our narcissism as a country

having do with our, in the past century, have absolutely NO frame of reference. everything we have done has been VIRGIN TERRITORY. Brand new industrial technical society. It's not like we can look back 2000 years and say yes, this was done before, and we're just peaking between troughs. But of course it HAS all been done before, essentially, it's just that on the surface, with all our jazzed up stuff, it looks different.