Musings on "The American Dream..."

So let's get started with some real Blogage here...

As a budding social psychologist, one of the things that has come to interest me is the concept of the American Dream. So much to the point that I am looking to really get into the research and potentially write a book about it. I hope that you guinea pigs will help out with some insight and random paths for me to wander down...

At current the thesis for this study will be a comparison between the American dream and it's application to humanity at present with that of a litteral "dream" and how we as individuals are affected by them upon waking. I'm starting work on a potential outline and need to start doing my research. Hopefully I'll be able to really work on it down in Baires and that the "non-american" surroundings will help me get an outside perspective on things. But right now it's all a lot of gibberish floating around in my melon.

The whole idea stems out of my thought that the American dream is flawed. I feel that in the beginning it began as a beautiful concept: freedom, opportunity, equality. But, like most great ideas (Communism, television, children...) it has become either corrupted, outdated, or both. This used to be a country that people looked to come to in order to raise themselves to a higher level of some sort whether it be spiritually, mentally, or economically. But it seems now that people have taken this as license to raise themselves by stepping on the backs of others instead of being lifted up by others. Wall Street greed, the American "superiority complex", and our seeming cultural view that "bigger is better" is promoting the individual over the group. Even the way that we are beginning to remove ourselves from those people around us is encouraging this: we each have our personal space to live (fenced in back yards so no one can see us or get in our -ish,) our personal modes of travel (isn't it something like a 1:1 ratio of cars to people in this country now?), even our own personal communication, music, and computing devices. We as Americans are becoming independence junkies. Nice idea but for application: big fat 0 in my book...

So how does this equate to the "dream" model? Well... it starts out as something good, but once we wake up and start our day off the dream becomes more and more vague and we can't quite remember the details so we start making it up as we go along and suddenly it is totally diferent than the original. The question then becomes: as "responsible" human beings, how should we respond the lessons put forward by our dreams and stick to the true meaning of what we as humans are here to accomplish?

But I'll leave those thoughts for next time...

Keep on dreaming,
~jumpn2nsanity~