In my opinion, the American dream is a commercial advertisement from governors and merchants. It is an illusion created for people to dreaming about the unreachable ideal condition about their life standard. The American dream enable business and government to take advantage of citizens for profits and their game of thrones.
With the development of society, the American Dream tend to focus on wealth, because the word American dream is taken advantage by merchants to promote their sales. This phenomenon left people the idea that only purchasing the product or follow the government instruction will help them to achieve the American dream. Therefore, this idea will lead to superficial consumption and excessive consumption within the society. Meanwhile, citizen’s definition for American dream has changed overtime. According to the US chamber, since Bill Gates is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time and ranks among the richest in the world, so he is one of the most successful people in achieving American dream. Evidently, people has already ignore his devotion and hardworking, the only way to define his success was measured by amount of money.
In addition, the American dream is the product of capitalism social construction. With the development of society class division became more serious because of fixed logical thinking and unfair opportunity for each individuals. Rich people become richer but poor people still in relatively low life standard. The rate of social mobility informed us that American dream cannot rely on any political states or social structure but for accumulation of capital and personal talent.
Still some people argue about what if American dream is a simple personal goal, I would like to say it is still unreachable because people’s infinite desire, once people accomplished a short-term goals, their upward mobility will push them to pursue a higher dream.
The goal of american dream were more successfully carried through in the advertisement
Hi Sue,
ReplyDeleteIn your blog, Continuous Lies, you explained how the American Dream is only achievable to those who do not come from prominent family through dishonest ways. Your reasoning is very solid but I find that, after re-considering and re-connecting the novel and the documentary, I am agreeing and disagreeing with your idea that the same time. As you mentioned, Gatsby’s dream fundamental motivations are getting rich and marrying Daisy, and I consider these two motivation reveals two aspects about the viability of the American Dream.
I think the American dream is not attainable to all and I’ll start with explaining this. The reason why I think it has no connection with one’s personality or so and is never achievable is because it demands social equality, which is primarily unrealistic in our society. In the Great Gatsby, Gatsby overcame every possible potential barrier that laid between he and Daisy, yet due to the education and influence the Old Money people received, New Moneys are always, and will always be different and inferior species in comparison to them. Undoubtedly, Daisy cannot be with him even because of this simple reason.
The idea of unachievable American Dream is very appealing, since this idea holds very true in many societies that are not in America. Just like the documentary argued, our life is like a rigged game and for those entering the game, all the wealth and opportunities have been divided already and people can hardly make any change on that.
Diana