Is the American dream a thing of the past?

A few decades ago, the American Dream was synonymous with opportunity: opportunity to endeavor after “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The American Dream was imbued with the concept of the individual: each man would reap the fruits of his own labor. America was the land of the rugged individual, who carved out his life with his own hands and accounted to no one but himself for his failures.

Let us compare this view of the American Dream with that of today. Whereas the American Dream was once equated with certain principles of freedom, it is now equated with things.

Today, a man would say merely that he has a right to live comfortably; the fact that comfort must be earned is ignored; the question of whether the person is deserving of comfort never arises.

When people are concerned more with the attainment of things than with the maintenance of principles, it is a sign of moral decay. And it is through such decay that loss of freedom occurs.

This metamorphosis of the human spirit did not come about unforeseen. Although he was not writing specifically about America, Jose Ortega y Gasset, in his The Revolt of the Masses, clearly delineated the process by which the individual would eventually be sacrificed to the mass-man; the mass-man thereby destroying that which made possible his very existence.

Respect for the rights of the individual has been the foundation for America’s greatness; it was the reason for the immigration to America from all around the world. It is precisely this respect which has deteriorated as a result of the efforts of the mass-man in America, this laying the groundwork for a totalitarian welfare state.

 Gilbert De Bruycker

The Free Man

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What are your thoughts about this perspective?