Today marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. In the ordinary sense, it should be a day of celebration. America is not just another country. Over the past two and a half centuries, it has given the modern world a great deal. Constitutional government, individual liberty, the university system, scientific innovation, commercial civilisation, the immigrant imagination, popular culture, and the belief that a person can begin again — none of these are illusions. Even if one feels disappointed by America today, it would be intellectually dishonest to deny what it has contributed.

And yet my feeling is not a simple one.

A very ordinary image comes to mind. Eating sunflower seeds, one after another, you find them fragrant and pleasant. The taste is good, the rhythm is enjoyable, and you begin to trust the whole packet. Then, when you get to the last seed, you suddenly discover that it is bad. At that moment the taste in your mouth changes completely. What is worse, that final bad seed does not remain isolated. It contaminates the aftertaste of everything before it. You know very well that the earlier seeds were good, but the last one leaves such a strong unpleasant taste that the whole experience is rewritten.

That is roughly how America at 250 feels to me.

This is not anti-Americanism. It is not gloating. It is not the claim that America was bad from the beginning. Quite the opposite. The disappointment is sharp precisely because so many of the earlier seeds were genuinely fragrant. If a country had never offered the world any real hope, its decline would be just another ordinary failure in history. But America was not like that. It once gave concrete form to many ideals of modern civilisation. It made freedom more than a slogan. It made individual striving more than a fantasy. It showed that an immigrant society could be more than chaos. It once created a powerful ascending structure in which technology, universities, markets and institutions reinforced one another.

So the disappointment today does not come from the fact that America was never good. It comes from the fact that it once really was good.

The most troubling aspect of America today is not merely one president, one party, one election, or even a few visible social conflicts. The deeper problem is that a civilisation which once integrated differences, absorbed energy and generated a future-oriented imagination is slowly losing its ability to sustain its own ideals. Freedom is turning into licence. Democracy is turning into performance. Speech is turning into noise. Individualism is turning into isolation. The vitality of capitalism is turning into naked interest manipulation. National confidence is turning into arrogance and loss of control.

This does not mean America has lost all of its strengths. It still has powerful universities, technology, capital, military capacity and cultural influence. It still has many honest, decent and creative people. But the health of a civilisation cannot be measured only by the amount of resources it still possesses. The more important question is whether those resources can still be organised into a sustainable common order. In the past, America could turn difference into creativity, immigration into renewal, and conflict into institutional correction. Today, it increasingly seems to turn difference into hostility, identity into weaponry, media into machinery of emotion, and politics into tribal warfare.

This is why the bad taste is so noticeable. It is not created by one bad person, nor imposed by one external enemy. It feels more like the smell produced by a system after a long period of internal imbalance. When a civilisation keeps consuming its institutional trust while remaining addicted to self-celebration, its celebration becomes increasingly hollow. The louder it insists on its greatness, the more clearly it reveals its inability to face its own cracks honestly.

America’s greatness once lay in the fact that it did not only believe in ideals. It had mechanisms through which those ideals could be maintained, corrected and renewed in reality. The problem today is that the ideals are still on the wall, but the mechanisms look exhausted. The language of freedom remains, while public reason is being eroded. Democratic procedures remain, while social trust is breaking down. The myth of equal opportunity remains, while class rigidity and wealth concentration become more visible. The country is still powerful, but power and health are not the same thing. A person may still have muscles while his internal organs are already in trouble.

Reflection on America at 250 should avoid two easy extremes. One extreme is to continue treating America as sacred, as if all its problems were merely temporary fluctuations and recovery were automatic. The other is to deny America completely, as if all its past contributions were nothing but fraud. Both views are too simple. A more truthful judgement is that America was one of the most important experiments of modern civilisation. Its success was real, and its contribution was real. But precisely because of this, its present deterioration is more alarming. The decay of a great civilisation carries a deeper warning than the failure of an ordinary state.

It tells us that institutions do not protect themselves automatically, freedom does not sustain itself automatically, and civilisation does not remain great simply because it was once great. Any ideal, if it is not maintained by real people, real institutions and real public responsibility, will gradually become a souvenir. A souvenir may be displayed in a museum and praised at ceremonies, but it no longer truly organises life.

I do not want to end this piece by saying “America is finished”. That judgement is too quick and too much like emotional release. America still has enormous capacity for repair, and there remains a great deal of vitality within its society. But on the 250th anniversary of its founding, I do want to preserve this complex and uncomfortable feeling. It is like the taste of a bad seed left in the mouth. It reminds us not only to remember the fragrance before it, but also not to pretend that the final bite never happened.

What is truly worth commemorating is not only how great a country once was, but whether it still has the ability to face its own bad taste, acknowledge it, clean it away, and recover the capacity to sustain civilisation.