Sort of like securing slavery in the s or segregation in the s. It also provides purpose, meaning, and structure in our lives, getting us out of bed in the morning and stopping us from drinking in the afternoon. It makes us feel part of the collective experience, makes us social, and it gives us respect in our families and among our communities.
One way to fix work for the future is to renegotiate the so-called social contract between employers and workers. In the midth century, corporations and unions reached historic deals to effectively share in economic growth. Workers agreed to be loyal and not strike, and companies in turn agreed to pay generous benefits and guaranteed wage increases. As they replaced in-house workers with contractors, franchises, and on-demand workers, they tended to pay lower wages and offer fewer benefits. Meanwhile, the short-termism of Wall Street pressured companies to reduce investment in training and workforce development, which tends to disadvantage workers with fewer skills, who might once have risen up the corporate ladder.
In Europe, for example, governments pick up more of the tab. But the shifts in employment have left an uneven labor economy. Meanwhile, the growth of the gig economy has seen a whole new generation of non-payroll staff emerge. Companies like Uber steadfastly treat their workers as subcontractors, thus absolving themselves from having to pay benefits. One way to stop this abuse of this binary system would be to set up portable benefit schemes. These would prorate benefits based on hours worked and allow workers to move between gigs and projects more easily.
So, for example, a driver who works for both Uber and Lyft could pick up fractionalized benefits from both and accrue money in an universal account. That in turn might incentivize employers not to push workers off their payrolls to cut costs. Though the shift to independent working is often portrayed as a bad thing for workers, many people would welcome the change if it paid as well. Other ways to support that shift include setting up community coworking spaces. That would substitute for the loss of social interaction that sometimes comes with independent working and perhaps provide workers with access to collectively owned high-end equipment.
For example, the hubs could offer maker labs with 3D- printing machines or professional kitchens. In recent wars, civilian casualties have been referred to as "collateral damage. We don't know how to sustain heroic energy because we don't have a culture that honors it except in sports.
Auden remarked on this in his poem "The Shield of Achilles," which imagines Achilles' mother returning to heaven for new armor for her son, just as she does in the Iliad. But this time, when she looks at the shield, she sees not the integrated harmony of the community, which was displayed on the original shield of Achilles, but scenes from modern life, including one of a boy in a vacant lot throwing stones at a bird:.
The shield of the hero displays the total, integrated life of the community. Without community there cannot be authentic individual heroism. We are wrong to think that heroism is a matter of will alone, of the individual cowboy riding into the town, cleaning out the bad guys, and leaving. Our problems are more difficult than that--and always have been.
Without a community to sustain it, our hero myth is doomed to debasement. And traditionally, it is the religious myth that has offered us that vision of community. The power of the religious myth gave us a reason to sacrifice in the present for the good of the whole and a better future. But in an economic myth what we give to the community--or to our homes and families--has no economic tag and therefore no way to be valued.
Undervaluing service--whether reflected in our lack of support for full-time single mothers or the steady decline of teachers' salaries in relation to those of other professionals--will continue to have a debilitating effect on communities. The democratic myth held up the ideal of "one nation under God with liberty and justice for all. In addition to a loss of the values embodied in our earlier myths, there is a danger for the society dominated by the economic myth that its citizens can lose their sense of a larger significance--or even of significance on an individual level.
The economic myth is the first large myth that is the story of a process rather than of a character in action. The Greeks had their founding stories of gods and heroes, and the Hebrew and Christian traditions had stories of God and His people and prophets. Even the democratic myth had the implicit sound of God's machinery, ticking away through time, just waiting to be discovered in the inevitable march of scientific and technological progress.
But the economic myth, like the natural world, doesn't have a plot. Some might say that such a random collection of ups and downs, like the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is hardly any story at all, simply a changing pattern along a trajectory of growth. And even that trajectory is "accidental," like everything else in the story.
The American Dream and the Economic Myth
In this myth, humans are the victims of large forces over which they have no control--terrorism, or crime, or pollution, or guns, or global competition, or inflation. The aim of living is survival itself--or, depending on resources, a quality of life that is measured in terms of costs versus benefits.
From the perspective of this myth, the Islamic fundamentalists, who are willing to die for their story, seem incomprehensible. Like the phrase "We the People," "civic discourse" seems a little old-fashioned. We report political news not in terms of the complexities of the issues and the historical background or how the common good might be furthered, but in terms of the power relationships of the personalities involved, as if politics were like a simple sporting event--who's winning and who's losing, or, to follow the little arrows in a popular news magazine, who's up and who's down.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death , Neil Postman claims that in our culture, "all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.
To Save The American Dream, We Have To Change How We Think About Work
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business. In show business, sex and violence sell. So, too, in television news, the storyteller of our society. Under our economic myth, we make political decisions on the basis of the story we are being told in order to sell commercial products. We believe the violence we see and experience on television, not the statistics we read, so we perceive the world as much meaner and more violent than it really is--which is why we voted for more prisons in an era of declining crime.
In short, we cannot expect the economic myth that shapes our society to foster the ideals of individual responsibility that the hero myth embodied; or to encourage the ideals of community the religious myth promoted; or to emphasize the pursuit of a common good that the democratic myth supported. And yet these ideals of responsibility, community, and the common good are absolutely necessary for the health of the civic spirit. Even so, we can't simply return to the old myths, no matter how many movements in their direction we try to beat the drums for.
These myths don't hold up for us now. We don't want to look up to the chosen few as our heroes; we don't want to re-introduce the sense of division and intolerance that a ruling religious myth so often fosters; and we're rightly suspicious of the idea of one common good because we know how much suffering has been caused in our diverse society by insisting that our identity fits one mold. For example, we can no longer blindly tell our history from the point of view of Columbus. We don't have one story about who we are anymore, so how can we articulate a common good?
We have to begin by raising our awareness of the myth that we are in--how we are caught in it, and how it shapes us individually and as a nation. And then we must learn to tell better stories about who we are and who we might become. To deepen the American dream calls upon our minds and hearts--and also our imaginations. The quest to deepen the American Dream through the power of the imagination begins deep in the center of the economic myth--because that's where American culture is.
The United States is currently the clearest embodiment of the economic myth not only because of its economic prowess but also because of its continuing link to the founding principle of "the pursuit of happiness. To deepen the American dream we can imagine a story about the pursuit of happiness that neither ignores the economic myth nor fights against it, but uses its elements in a transformative way. The desire for happiness is both a curse and a blessing--a curse because we're so often discontent, imagining happiness to be down the road rather than here and now; and a blessing because the pursuit of happiness turns out, in the end, to be a spiritual journey.
Pursuing happiness, we learn love. At least, that's the possibility offered to us. A wonderfully magic characteristic of the pursuit of happiness is the discovery of helpers along the way. You could easily object to this claim, saying something like, "There may be help along the way--but only for some people. Those people get all the luck. But luck often has a way of showing up in certain circumstances rather than others. For example, there is a recurring folktale motif that features three sons who are sent on a quest--to find a treasure, or rescue a princess, for example.
When the first son is halfway down the road, he comes across a fox and says, "Get out of my way, fox, I'm on a quest! The second son, going down the same road, comes across the same fox and says, "Get out of my way, fox, I'm on a quest! The third son--whose name is always something like "Dumb Hans" or "Stupid Jack"--comes across the same fox and says, "Who are you? Can I help you? This deep impulse towards generosity of spirit is an American virtue, perhaps developing in response to the hardships early settlers shared, where survival depended upon helping each other.
Again and again, that impulse towards a common good is the door that unexpectedly opens to the fulfillment of individual dreams of happiness--even though the stories that emphasize individual success sometimes obscure this true source of happiness. Such stories of the lone individual succeeding in the world are the familiar basis of the self-help book. If we took that popular genre and applied it to the folk tale of the three sons on a quest, we might have the following tale:.
Once upon a time, after Dumb Hans has succeeded on the quest after his two brothers have failed, the oldest son buys a self-help book--"How to Succeed on the Quest. He rapidly thumbs through the book--"Hmm. There's a chapter here called 'Be sure to talk to foxes,' but nothing about horses. The second brother has bought the same book and, like his older brother, not finding anything to guide him in response to this new circumstance, reacts the same way.
Dumb Hans, as you can guess, greets the horse--and the horse has the key to the castle, the magic cloak, the crucial advice, etc. The moral of the story is that help was on the road for all three brothers, but only the youngest brother found it--not because he followed a recipe of what to do, but because his way of being allowed the help to become apparent.
There is no "to do" that elicits the helpers--only a way of being. The youngest brother is fully present to those he meets along the way. In the economic myth, with its emphasis on efficiency and time management, the discipline of full presence is particularly challenging.
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From a spiritual perspective, love is always present. But to experience love requires us to step out of the hurry of measureable time--time as money--into a sense of slow time--time like honey, smooth and sweet. No wonder that the son who ignores the opportunity costs of slowing down is called "Dumb Hans" or "Stupid Jack. In the Economic Myth, the aim is not goodness, as in the religious myth, or truth, as in the democratic myth, or excellence, as in the hero myth, but "more.
And a corollary to aiming for more material goods is the drive towards perfection--the desire to have perfectly white or straight teeth, the perfect slim figure, the latest model appliance or car. If happiness is pursued as "more" or "perfection," however, it will never be achieved. There is never enough; nothing is ever perfect. As wise observers have always taught us, the pursuit of happiness is most fruitful when it is experienced as the pursuit of wholeness--a journey that depends upon a recognition that even our flaws, or the shadow side of our selves, must be acknowledged and accepted as part of us even as we attempt to improve.
Our failures become part of the meaningfulness of life that gives it shape and individuality and that leads to understanding and treasures of the spirit. There's an old folk tale of a man plowing who stumbles across an object--and when he stops and looks at it closely, it turns out to be a box of treasure. It's a common motif, characterized by the saying, "Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
During the voyage of the Beagle, when it anchored off the coast of South America, Charles Darwin climbed a mountain in the Andes. There on the peak, he looked down at his shoes--maybe he stumbled; the account doesn't say--and next to his feet was a fossil seashell. Darwin realized that the seashell's journey--and therefore, the mountain's journey--from ocean floor to high peak must have taken a much longer time than the earth's age of 6, years, as theologians had computed, based on the Bible.
Some looking has profound consequences. Where we stumble, there our treasure lies. I once quoted this to someone who responded, "Is that like 'if you get a lemon, make lemonade'"? The answer is "No"--for several important reasons. In the folktale of the man who stumbles while he's plowing, for example, the first aspect of the story to notice is that the guy is going forward when he stumbles.
In his moving ahead, in his walking, in his work, he stumbles. Then what does he do? He looks closely at what he's stumbled against. Now if he had responded the way most of us have been trained to do, he would have simply stood right back up, picked up his plow, and kept on going. But if we're not too eager to get right back to plowing the same furrow, we can use the stumble as an opportunity for deep seeing.
Let me summarize the process: If we're not moving forward, we won't stumble. If we don't stumble, we won't stop to look. If we look closely enough, we might find treasure. This is a process that puts the emphasis not on willing, but on looking--not on making lemonade, but on really seeing the lemon. To look--to really look, with full consciousness, fully in the present--changes things.
BREAKING DOWN 'American Dream'
To practice seeing rather than acquiring places the "more" of the economic myth against an intangible--not more things, but more seeing or deeper experiencing of the things and events in our lives. Those who find the current emphasis on "more" to be contributing to the ills of our current American society might object by saying, "Why put the emphasis on more --even if it's more experiences rather than more things?
Why not try to fight directly against this emphasis on more? The answer to this call to arms against the materialist emphasis of 21st-century American culture is that it won't work. You can't fight the energy of a culture directly--you can only use the energy that's available and turn it into a new direction. Here's a example of what it means to turn cultural energy: Then a brilliant ad campaign came along that used an aikido approach to littering--it simply demanded, "Don't mess with Texas. What had formerly been a kind of special effort from "good citizens"--carrying empty drink cans home--came to be expected from everyone.
Picking up after oneself wasn't a form of "goodness"--it was just ordinary, decent human behavior. It didn't require an extraordinary act of will--it was just the reality of what everyone did because you simply "don't mess with Texas. So while we can't fight the materialistic aspects of the Economic Myth directly, we can use the aikido approach to influence the direction of its energy. The same is true of complex economic systems--as with the natural environment, we are all interconnected.
The introduction of a trade barrier for particular goods in one nation can affect the health of children in a nation across the globe when workers in that industry lose their livelihood--and then can't purchase goods from us, or help raise global economic prosperity. What seemed best for short-term self-interest has worked against long-term self interest.
American Dream
The aikido move, in this case, would involve a simple shift in emphasis that would benefit the system as a whole while, at the same time, not requiring a frontal assault on one of the main energies of the Economic Myth--self interest. This shift-- from short-term to long-term self interest-- is simple, but not easy. It requires the telling of a new story that would be recognized within the old paradigm of self interest. But pursuing the happiness not only of one's own, "neighborhood" system but also of other, geographical remote systems would lead to the discovery that wise people learned long ago in relation to personal life--that the most efficient way to pursue happiness is to pursue the happiness of someone else.
This observation, if acted on by a growing number of people, would help create enormous wealth in the happiness economy. One of the founding theorists of capitalism, Adam Smith, argued that when every individual follows his own self-interest, the interest of the whole is also achieved--as by the movement of an "invisible hand. Because we are all linked in an enormously complex global economy, the long-term self interest of the individual is allied to the self-interest of everyone on the planet. To illustrate with a simple example: The "more" achieved by emphasizing wholeness rather than perfection and of integrating the larger global system and a long-term perspective into the energy of our self-interested pursuits requires a lessening of our youthful narcissism as a culture.
Americans sometimes appear to be looking at the world as if into a mirror--seeking our own reflection in the values and aspirations of other cultures. We feel we know what they want because we know what we would want in their place. President Johnson, in attempting to bring the Vietnam War to a conclusion, offered a generous array of improvement projects to the North Vietnamese--a large dam project, for example, and all kinds of aid for education and social welfare.
He was frustrated by the apparent disregard of the North Vietnamese, who didn't seem to appreciate what these gifts from the American people could do for their economy. It's an overstatement to say, as some have, that Americans know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But sometimes the pursuit of happiness, when it takes an economic form, can appear callous, "unevolved," and immature. Our culture sometimes seems to have the quality of a youthful hero, beginning on his journey, optimistic and brave, partly because optimism and bravery are attractive features of his character but also partly because he is ignorant of the trials and darkness that lie ahead on the journey.
He is bound to stumble in time. And sometimes that stumbling results in a wound. So whether or not the wounded hero finds a material treasure when he stumbles, he does have the opportunity to deepen his empathy for all those less fortunate than he--all those who are also wounded. The hero who has been wounded on his journey comes back with a blessing or gift for society that arises even from those adventures that were failures.
Stumbling and wounds can contribute to our individuality; to our creativity; and to our compassion. The archetype of the wounded healer points to the blessing that some people can give to others because of what they have learned from their own painful experiences along the way. This archetype also applies to a culture when it attempts to integrate an experience of failure rather than to ignore it.
The United States is in a position of leadership in the global economic myth in part because that myth is so well exemplified in our culture, and we have been very successful within it; but its leadership also depends on the willingness of other nations to trust us. I discovered this rule when I attempted to answer a question that one of my students put to me many years ago: She helps people all day long, and she has a lot of responsibility and stress.
So why doesn't she burn out? I couldn't answer that question immediately, so I began reading about Mother Teresa. One story seemed to offer a clue. Mother Teresa said that when she embraced a leper, she was embracing her Beloved, Jesus.
This insight, of course, is linked to Jesus' story about the Last Judgment, when he says to the righteous, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: Today, home ownership is frequently cited as an example of attaining the American Dream.
American Economic and Cultural Expansion ," sociologist Emily Rosenberg identified five components of the American Dream that have shown up in countries around the world. These five points include the belief that other nations should replicate America's development; faith in a free market economy ; support for free trade agreements and foreign direct investment ; promotion of free flow of information and culture; and acceptance of government protection of private enterprise. The American Dream was aided by a number of factors that gave the United States a competitive advantage over other countries.
For starters, it is relatively isolated geographically, compared to many other countries, and enjoys a temperate climate. It has a culturally diverse population that businesses use to foster innovation in a global landscape. Terming it a "dream" also carries with it a sense that these ideals aren't necessarily what has played out in the lives of many actual Americans and those who hope to become Americans. The criticism that reality falls short of the American Dream is at least as old as the idea itself. The spread of settlers into Native American lands, slavery, the limitation of the vote originally to white male landowners, and a long list of other injustices and challenges have undermined the realization of the Dream for many who live in the United States.
As income equality has grown in the U. S, starting in the s, the American Dream has begun to seem less attainable for those who aren't already affluent or born to affluence.