This is a quote from YouTuber Emma Thorne in her video Evangelical Conspiracy Movie: Trump 2024 Recap, referring to the United States. Thorne herself is from the UK. Main character syndrome is an informal, nonscientific term to describe someone who thinks of their life like a story in which they are the main character. In particular, this makes everyone else a mere supporting character in their story.

Americans seem to take it for granted that the US is the greatest country in the world, a kind of national narcissism that most of the rest of the world finds laughable. What’s more, the US is thought of by Americans as the protagonist of world history (a frankly absurd proposition). For that majority of world history which precedes the founding of the US, events are interpreted in terms of how they led up to it. This is a Eurocentric view of history, focusing especially on Great Britain. This includes the British Empire and, earlier, the Roman Empire which colonized Britain. Rome was in some sense a successor to classical Greek culture, and Americans (rightfully or not) trace their system of government back to Athenian democracy.

The narrative of American history is also Christocentric. Classical Greek culture came together with Christianity in ancient Rome, whence Christianity was spread to Europe. Christianity, of course, grew out of Judaism, which supposedly originated with Abraham and Moses. More realistically, Judaism grew out of ancient Canaanite religion, transitioning from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism. In any event, many Americans view certain historical figures as being foundational to American history, including: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Aristotle, Pericles, Augustus, Constantine, Columbus, and Elizabeth I. Many additional philosophical figures are often credited, including: Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Plutarch, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and so on. This is what Americans call “Western Civilization.” (See Why Has the West Been So Successful? and What is “The West”.)

Anything outside “Western Civilization” is foreign, including for example every civilization that has ever existed in Asia, Africa, Oceania, or South America, as well as civilizations in North America before Columbus and civilizations in Europe before the expansion of Rome. Certain groups of people are seen as especially foreign which have been the traditional enemies of the Hebrews, Greece, Rome, and Britain. These include the Philistines, Egyptians, Persians, Gallic and Germanic tribes, Carthaginians, Vandals, Goths, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch. This extends to modern animosity (or at best ambivalence) towards people in continental Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (except Israel).

Who in the world, then, is not foreign? Britain and its predominately white, English-speaking former colonies, mainly Canada and Australia. South Africa and New Zealand too, but less so. In general, the smaller islands that fit into this category are seen by Americans as vacation spots and not as “real” places where people live.

A distorted perspective

Many Americans underestimate the cultural richness and diversity of the “foreign.” In East and Southeast Asia, for example, in an area comparable to the size and population of Europe, there is at least as much ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity as exists in Europe. And yet, many Americans think of the people from this area as being basically the same while drawing large distinctions between peoples of different European countries. Similarly, many Americans think of sub-Saharan Africa as being basically uniform in culture, even referring to Africa as if it were a single country.

Americans may also underestimate the contributions to modern American culture from “foreign” peoples, especially Africa. The slave trade brought people from many different cultures to the American continent, and these cultures blended and evolved over time. Black American culture has been incredibly influential for American culture as a whole, for example in music and politics.

Other countries with main character syndrome

The US is not unique in its nationalistic chauvinism, but this is of course expressed differently in different countries. A prime example is China. As a very ancient country (in the sense that people have continuously inhabited the area for a long period of time), the narrative of Chinese development involves little outside influence, especially compared to the very young United States. National self-reliance is central to Chinese national ideology (Terrill 1977, p. 296). It is something of a meme that many Chinese people believe China invented virtually everything (which they did invent a lot of things). Much of modern Chinese propaganda is aimed at convincing people China is on the cutting edge of every technology. (See If the Chinese invented everything, why didn’t they rule the world instead of Europe?, This Only Happens In China Technologies That Are On Another Level, 10 Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Were Chinese Inventions, and Why China’s 5G is Garbage.)

Nazi Germany is another example of main character syndrome. It was possibly less severe than in the US, despite being more ethnonationalistic.

Is it just nationalism?

I don’t think so. Looking at modern nationalist movements in, say, Finland or Japan do not seem to me to have the same globalistic character that American exceptionalism has. These movements have more to do with preserving traditional culture and keeping out immigrants. Main character syndrome also involves a narrative interpretation of history, and nationalism does have a narrative character. Indeed, Michael Morden (2016, p. 448) notes that “our relationships to community and place are codified in storytelling and mythology.”

More specifically, [nationalism] is a history of contestation between those who seek a fully coherent narrative of the community’s existence and those whose presence, ideas, color or culture undermine the possibility of that coherence. Nations and nationalisms, in this view, repeatedly face a dialectical struggle between the quest for coherence or unity and the inevitable frustration of that quest by the challenge or complexity of difference … There would be no meaning in the search for unity within a nation or against other nations if the difference did not exist; nationalisms depend on difference. It is therefore the presence of “otherness” that both fuels the desire for a fully coherent nation/narrative and also makes it impossible for that totalizing desire to be fulfilled.

Kramer 1997, p. 537

The distinguishing question to me is, is it a narrative about a nation or is it a narrative about the world? Going back to the analogy to main character syndrome, I’d argue that everyone is the main character of their own story in some sense, but not everyone considers themselves to be the main character of their entire reality.

References

Kramer, L. (1997). Historical Narratives and the Meaning of Nationalism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 58(3), pp. 525-545.

Morden, M. (2016). Anatomy of the national myth: archetypes and narrative in the study of nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 22(3), pp. 447–464.

Terrill, R. (1977). China and the World: Self-Reliance or Interdependence? Foreign Affairs, 55(2), pp. 295-305.