Many words in English are quite overloaded in meanings.

To me, I find the very question of “Do you want to see your country do better than other countries?” to be troubling.

At its heart, such a question is about the type of survivalism that has been so well portrayed in all the reality-TV competitions of the past couple of decades.

This gets to why Trumpers love Trump so much: because Trump on his TV show played the ruthless judge to determine who would do better than the other contestants.

The idea that one has to do better than another means that if the other does better then you are worse off.

This is the essence of the zero-sum mindset the infects the nationalists.

I’ve lived outside the US, I’ve traveled to a few different countries beyond that. There’s not a place I’ve been that I don’t want the people there to “do better” than they already are.

While in the big scheme of the planet we are all caught in the great throws of entropy and eventually we’re all going to pass away and everything we’ve made will turn to dust (though the bits and bobs we’ve left on the Moon and sent into deep space will probably last billions of years), for now, in the lifetimes of those who not only are alive now but in the near future, we all benefit from all of humanity doing “better”.