America is a land of familiar paradoxes. An agreeable civility habitually prevails in most everyday relations among people in America - yet the United States is factually a socially highly unequal society. In most parts of America, the laws and social customs strongly restrain people from doing harm to themselves and others by smoking - yet the laws and social customs only weakly restrain people from doing harm to themselves and others by the use of guns, and the murder rate is about four times as high per capita as in Western Europe. The usa is the world's remaining super-power - yet internally the American state is in some ways strikingly weak. The usa has 'saved the world for democracy' on more than one occasion - but has itself become an aggressive militaristic society. And there appears to be an increasing divergence between how a large proportion of Americans view themselves and their country and how they are perceived by a large proportion of the 95 per cent of the world's population who are not Americans.