Is the American Dream Killing You?

>Is the American Dream Killing You?

>Someone builds a gigantic house next door; after six months, you and your neighbor haven't even said hello. You walk into your local junior high (where his daughter was a student), and it looks like something out of hell: nose rings, boys showing their underwear, girls with T-shirts that say HO! on them, and others that sport MEGADEATH. Kids with hoods over headphones, with gangsta rap leaking through them: "All flowing past you in the hallways like sea wreckaage, all that is left after the ship goes down."

>You then drop your daughter off, after hardly having spoken to her, and drive to work. On the way you see an electronic sign that broadcasts the latest Threat Level from Homeland Security. You reflect on the fact that the nation's capital used to have a crack user as a mayor, and that he later returned, elected to the city council.

>Now you are in the CEO's office with the rest of the management team. "You are polite, of course, but...you know too much to respect the man who runs the corporation. You know he is out for himself, that he has formed a small cabal at the top to leverage the entire company for their own personal gain....The CEO makes over five hundred times what the average person in the company makes, but this is normal in America today, where the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily for thirty years, and is now the widest in all the rich democracies, on par with the third world."

>After the meeting you walk through the company, acknowledge those you pass by, "but it is nothing but the nod between jousters. Office relationships are like business as a whole: pleasant on the surface, deadly underneath." Nothing makes sense, life's purpose eludes you, you can't trust anyone. The market economy has the power "to run your life, harm your health, fragment your family, dumb down society, destroy the environment, incite global conflict, and displace God himself."

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/zGVB9qlfi3k?t=5m26s
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Megadeath is pretty cool.

>Meanwhile, the incarceration rate has increased nearly 500% in the last 20 years, one-third of all marriages end in ten years or less, the rate of child abuse has tripled in the last 25 years, 65 million Americans suffer from stress, and between 1989 and 2001 credit card debt went from $238 billion to $692 billion and the number of people filing for bankruptcy jumped 125%. Nearly 2/3 of all Americans are overweight; the number of overweight adolescents tripled during 1980-2005. The US leads the industrialized world in child suicide (ages 5-14); the youth suicide rate has doubled since 1950.

>We live in a winner-take-all society. "When competition becomes too intense, it separates people. Your society may start making market sense, but it stops making moral sense. You lose your connection to other people, and to anything larger than yourself. This cuts the very bonds that give life meaning. Bonds between the individual and his family, his community, his country, and even his God all erode and break. In short, the more intense the market experience, the more meaningless life will become."

>The victims of US corporations, and the philosophy they represent, feel oppressed and exploited by America. This is "why they hate us." "You can understand why those most fervently opposed to living by the Market code--religious fundamentalists--would attack us. And you can understand why they would target the global system of American capitalism, the World Trade Center."

>"Far from being an unlimited good, the Market has become the driving force of American decline."

thoughts?

You sound like a communist faggot.

What the CEO makes is totally fucking irrelevant.

good goy

Yeah, fuck you.

That is my thought.

jews want you to buy into communist bullshit, they are the ones that spread the propaganda that you should care about the CEOs pay.

How can it be irrelevant if wealth inequality historically predates social unrest and instability?

I think you may be focusing too much on one line.

you are such a pathetic know-nothing, sack of shit psychopath.

You are right, the government should take all of the money and the redistribute it "properly".

you are leaf sack of trash and yeah I would love to show your virtue signalling ass what a psychopath looks like.

FUCK YOU

It is possible to criticize alcohol abuse without suggesting prohibition.

Capitalism is not the problem per se, it is more the abolition of all morals and values which placed intrinsic restrictions on capitalistic excesses. The real problem is the so called doctrine of "progression", which can only be apprehended by a revolutionary conservatism. I would suggest reading some Evola, probably starting with 'Revolt Against the Modern World'.

This guy has the right idea

No he is simply playing the same game of incrementalism like they all do.

Are there global elites that are hell bent on having prohibition?

NO your analogy is pure shit.

>what is pharmaceutical idustry

shill harder buddy, the more rage posts you make arguing your weak point the more you redpill people against moral decay, which is what this thread is about if you didn't notice.

greed can be good, but too much of it IS degeneracy you fucking moron.

Fanatic individualism is to blame too, something which affects America most of all. I think it explains why Europe is not declining as quickly as the USA, despite being subjected to the same forces of progressiveness.

Uhhh, okay.

Maybe you don't know this but global elites tend not to really favor the radicals who argue for wealth redistribution. It's why they support Hillary over Bernie, or Blairite Labour over Corbyn. Communism has been pushed by Jews, yes, but what Jews push has changed, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Now, that doesn't mean "modern" communists have it by the right end. But they're not necessarily the ones that enjoy the support of globalist elites and the institutions they control.

No it is about what it is ALWAYS about, faggots lusting after leftist garbage.

related video

youtu.be/zGVB9qlfi3k?t=5m26s

WE can criticize our capitalist culture without going full commie

There are things that should be and could be fixed. We need to get rid of crony capitalism

Our political discourse is simply too clouded and fucked up.

Sure there are things that need to be done but when you have communists pushing for everything it is pure folly.

KILL LEFTISTS and then we can talk about fixing things.

The average American is better off than people living in nearly all of the other "rich democracies". Why the fuck would you care if a CEO who is obviously doing their job very well is paid more? It doesn't decrease your salary.

Schools aren't like that except in shitty inner cities controlled by unions and Democratic machines.

Suicides, child abuse, and stress are actually LESS now, its just that people actually report them. Also of course debt in absolute terms will increase when the economy grows.

Competition without force is perhaps the most beneficial thing in existence. Here's the real red pill: the West lead by America is the wealthiest, most peaceful, most free, most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen. This is almost entirely due to the market economy.

Really? Who give a flying fuck. It's always been this way. From the time of the pharaoh, medieval kings, caste system ad infinitum. So know we live in a time when CEO's are gods and the have power via imaginary money created at will by even more powerful gods called bankers.

Watcha gonna do about it Marcus? Nothing. Because you can't do anything about it unless you decide not to play and live under a bridge like a dirty fuck, or somehow get rich with imaginary money.

In every epoch most people play by the rules that the gods of that time make. Eventually the gods find a way to destroy themselves and the shit starts all over again. It's no big deal.

My Belgian friend, I think we both know that for the past couple decades Europe has been a couple of years behind America in terms of cultural and economic development. Look at what America is now and that is what we will have in a few years.

On a scale of 1-10, how boring is the idea of a Belgian criticising the US to Americans on Sup Forums?

>belgium

shouldnt you be raping kids or something

>Here's the real red pill: the West lead by America is the wealthiest, most peaceful, most free, most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen.

Free-riding from an era when the things discussed in the OP were not an issue. I agree with you that the market economy is alright, and the original text is too critical of it in portraying it as the source of the described problem.

The problem is culture, always will be.

Obviously.

The original text is from a 2005 book by an American ex-corporate executive who emigrated to Europe, take it from him, not me.

>x isn't a problem because y are doing z

There is literally nothing with listening to the good megadeth albums.

i hope you stay in belgium you commie

me on the right

>Is the American Dream Killing You?
im a stay at home dad that will home school my kids so...........no

>MEGADEATH
>buying cheap chink knockoff merchandise

Fuck it, dumping another text. This one is Morris Berman's talking about his travel to Xela in Guatemala.

>I don't know what I had expected of the physical environment--something like Antigua, perhaps--but Xela was not it. It soon became clear to me that Antigua was a "showcase" city, the exception rather than the rule. With a population of 200,000, Xela claims to be the second-largest city in Guatemala; yet its infrastructure is completely shot. The streets are riddled with cracks and potholes; sidewalks, when they exist, are typically broken. More often than not, you are walking on dirt or trekking through mud. Riding the buses is not to be undertaken on a full stomach, as they are old and decrepit, and jerk you up and down as though you were in a milkshake machine. The cause of all this is not hard to ascertain: Guatemala is, in effect, ruled by an oligarchy, and a large fraction of the national budget is earmarked for the military (which the country needs like a hole in the head). There is very little left over for roads, bridges, transportation, education, and public health. Truth be told, Guatemala is a lot like the United States, only a bit more strung out.

>Of course, the United States has no excuse, whereas after thirty-six years of civil war (1960-96) Guatemala had the stuffing kicked out of it. Nearly half the population is illiterate, and half the country's children suffer from malnutrition. With heavy American support, the Guatemalan military undertook a scorched-earth campaign, complete with U.S.-trained torture and death squads, that destroyed any possibility of social justice. The result? After 626 massacres there were something like 150,000 dead, 100,000 desaparecidos, 1 million persons who had gone into hiding, and 1 million refugees (most of them fleeing to Mexico and the United States). More than 440 indígena pueblos were wiped out, 200,000 children were orphaned, and 40,000 women became widows.

>implying america is sleeping
>we awoke from that dream in the 90s

>The urban population is understandably demoralized and cynical, living in a strange kind of spiritual vacuum. What Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland, California, applies to Xela a hundred times over: There is no "there" there.

>The odd thing is that this huge void at the center has been filled by a purely consumer culture, one very much based on the U.S. model of the "good life." In fact, Xela comes across as a bad version of a bad American city--Sacramento, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, etc. "Culture" consists of cell phones and Internet cafés, which are always crowded; there doesn't seem to be much else. Whatever happened to the Maya?, I thought to myself. To an outsider, the whole thing made for a strange sight: elderly indígena women on broken-down buses clutching cell phones, and nine-year-old Mayan girls tottering around on high-heeled shoes. And as in the majority of U.S. cities, the people are basically unfriendly. The staff in stores consists mostly of adolescents, who won't make eye contact and can barely grunt out "para servirle." It is as though what the United States was not able to destroy by means of "hard power," it was now finishing off by means of "soft power"--electronic toys, blockbuster films, Coca-Cola, and neoliberal economics.*

>These impressions were largely confirmed by conversations I had with people born and raised in the town. One woman, a social worker in her early forties, agreed with me about American electronic gadgetry being the focus of Xela culture. "It's quite amazing," she told me; "I work with families who go to bed hungry, who literally go without food, so that they can buy and maintain a cell phone. It enables them to say, 'yo soy alguien' (I am somebody), because in truth, they have no other identity or source of self-esteem. It's pretty pathetic, but that’s what Guatemala has come to." (I subsequently learned that Guatemala is No. 1 in Central America in cell phone consumption, and No. 3 in all of Latin America.)

>"When did all this start?", I asked her, "and how?"

>"I think in the sixties," she replied, "around the time that I was born. The greatest single influence was American television. Those images of the wealthy consumer life had a big impact on the Guatemalan population. Most of us still believe the images are real."

>"But what did Guatemalan culture consist of before the CIA overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954, and before the invasion of American TV?", I continued.

>She shrugged her shoulders. "I honestly don't know. What you see in Xela today–McDonald’s, Wendy's, shopping malls and all the rest–is all I've ever known. It's who we are now. I don't know who we were before that."

Boom.