> "The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work."
I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the American Dream.
I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the American Dream.
I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.
The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract, it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you than not busting your ass, but there are no guarantees. You can only approach the table and go again. Another role of the dice or the hope that you haven't drawn a bad beat.
I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores, background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth. You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still alive, but never met.
Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section of them are products lifted from the mud and polished for public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators' sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.
You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.
I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.
If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.
To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.
Care to weigh in on the other 98% of my response?