I recently did a round table discussion on the American Dream. Here’s a part of the conversation I offered:
The American Dream is freedom to be left alone, to succeed or fail on your own. It’s the promise that with effort, or luck, or both, you can find an unmolested happiness. And when I say unmolested, I mean in the sense you aren’t bogged down with limitless barbed wires of mindless regulation and compulsion to participate in programs a government deems beneficial for everyone. That you can make a living on your own terms, responsible for yourself. It’s as much the freedom to fail, and perhaps die early as a result of your bad choices, as it is freedom to prosper.
But it’s not just liberation from a heavy-handed state. It’s liberation from the tyranny of uncontrollable, stifling forces that would subjugate society to their small-minded ends. And by that I mean, it’s freedom from the chains of this silly corporate McWorld we’ve created. Many of us – hell, most us – have no choice but to work for mega-corporations, organizations, or firms. These companies enjoy relationships with the government that give them marketplace power far exceeding what they’d have in a true free market. And with that power, they suck in everything around them like black holes, commoditizing and monetizing all interactions in our lives. Chopping every transaction into a form of tradable economic units. Placing the majority of the country on a treadmill to nowhere, and rendering enormous numbers of us debt serfs from cradle to grave.
Consider the average upper middle class neighborhood. Most everybody works for some monster corporation, hospital network, law firm, or financial company. Their urine is tested once a year, their comments in the workplace are constrained by zero tolerance policy handbooks, their social media’s monitored by some creep in HR doing a monthly sweep to ensure against “brand damage,” and their retirements are tied up in some company pension or 401k. They shop at big boxes like Wal Mart, Target, and Coach, buy what they’ve been told is desirable in endless marketing messages they’re bombarded with every day, and watch news created by a handful of networks all owned by the same five or six multi-billion dollar conglomerates. Once a month they walk to the mailbox and make a mortgage payment to a bank so enormous it doesn’t even know where their note is located.
Is this the American Dream? No. This is a society squeezed between corporate and government taskmasters. If the Founding Fathers the Tea Partiers so often laud were alive, they’d choke back vomit viewing the mass of blissfully incurious, told-what-to-do robots we’ve become.
So no, you won’t find the American Dream on Main Street. Main Street’s brain dead, a fenced-in pen where the herd sleeps. And it’s been that way for years. The American Dream is elsewhere, probably with the entrepreneurs. With the kids starting the new businesses and hoping to never have to take orders in a hierarchy of bureaucrats or functionaries. With the guy leaving his corporate or government job to do something he has a passion for because he realizes money alone is never going to be enough, and that the accrual of “stuff” – the rapidly depreciating status purchases and gadgets Main Street’s been manipulated into viewing as trophies of success – is but a temporary junkie’s fix, a fill-in for the fact that we’re not doing what fulfills, or even interests us.
And that right there is the American Dream: The promise you can forge your own way, carve your own road. That you can be your own man or woman. You might not make a fortune in it. You might not even succeed. But You Can Try, and though the forces all around you are working overtime to corral you into robotry, to put you “back in line,” You Have a Choice.* You can still say, “No. Fuck that. I’m going to strike out on my own and see where it goes.”
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* See also, this delightful little song.
You can, and should, read the whole thing here.