Blog #4 Chomsky Challenging the American Dream

I want to start off by saying, regardless of what I've read about Chomsky, I don't think he's anti-American. 

Seriously. It doesn't make you anti-American to question certain parts of American culture that have been around for a really long time. If anything, that sounds reasonable to me. Things change so much day to day, year to year, century to century. Why is it reasonable to assume something would stick around for so long and not change? 

Chomsky’s book called the Requiem for the American Dream takes a super interesting (and pretty liberal) stance on the American Dream.

He sets aside 10 principles about the “concentration of wealth and power, “ but this week we only got to 3 of them. The first one is reducing democracy. He explains that “inequality has many consequences” and there are some that obvious. For example, we know that inequality leads to the lives of some being worse than others. That’s the whole point. But he brings up the interesting study that “the more unequal a society is, whether it’s poor or rich, the worse the health factors.” So unequal societies don’t benefit certain groups more in the end in a way because if part of the society is suffering, it can lead to the society suffering as a whole. The concept didn’t really make sense to me at first, but I started thinking...lets say the very lower class gets really sick. Even though poorer communities are usually together, viruses/illnesses/etc. spread and so it is very possibly that overtime, even people with access to health or wealth will still catch something OR it’s possible that they will. That’s just one very small example, but I think it shows how a prosperous society is one in which people are actually trying to better everything, and not just certain groups.

I also thought it was interesting the 2^nd principle that Chomsky proposed. Chomsky calls principle number 2 “shaping ideology” and says that some people react to an “excess of democracy.” The example he gives is the 60s. The 60s are a really well known time of QUESTIONING. Questioning everything. Questioning your parents, your friends, the values you were born into, the mostly government. He says that the way people were acting caused “too much pressure in the system..therefore, they have to return to passivity and become depoliticized.” They tried to control the people and overall just control everything.

This section kinda confused me, so I decided to look up exactly what the word indoctrine meant because he used it several times. What I found was that indoctrination (from a political view) “is often analyzed as a tool of class warfare, where institutions of the state are identified as "conspiring" to maintain the status quo.” It seems like Chomsky is saying that the American Dream is a tool that the government uses to keep people “controlled” in a sense. I could be wrong, and I’d love to hear about other peoples perspective on this section so I can really understand it (and I’m about to read other blogs to search!), but I feel like he’s trying to say that the American Dream is a social tool to keep everyone trying to work toward that cheesy American Dream, or maybe just to WORK. Because the idea is that you work really hard in this country and contribute to the work force, and you’re rewarded for it. And I agree that Chomsky that it doesn’t always have such a positive view.

I’m excited to read more of the book and try to really grasp what he’s trying to do here...