When the American Dream Becomes Undreamble

The American dream is what is holding our country, our society together. In traditional cultures, which means in the rest of the world where industrialization has not completely wiped out the homes and communities, people’s personality, their identities are defined by their relationships with neighbors with whom they share work and life outside of work. Work is experienced as the means to maintain their traditional way of life and participation in the life of the community with the additional bond to the personal skill and quality of the product which expresses the person. It is this participation which defines them and thus which binds them, so to speak, to the norms and mores of the society with an added measure of respect for each other.

But here community is rare. I have nothing to do with my neighbors. One is a carpenter, another works for a dental supply company according to what is written on the side of his van. Most people live where they live temporarily while on their way to a better job. It is this better job which defines them. When we meet someone, we ask them what they do for a living which is asking them what is their excuse for being around, and they tell you what they are working towards: a bigger truck, a promotion, a new house, a PhD within the context of a past which they also present to cover the obscenity of being, as Sartre tells us. It is their project which defines them, their project in the American dream and it is this project which prescribes how they are supposed to behave, their values, the norms they are to follow. It is not participation in the concrete community around them which sets their moral behavior; it is the dream they have to become someone by espousing the values and enacting the behavior defining that someone.

But when the dream dies, the whole project collapses and with it the norms. Mature people might continue following those norms out of lack of anything else to do. But a young person not yet into any project of self facing the absence of any dreamable dream, much less its actualization, has no reason to live this or that way. All that counts now is the stuff that the good job he cannot have would provide. He has no reason not to grab it and every reason to do so when it is this stuff which sets his identity and status among his peers. The result is what is called anomie which is a polite and high sounding way of saying that the society falls apart through crime.