There are two stories at the heart of the American Dream. The first is that hard work is morally good.: if you work hard, if you sweat and toil and skip Sabbaths, you are a good person. Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is not only possible, it is admirable. There’s no shame in work, but there is shame in laziness. It is noble, moral, and righteous to work hard.
The second follows the first: hard work brings monetary success. Those skipped Sabbaths will add up to years of leisure when the sweat you’ve poured into the earth becomes financial gain. There will come a time when your hard work will bring all the riches you’ve worked for (riches here may not mean wealth, but it certainly means advancement— out of a difficult situation, out of a bad town, out of the social class of one’s parents). In the American Cinderella Story, there is no prince: Cinderella works herself out of her own ashes.
The trouble is with the things we leave unsaid in these stories. Those who don’t work are bad. Those who are rich are good. Riches are a sign of moral goodness. If money comes to those who work hard, and those who work hard are good, then of course anyone with money is morally superior to those without. The more money, the better: the better the life, the better the person.
Consider: why is it so hard to demand justice against the rich? Why would the first image of someone using social welfare systems be of one who abuses the system, instead of one for whom the system was built? Why do we know that the most successful businesses in America do terrible things, but it somehow doesn’t reach the part of us that makes us sick? Why would anyone believe that someone born into wealth represents the working class in politics? I think the answer is simple: those without money are (fundamentally) bad, and those with money are (fundamentally) good, or at least deserving. It also means that good, hardworking people are never poor; they are the almost-rich. Those who enslaved other human beings weren’t evil; they were capitalizing. And, of course, making capital is almost identical to making moral goodness.
I’m aware that it is illogical to say that because hard work is good, all those who do not perform work are bad. It isn’t even borne out by the front page of newspapers that the rich are good. However, the human heart is not a logical place. We believe; we don’t deduce. The harbor of the soul requires constant tidal movement, or it becomes a shelter for whatever ideas grow best in the dark. These are not the ideas of America; they are the spaces between the ideas.
The more I look at myself, the more I realize that I have bought the American Dream stories and that they will cost me my life. They will cost me my compassion, they will cost me my work ethic, they will cost me my love of Christ. How can I love my neighbor if I am weighing their economic value before I decide if they are worth investing in? How can I love myself while I am poor? How can I call for justice when I believe deep down that those with the power do know what they’re doing, and that what they are doing is right?
I can’t.