The American Dream of Inequality

As I was reading the chapter “Deviants and the Consensus” in Stuart Hall’s “The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: return of the repressed in media studies,” I realized that many of the things he talks about directly connects to the American Dream. Though the American Dream was not mentioned in this chapter I would argue that The American Dream would be the perfect example of what he talks about. One of the first things I did when I had this realization was looking up the exact definition for the American Dream. None of the sources have an exact definition of the American Dream; most even claim that the American dream probably has a different meaning to every US citizen. So for the sake of my argument I am going to assume that the American Dream is “the dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement,” which I believe is a fair representation (Truslow Adams).

Based on Hall’s argument, I would claim that the American Dream is a result of a “complex process of social construction and legitimation” to benefit the wealthy and the powerful who “had much to gain from the continuous production of popular consent to its structure, to the values which supported and underwrote it, and to its continuity of existence” (Hall 63). Though exists in the democratic society, the American Dream is fundamentally an ideology that actually defend a system of inequality. The idea behind the dream is that the hard working will succeed and get ahead while the lazy will fall behind. Though this idea is perfectly logical and rational, this does not take into account, inheritance, connections, luck, and discrimination. There are countless of examples out there to show that, it does not take hard work to be better and richer.

This idea of meritocracy is therefore a myth created to disguise inequality and to create the illusion of fairness. Throughout history, we witnessed that it is never enough for some to simply have more than others. Therefore, for a system of inequality to exist, those who have more must persuade those who have less that the allocation of who gets what is just, “natural and unchangeable” (Hall 65). Those who have less must “accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they value it as divinely ordained or beneficial” (Hall 65). Another reason that it is so hard for people to see this illusion is because the illusion is rested on the ideology which cannot be proven true or false. One cannot simply conduct an experiment testing whether hard working will make life “better and richer and fuller for every man.” Similar to many aspect of religion, divine right of kings and reincarnation, the idea of American Dream cannot be falsify.

Regardless of what other may think or believe, I do not believe in the American Dream and the idea that you can go as far as the ability can take you. I believe different people face different obstacles and complications and it is not fair to say that everyone has equal opportunity or even any opportunity at all, to achieve greater material prosperity. To a large extent, I believe American Dream to be a modern propaganda that aim not to “modify ideas, but to provoke action” (Ellul 16). This action I am talking about is the act of accepting the idea and to act on it as if it is true. The American Dream is fits perfectly with the ideal characteristic of propaganda claim by Ellul: “It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious and… is an activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all encompassing and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it” (Ellul 18). And as it is natural for people to attend to and retain information that confirms their beliefs and ideology but to ignore information that contradicts expectation, they immerse themselves in this myth and illusion also known as The American Dream.