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You have this thing called "The American Dream" and you have an entire cultural history tied to self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier"...

You have this thing called "The American Dream" and you have an entire cultural history tied to self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier"... Clearly every single american isnt subject to the same cultural pre-occupations, that's absurd. But there are only certain cultural phenomena possible in one place or another. A right-wing party in the UK could not even begin to use any of the ideas or rhetoric of the republican party - they'd be widespread revulsion. We dont sing our national anthem in the UK, we dont "pleg" anything, we dont consider our country "Exceptional" (hence American Exceptionalism). There hasnt been the suggestion that our prime minister is impotent for not interfering in Ukraine, at least, nothing like the inferiority-complex about Obama's lack of big-dickery. The idea that the west is culturally homogenous is "Bullshit". As compared to anywhere in europe, americans are vastly more market-oriented, mistrustful of government, approving of business success, etc. It is simply the case, insofar as I can see, that "business" isnt really a dream of any kind in europe. People dont grow up wanting to run/own/be in business in anyway, we dont really have an "explorer"/inventor dreams either. A considerable amount has been written by the european experience of america and an almost ubquitious theme in the accounts is "the feeling of unlimited possibility", an ostentatiousness and pre-occupation with wealth, etc.

melvinram 13y ago
"The American Dream", self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier" are all good things IMHO. However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre-occupied with monetary success". I'm not going to address the rest of your America bashing because the response requires a nuanced answer that I don't have the time to write today. I'll leave that to others.
- tunap 13y ago
  [quote]"The American Dream", self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier" are all good things IMHO.[/quote] Everything in moderation. Here in the US, however, moderation has no place. It's all or nothing mentality, like a fricking casino bet. Fair compensation for effort is dead when everybody is taking risks for maximum rewards and training their work-force to pander the lowest common denominator... the hard sell. Everywhere I go retail workers are badgering me to upsell, banks & home improvement chains are the worst, IMO. That's what happens when there are 100's of candidates for every job opening and all the competition has been killed off by the oligops. Everywhere you go in the US, if it's a large enough customer base, it's oligops all the way down.
- mjburgess 13y ago
  > However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre-occupied with monetary success". They have become inextricably linked. Maybe early in the 19th C. you'd be right. After the rise of american industry and maufacture and its corresponding propaganda (edison, etc.) AND after the cold war, "capitalism", "democracy", "patriotism" all became intertwined. Such that today The American Dream is almost purely capitalist and pragmatic. The American Dream has, to my eyes, for a long time been directed towards individuals - it is their dream. A person achieves their dream. Once, perhaps, The American Dream was a dream for Americans - a common enterprise, with common goals, something achieved for everyone or no one, etc. The author of this article did not explain why ONO was part of a common enterpise, which its activity was making all our lives better and helping us achieve our ideals. He said, "built originally by Eugenio Galdon and mostly by my friend Richard Alden between 2001 and 2011, is in the process of being sold to Vodafone for around $9.5bn, and nobody cares." If that's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money. The rhetoric in this article is almost suffocating its message and very few can tell - because this rhetoric has become the language in which we phrase our dreams today.
  - jessedhillon 13y ago
    The extent to which you have littered your own biases throughout this thread, and then expected everyone to regard them as the true interpretation, is absurd and childish. If that's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money. For example, this. I'm amazed you can't find one positive interpretation to agree with. The $10bn price tag is a reflection of the company's commercial success -- a reflection of the hard work, smart decisions, luck, timing and scale involved in that success. To an American it's obvious that two people didn't personally build the company, but it's also respectable that they undertook a massive risk to create opportunities for others to join in their effort and partake in the rewards. The fact that you can only arrive at an extremely cynical interpretation really says more about you, and goes a long way to confirm the assertion of the article.
dap 13y ago
> A considerable amount has been written by the european experience of america and an almost ubquitious theme in the accounts is "the feeling of unlimited possibility", an ostentatiousness and pre-occupation with wealth, etc. You say "etc." there like those two things are related in some way and a reader could figure out how to extrapolate. Surely the feeling of unlimited possibility does not entail ostentatiousness and preoccupation with wealth? They're just two things that you ascribe to Americans without much argument. The "American Dream" is an idea about the distribution of money in a society, not about money itself. If it were just about money, lottery winners would be considered realizations of the American Dream. If it were even about success in business, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be heroes in American society. (From political debates to popular media, they're decidedly not.) If there were some government policy by which all Americans could be made filthy rich (ignoring the intrinsic impossibility of that), I don't think anyone would consider that a realization of the American Dream either. The dream assumes that money is a central value in society, of course, but maybe that's because things like inner peace, being a good person, and deeper notions of happiness haven't historically been explicitly constrained in so many human societies the way the ability to accumulate money has. Out of curiosity: if Americans are prototypically self-motivated and desire to make money, push the frontier, explore, and invent, and that Europeans don't (as a culture) dream of those things, do Europeans have widely shared dreams? What are they?
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > Out of curiosity: if Americans are prototypically self-motivated and desire to make money, push the frontier, explore, and invent, and that Europeans don't (as a culture) dream of those things, do Europeans have widely shared dreams? What are they? There aren't any. "Europeans as a culture" simply does not exist. It's just a bunch of very different countries with very different cultures that decided to make a union. The only difference I've found that holds between the USA and the whole of Europe[0] is that our price-labels all list the price after taxes. I found that quite weird. But they all get to have some unique quirks, so otherwise your culture is very recognizable in the sense that it might as well be another EU country :P [0] someone is bound to correct me on this, I haven't been to all of the EU countries.

melvinram 13y ago

"The American Dream", self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier" are all good things IMHO. However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre-occupied with monetary success". I'm not going to address the rest of your America bashing because the response requires a nuanced answer that I don't have the time to write today. I'll leave that to others.

tunap 13y ago
[quote]"The American Dream", self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier" are all good things IMHO.[/quote] Everything in moderation. Here in the US, however, moderation has no place. It's all or nothing mentality, like a fricking casino bet. Fair compensation for effort is dead when everybody is taking risks for maximum rewards and training their work-force to pander the lowest common denominator... the hard sell. Everywhere I go retail workers are badgering me to upsell, banks & home improvement chains are the worst, IMO. That's what happens when there are 100's of candidates for every job opening and all the competition has been killed off by the oligops. Everywhere you go in the US, if it's a large enough customer base, it's oligops all the way down.
mjburgess 13y ago
> However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre-occupied with monetary success". They have become inextricably linked. Maybe early in the 19th C. you'd be right. After the rise of american industry and maufacture and its corresponding propaganda (edison, etc.) AND after the cold war, "capitalism", "democracy", "patriotism" all became intertwined. Such that today The American Dream is almost purely capitalist and pragmatic. The American Dream has, to my eyes, for a long time been directed towards individuals - it is their dream. A person achieves their dream. Once, perhaps, The American Dream was a dream for Americans - a common enterprise, with common goals, something achieved for everyone or no one, etc. The author of this article did not explain why ONO was part of a common enterpise, which its activity was making all our lives better and helping us achieve our ideals. He said, "built originally by Eugenio Galdon and mostly by my friend Richard Alden between 2001 and 2011, is in the process of being sold to Vodafone for around $9.5bn, and nobody cares." If that's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money. The rhetoric in this article is almost suffocating its message and very few can tell - because this rhetoric has become the language in which we phrase our dreams today.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  The extent to which you have littered your own biases throughout this thread, and then expected everyone to regard them as the true interpretation, is absurd and childish. If that's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money. For example, this. I'm amazed you can't find one positive interpretation to agree with. The $10bn price tag is a reflection of the company's commercial success -- a reflection of the hard work, smart decisions, luck, timing and scale involved in that success. To an American it's obvious that two people didn't personally build the company, but it's also respectable that they undertook a massive risk to create opportunities for others to join in their effort and partake in the rewards. The fact that you can only arrive at an extremely cynical interpretation really says more about you, and goes a long way to confirm the assertion of the article.

dap 13y ago

> A considerable amount has been written by the european experience of america and an almost ubquitious theme in the accounts is "the feeling of unlimited possibility", an ostentatiousness and pre-occupation with wealth, etc. You say "etc." there like those two things are related in some way and a reader could figure out how to extrapolate. Surely the feeling of unlimited possibility does not entail ostentatiousness and preoccupation with wealth? They're just two things that you ascribe to Americans without much argument. The "American Dream" is an idea about the distribution of money in a society, not about money itself. If it were just about money, lottery winners would be considered realizations of the American Dream. If it were even about success in business, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be heroes in American society. (From political debates to popular media, they're decidedly not.) If there were some government policy by which all Americans could be made filthy rich (ignoring the intrinsic impossibility of that), I don't think anyone would consider that a realization of the American Dream either. The dream assumes that money is a central value in society, of course, but maybe that's because things like inner peace, being a good person, and deeper notions of happiness haven't historically been explicitly constrained in so many human societies the way the ability to accumulate money has. Out of curiosity: if Americans are prototypically self-motivated and desire to make money, push the frontier, explore, and invent, and that Europeans don't (as a culture) dream of those things, do Europeans have widely shared dreams? What are they?

tripzilch 13y ago
> Out of curiosity: if Americans are prototypically self-motivated and desire to make money, push the frontier, explore, and invent, and that Europeans don't (as a culture) dream of those things, do Europeans have widely shared dreams? What are they? There aren't any. "Europeans as a culture" simply does not exist. It's just a bunch of very different countries with very different cultures that decided to make a union. The only difference I've found that holds between the USA and the whole of Europe[0] is that our price-labels all list the price after taxes. I found that quite weird. But they all get to have some unique quirks, so otherwise your culture is very recognizable in the sense that it might as well be another EU country :P [0] someone is bound to correct me on this, I haven't been to all of the EU countries.