A friend forwarded me this FANTASTIC article by Judge Andrew Kleinfeld comparing 2 border towns in Alaska & Canada -

...A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this. She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart, these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart."

It's so well written that I could practically quote every paragraph.   But I won't.  Go read it my Canuck friends!

One section really stood out for me -

...Each time our Jeep passed back and forth between the two towns we answered the same litany of questions to people who quickly got to know us and our answers. We asked one of the Canadian border guards what Hyderites were like. "Free spirits. Wild. They have guns, you know." We were asked if we had any guns each time we drove back to Stewart, since handguns (a near-universal in Alaskan bear country) are contraband in Canada.

...The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

...But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists, Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us. When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites' reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force of great and positive life powers.

Cowboys, venture capitalists, brilliant scientists, businesspeople like Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina, warriors like George S. Patton--have thumos. Modern people often ignore the role of "spiritedness." Psychologists measure intelligence, attitudes, emotions and values, but spiritedness is not a category of much academic interest. For ancient people, in contrast, spiritedness was central to an understanding of a society and the individual psyche. Socrates divided the soul into three parts: reason, thumos and appetite. Critics disdainful of America today often mischaracterize as aggressive or greedy "appetite" what should more accurately be interpreted as "spiritedness."

...Americans enjoy the emotions freely chosen activities bring. We enjoy the autonomy and sense of authenticity, the exhilaration, the "wind in your hair" feeling of motion and freedom.

America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce," he noted.

I'm a bit surprised at how deeply statist Canada was portrayed - I'd always heard (but it appears that I'm wrong) that Canada's Albertans and Newfoundlanders (Newfies) were roughly analogous to our Texans - harshly individualistic, etc.

BUT, the "Thumos" that they talk about here is the same as the "Thymos" that's a central aspect of Fukuyama's End of History and is somewhat the same as Quality from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.    Where I *REALLY* credit Fukuyama et. al. was how deeply he recognized that this seemingly abstract quality / emotion bubbled all the way up into profound political significance.  A deep, economic & political freedom - libertarianism in essence - was the only way to truly satisfy men's thymotic desires.

By contrast, most modern poli philsophers kind of treated Thymos as a secondary/orthogonal political emotion (for ex., similar to "tiredness") if they even recognize it at all.   In its more extreme postmodern form, Thymos is framed (although not by name) as one of the worst negative emotions which implicitly requires the state to stamp out / control (e.g. the Male Ego and the near-criminalization of "arrogance"). 

Fukuyama, Libertarians, Hegel, Locke, etc. instead saw Thymos as the core of what is good and what needed to be preserved / maximized by the state - it's the engine of progress.

Artists/Singers/etc somewhat recognize this within their limited domains (under the guise of authenticity) but they turn and do evil by denying it / assuming it simply doesn't exist in other, more pedestrian, more economic-centered domains.   The counterpoint, of course, is elegantly made by Kleinfeld above.   It's precisely those folks that Robert Pirsig tried to target in ZAMM...