The American Dream as Social Control

"Hope is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness." - The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

The American Dream- the belief that enough hard work will earn you a place in the upper echelons of society- is rooted in the Enlightenment ideals of the 1800's.  Our society was one birthed in the denial of a formal class system, and it was this idea that spawned another, that surely with enough work, anyone could ascend to any height of economic or social prosperity.  I have no idea if the Founding Fathers intended for this to happen, but this newly created American Dream became a method of exerting social control over the disadvantaged classes while simultaneously building America into an economic powerhouse.

It is the American dream that drives the huge influxes of immigrants from their homelands into the US.  Immigrants like Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie who aded value to our society and built it into something great.  It is the American dream that busses the lower classes to menial daily jobs, where they trade their lives for a daily wage in hopes of a better future.  It is the industry of the lower classes, fueled by the American dream, that elevated the US to economic heights previously undreamt of.  The problem with this whole thing, is how unfair it is in it's effects.

I'll start with an example.  I've had several days when my stock portfolio has jumped a healthy percentage, netting me (lets say for example purposes) $1k.  Thats a third of the money I made last summer working three jobs I made in one afternoon.  A glaring problem with the American dream is that hard work does not translate into wealth.  That work has to be focused in a certain way.  It is only the hard work of the capitalist, the entrepreneur that may result in wealth, not the sweat of the day-laborer.  This may seem obvious to you or I, but rest assured the vast majority of people out there don't understand this key point.

The few society members that understand this point rise to the upper echelons of society and pass down their wealth from generation to generation.  Those that don't remain in their destitution and squalor.

The effect of the American Dream on our society is to pacify the lower classes.  Have you no money?  Then surely you have not worked hard enough, for America rewards the hard workers.  In fact, you are a lazy parasite on our society if your hard work has not made you rich, and you need assistance from the government to survive.

Because of the American dream, the lower classes can only think to blame themselves for their poor living conditions, not the upper classes that constantly use their institutional advantages to maintain their power over the plebeians.  And so, they are pacified.  They plot no revolutions or coups- they turn to religion in hopes of claiming their justly deserved but nonexistent rewards in the afterlife.  If I haven't previously covered how religion is a system of social pacification, I may do so in the future.  For now, suffice to say that it functions in a manner very similar to that of the American Dream.