothes, printed mats, and a host of other products.
American pop culture, not unlike the populace itself, is about assimilating to the broader society in ways that retain only some of the origins. An Irish-American is wholly not Irish. Often that feeling of Irishness buoys them from the deep boredom and general listlessness of whiteness in the US. But, of course, their Irishness is completely displaced from Ireland or even the experience of their ancestors.
Which takes me to the *sisu *of Americanness. We’re a nation that would probably say what’s not torn us asunder has made us stronger, but are we? History has shown many a moment where the US could confront our fault lines only to choose willful ignorance. A portion of our nation committed treason. They started a war. They lost. And for what? The right to own human beings. They received compensation for their loss of property—again, human beings. We moved on to continue to allow the nation to maintain the status quo of a Black underclass. If at the end of the war, 40 acres and a mule were transferred to the formerly enslaved, if they were then considered human, if the former slaveholders were punished, where would we be as a nation?
Trump’s America is the latest battle of the Civil War. In his lasting failures in Iran or his continued hamstringing of our nation through tariffs, he’s so far not even had the victories Robert E Lee enjoyed. Instead, Trump and his cabinet show us that DEI angered so much of white America for the ways in which it exposed the complacency and weakness of MAGA. They said they assumed Black and brown people were getting special treatment because they’d been getting special treatment since the beginning of the nation. Now, given the opportunity, though, we see that in fact, special treatment isn’t enough for them to succeed. They need a rigged system just to be worse than others, forget excelling.
That which almost broke this nation has in fact left our people even more broken. Why? We’re an interesting mix of Protestant work ethic, morality, and vice. We valorize tech CEOs for their ability to become rich often on the backs of other people’s labor. We then shame the poor for their laziness. Both are symptoms of a broken system. The national cult of individuality makes the whole machine invisible. We all want to win in a system that is largely unwinnable. We also shame those who seemingly got the golden ticket only to lose their chance, particularly if the loser is not a white man. Think about how much grace Hank Green has received, while numerous black authors have been vilified for even a whiff of AI. (I wrote about Hank Green’s AI, by the way)
Recently, many online have written think pieces about an influencer with 2 million followers who started a GoFundMe for dental care. Jools Lebron spawned a million videos with the phrase "so demure, so mindful.” Lebron seemed to win at the system and then failed to hold onto the fiscal gain. As I’ve written about, the online ecosystem functions in parallel to financial ones. Virality is often a boon without continued financial earnings. It’s clout without cash.
To see someone huge, who had become a cultural phenomenon, fail makes many Americans happy. Sadly, Lebron found themselves in some dire times after the upswell ended, partly due to substance abuse challenges and partly due to the overwhelming nature of fame. Rather than meet this setback with empathy, many people wanted to make Lebron an example of personal failure. But hers is a common story. Fast money is often lost when you don’t have the support system that understands wealth or the financial habits needed to hold onto that boon.
Why do we have so little empathy as a society? Again, it’s our cultural individualism. We tie success and failure to personality. People make good and show their merit. People who are bad fail. We celebrate the cases that show failure as a way of supporting the underlying false morality of the system. It’s like a lottery winner gone bankrupt or a beauty queen gotten fat. Somehow their success feels unfair, and cosmically, their failures feel earned. In other words, much of the backlash online highlights how much Americans revel in *schadenfreude, *joy at someone else’s failing.
The Germans aren’t alone in naming this feeling. The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering; the Danish have skadefryd; and the Dutch have leedvermaak; in Hebrew simcha la‑ed; in Mandarin, xìng‑zāi‑lè‑huò; in Serbo-Croat, it is zlùradōst; and in Russian, zloradstvo. While these other societies point out this feeling almost as a warning,
Americans don’t have a term other than the German one. Why? We’re ourselves cautionary tales of living rich off of other people’s losses. Our whole nation is built upon others’ successes, like Native people’s land and African people’s forced labor. We’ve not taken caution with how we’ve moved forward. Instead, we live in denial. We don’t understand the systemic failures and focus on the individual ones. We cannot get stronger for our desire to stay ignorant of our own nature.
Kintsugi is the beautiful golden repairs the Japanese use to fix broken ceramic. Rather than deny the break, they highlight the fault lines. Trump is nothing but the continued strain of denial of the broken system underlying our nation. His red hat cult is not about gilding our failures, but instead trying to spackle our breaks. They hope denial will allow us to maintain the status quo that they think profits them. Their recent sadness about Trump is that they are suffering. They voted for others’ failure. Rather than being able to enjoy the schadenfreude of liberal tears, they’re suffering like everyone else living through Trump’s broken economy.
The simplicity of Trump and his ilk's failures is not surprising when you realize how broken we really were. Our national ethos has been held together by the good vibes of broken men and the greed of cultural gamblers. We have tried to embroider the idea that we’re all created equal on a nation built on inequality.
But the future doesn’t have to continue this way. We really can use the idea of sisu, not wholly, but in our own way. We can see the failures for what they are, and make real concerted change. To do so, we’ll need to truly look at our patterns and find our faults. We can actually make America great, but not again, as it hasn’t been. But we can come together to find greatness from the weaknesses of our past.
