Let it Die

As we roll into the meat of the 2020s, I find myself looking around at a world that looks much different than the one in which I grew up. I know, I’m not that old, and if you talk to people in my parents’ generation (some of you out there), you’ll probably hear something like, “Yeah, no kidding. Let me tell you about _________.” And, people in my generation – are we Generation X? Are we Millennials? – have seen and participated in a lot in our short time. WMDs that weren’t, the tipping point of our climate catastrophe, and the rise (or is it the re-emergence) of neo-fascism. Also, broad legalization of gay marriage (shameful that it needed legalizing, but ok), the rise of widespread social activism in seemingly unlikely places, and Beyoncé. Perhaps more than anything, we have not only lived through the birth of, but created and helped grow, something truly transformative: The Age of Technology. 

I remember when The Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe was the height of modern tech. I remember our first home computer, a Mac PowerPC with a FOURTEEN INCH MONITOR!! I remember being in early high school and so badly wanting one of those cool translucent blue Motorola pagers. Dude, you know that you still have to get to a land line to respond, right? But MAN was that cool tech. I remember my first Nokia Brick cell phone (I realize that “Brick” wasn’t the model designation, but it should have been. You could cause some real damage with those things, and they were indestructible). Then there was this thing called a T-Mobile 2-Way, that had a full slide-out keyboard (WHAT?!) and let you send these things called “text messages.” Revolutionary! But back up, because long before texting – or SnapChatting, or TikTokking, or Tweeting – became our foremost ways of communicating, making actual phone conversations a rapidly dying art, there was this way you could use numbers to send a little word on a pager (55378008 upside down, what does that spell? Anyone who ever had a pager as a teenager knows…).

I remember my first TV, a 32-inch monster that weighed like 60lbs and went with me from apartment to apartment until it finally stopped working; then it took a red-eye flight off the top of my 3-story apartment building into the alley below. Ah, college. Long before Spotify and Apple Music, there was this magical thing called Napster, then LimeWire, where you could find and download literally any song or video off of a mysterious “server” that was based somewhere “overseas” aka in my friend Brandon’s bedroom closet. Fast-forward to 2009, when I got my first iPhone 3GS; even then Apple was confusing us with their designations…just call it the Fancy Brick 3 and move on. 

The level of innovation and the pace of technological development in the last 25 years has been staggering, and in 2021, nearly everything we do is grounded in some kind of technology. Everything from our Fancy Brick 27 phones to our cars to the airplanes that used to fly us around (RIP leisure travel, hoping for Your resurrection) to our home appliances and our Bluetooth-controlled heated socks (real thing) are governed primarily not by us, but by computers. We’ve spent the last year - at least those of us over the age of 25 since the younger generations are born with this knowledge – getting a crash course in group video chatting, presentation lighting, PowerPoint integration, Qualtrics surveys, and social media. We use technology, as we have throughout history used whatever is available at the time, to connect with some people and separate from others, to create opportunities and perpetuate inequality, to make our lives easier and to make other people’s lives a living hell, to uplift and oppress, and everything in between. Today, the good and bad are amplified, and the gap between them is widened, with each technological advancement. And throughout all of this “progress,” the idea of the so-called American Dream has stayed the same. But, this is not a discussion of the resiliency of that dream.

The Oxford dictionary defines the American Dream thusly: The ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved. In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams claimed when describing the American Dream that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement, regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.” Ok, a lot to unpack there, especially knowing what we do about the inequality intentionally built into all of our social, economic, educational, and political systems. But first, let me point out that I searched the still-a-mystery-to-most-of-us internet to find that information, and am typing this on a computer that 35 years ago could literally have run all of the world’s financial systems and still had processing power left over to watch puppies wrestle on YouTube. But I digress.

So the American Dream is a set of ideals sort of based on the Declaration of Independence: All men (and the problems begin!) are created equal with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc. Those ideals also include democracy, basic human rights, and equality aligned such that the American definition of freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity, success, and upward social mobility, all achieved primarily through hard work. You know, reach down, and pull yourself up by the ol’ bootstraps. 

First, can we all agree that life in fact COULD be better and richer and fuller for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic circumstances or race or anything else? Good. Unfortunately, literally all of our systems are founded on the principle of INequality. For the purposes of this study, however: In Adams’ definition above, the phrase “for each according to their ability or achievement” is essentially a loophole that allows for the subjective assignment of value to human beings. The idea of a meritocracy only works if first we all agree that each and every human being is fundamentally equal with no exceptions made for anything that is socially constructed. By “socially constructed,” I mean the differences in value between people that we ascribe to concepts like race, class, wealth, gender, and sexual orientation among others. These are all constructs, ideas born in the minds of human beings (rather than truths existing in Nature), and while they might be important in social contexts – some more, some less – we most often use them to assign status or to place other human beings in a hierarchy of merit. 

I’m not implying that hierarchies are absent in the Natural world. It’s just that in Nature, merit is objective; all creatures are born, some survive, some don’t; all creatures die, not because they’ve been oppressed by their fellows, but because they weren’t strong or cunning or ranked or supported enough to make it. In Nature’s meritocracy, there is no oppression; that is a uniquely human concept. I am also not saying that there is equality in Nature. In fact, most animal social systems are very stratified, with complex ranking systems and relatively rigid social status designations that are often brutally enforced and very difficult to transcend.

However, we are the only species that decides to hurt other members of our own species with malice, with the intent to divide and conquer; we are the only ones that use the concept of “otherness” to decide who gets to excel and who doesn’t. In the wilds of North America, a Grey Wolf doesn’t see itself as in some way inherently superior to a Sea Wolf, and out in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, the Humpback Whales don’t hate the Blue Whales just because they’re blue. We are the only species that thinks this way. And yes, we are unique among the other creatures on Earth in many ways, from the length of our gestation to the relative helplessness of our young to the development of higher cognition and ego, to the gathering of people into groups the sizes of which go well beyond the ideal or useful, to the use of tools and technology to artificially move us up the food chain. And, more than anything, we separate ourselves from Nature by creating hierarchies that are based on things that don’t matter from an evolutionary perspective.

In nearly every human society larger than 150 people (see Yuval Noah Harari’s incredible book Sapiens for an explanation of this number) we decide who gets access not only to the things that we claim are universal rights, but also to the technology that is, in 2021 more than ever, necessary for things like economic success and social mobility, not to mention basic survival for people in some places on Earth. We see it all around, from gender-based pay inequality and the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, to the “super-predator” designation and subsequent mass incarceration of young Black men in the 90’s that continues today. We see it in the brutally inequitable and cruelly unequal distribution of educational resources, and in the lack of access to basic needs like clean water, sanitation, food, shelter, and healthcare. Our subjective and ridiculous categorization of our fellow human beings is the foundation of institutions and behaviors in most societies on Earth today.

We are seeing it right now in the cruel and unusual mess that is American politics: For example, rather than examining why their policies are unpopular with the majority of the citizens who they supposedly democratically represent (I’m thinking specifically about the Green New Deal, The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, universal background checks for potential gun owners, and the most recent COVID-19 relief bill that passed with zero Republican votes in the Senate or in Congress), the bulk of the Republican party in this country has decided that the answer is that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t deserve to vote (warped meritocracy at its very finest). They have introduced more than 250 bills across the country that are specifically designed to limit the supposedly fundamental democratic right to use one’s voice, entirely based on their subjective – in this case, racist – definition of merit, and using (or withholding, if the situation calls for it) the very technology that is supposed to make voting MORE accessible to keep certain groups of people out of the democratic process. Technology unites, technology divides, and though the examples I’ve given pertain to the society in which I happen to live, American society is not unique or special or exceptional in its oppression. 

So, the American Dream is based on the idea of meritocracy, but we as a society don’t actually believe that everyone is created equal or that we all deserve the same happiness, opportunity, health, and respect, and so our meritocracy, and therefore the American Dream that is based upon it, are lies. We assign value to things that, in the Natural order, don’t matter. We go to incredible lengths, use every system and technology at our disposal, gesticulate and twist ourselves in knots in the effort to justify why a White man is more deserving of an opportunity for success or free speech or expression or a vote or life itself than a Black man. If that doesn’t work, we have incredibly advanced and marvelous ways of killing each other. We use the supposed merit of our brand of ideology to wage seemingly endless – and usually failed, especially since 1945 – wars against people who we have decided don’t deserve the right to self-governance simply because they have the audacity to disagree with us, or because they’re poor, or brown, or see God a different way than we do, or are “primitive” technologically. And where has it gotten us?

Throughout human history, our technological advancements have served at least equally to divide as they have to unite. With each revolution – Agricultural, Industrial, Technological – we have come together in larger numbers in pursuit of prosperity and progress, even as with each successive advancement, the gulf between the “meritorious” and the “undeserving,” the haves and the have nots, has grown, and we have fundamentally failed to evolve. We are doing the same things now as we have been for the last several millenia, with ever more advanced ways of rolling around in our same old problems. Social media, my generation’s great gift to the world, is the ultimate expression of this, a way for us to stay connected and stay informed, but also our most insidious tool yet for perpetuating our false meritocracy, promoting a fixed picture of worth, of deserving, of “what life should look like.” Social media is this generation’s social propaganda machine, cleverly packaged as a vehicle for individual expression.

If we can look past that, however, the gift of social media is that the failings of the American Dream – a dream adopted and pursued not just by Americans, but by people all over the world – are on display for everyone with open eyes to see. We elected someone who was a caricature of that dream, a representative of the perverse and cruel value placed on all the things that don’t actually matter. I don’t blame Donald Trump for the racism that he gave voice to, the bigotry that he encouraged to flourish, the deep division that he showed us and helped stoke in our societies. It was always there, the festering lie at the center of the “land of milk and honey,” the seething resentment and deep-seated race- and class-based oppression in our systems and cities and towns and, if we’re being honest, in ourselves.

Trump in fact told us that the American Dream is dead; he helped kill it, and in doing so showed us - some for the first time, some not - a fundamental truth about a part of who we truly are as a country. In counterpoint, he also helped us see who we could be if we choose to learn from, then heal that which he helped bring to the forefront. And, in order to heal something, one has to face it, and now we have an opportunity – another opportunity – to do so.

We are deeply divided, deeply mired in powerful racist and classist institutions, callous and cynical and confused and arrogant and self-righteous and terrified. And, we are also strong, compassionate, resilient, creative, funny, inspired, visionary, and loving. We, like almost every other creature on Earth, are complex social animals who need connection with each other in order to express the best of who we are. The Trump Train is still rolling, fed fossil fuels by a small – but loud, and growing – group of people desperate to maintain the lie and the power it bestows upon them. And yet, with every mile down the track, something that was obscured by darkness is brought – often brutally, painfully, tragically – out into the light. In a very real way, 2020 witnessed the dying of the American Dream; I say good riddance.

With that dream dead and buried, what shall we create in its place? While human beings have an unparalleled capacity for cruelty and narcissism, we also possess the capacity to choose otherwise. We have free will. We could and can – and in some places, do – build inclusive and equitable institutions that celebrate the diversity, depth, and breadth of the human experience. There are people out there now who truly believe in unity, not for the sake of optics or PR, but for the sake of our collective health, sanity, success, and growth. For our survival.

We have the capacity to cultivate societies based on objective fairness, world citizenship, and collective well-being. I know we can build this because I see how much effort we put into creating its opposite; how much energy do human civilizations expend trying to outpace Nature and dominate and conquer everything in life, each other, even death itself? There is no such thing as a life without pain, loss, suffering, hard choices, compromise, and an eventual end. Instead of giving our energy to fighting these things while shirking our responsibility for the damage we cause in the process, we could use our ingenuity, resources, technologies, and connection to each other and the natural world to build something different. 

To evolve. 

To support and hold ourselves and each other accountable. 

To develop and deploy technology to aid those in need, save our planet, and to help people thrive in the ways that honor their different values, beliefs, ancestors, history, and dreams.

To tell the truth.

To make compassion the central principle of everything we do and every institution we create. 

Maybe the point is that, in this new Age of Technology when the world is so interconnected and small, the time for disparate societal dreams has passed, and the time for a new Human Dream has arrived.

Originally published on March 20, 2021