Requiem For The American Dream Quotes

I guess it could be said that the inspiration for 'Requiem for a Dream' is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet.

the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.

By now, less than 7 percent of private sector workers have unions, and it’s not because workers don’t want unions—polls show that, overwhelmingly, they want to unionize—but they can’t.

There’s a very simple point about arithmetic—if you happen to be in a swing state, a state where the outcome is indefinite, and you don’t vote for, say, Clinton, that’s equivalent to voting for Trump. That’s arithmetic.

I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

The United States was a settler-colonial society, the most brutal form of imperialism. You’d need to overlook the fact that you’re getting a richer, freer life by virtue of decimating the indigenous population, the first great “original sin” of American society; and massive slavery of another segment of the society, the second great sin (we’re still living with the effects of both of them); and then overlook bitterly exploited labor, overseas conquests, and so on. Just overlook those small details and then there’s a certain truth to our ideals.

I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.

to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting. I

Workers aren’t free to move, labor can’t move, but capital can.

Aristotle was right—the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

The Republicans have moved so far toward a dedication to the wealthy and the corporate sector that they can-not hope to get votes on their actual programs, and have turned to mobilizing sectors of the population that have always been there, but not as an organized coalitional political force: evangelicals, nativists, racists, and the victims of the forms of globalization designed to set working people around the world in competition with one another while protecting the privileged.

Well, one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is by what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating consumers.” If you can fabricate wants, make obtaining things that are just about within your reach the essence of life, they’re going to be trapped into becoming consumers. You read the business press in the 1920s and it talks about the need to direct people to the superficial things of life, like “fashionable consumption,” and that’ll keep them out of our hair.

We’re human beings, we’re not automatons. You work at your job but you don’t stop being a human being. Being a human being means benefiting from rich cultural traditions—not just our own traditions, but many others—and becoming not just skilled, but also wise. Somebody who can think—think creatively, think independently, explore, inquire—and contribute to society. If you don’t have that, you might as well be replaced by a robot. I think that simply can’t be ignored if we want to have a society that’s worth living in.

If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it. That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.

Aristotle’s Politics, Book III, Chapter 8 The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is between poverty and wealth. Wherever the rulers, whether they be a minority or a majority, owe their power to wealth, that is an oligarchy. Wherever the poor rule, that is a democracy. Usually, where the rulers hold power by wealth, they are few, but where the poor rule, they are many, because few men are rich but all are free [if they are citizens in a city-state], and wealth and freedom are the grounds on which the two groups lay claim to government. Democracy is not necessarily only wherever the multitude has authority. Oligarchy is not necessarily wherever a minority has power over the system of government. If the majority of a citystate were wealthy and had authority, nobody would call it a democracy, just as if a small group of poor men had control over a larger rich population, nobody would call it an oligarchy. Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.

What we have to do is trap them into consumerism. Carry out enough propaganda and teasers and so on to make freed slaves feel they’ve got to have these commodities. They go to the company store and they get them, they’re in debt, and pretty soon they’re trapped—the slave economy’s back.

The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality but only self-interest, has made accountability almost non-existent. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all.

That’s essentially neoliberalism. It has this dual character, which goes right back in economic history. One set of rules for the rich. Opposite set of rules for the poor.

If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.

The tendency in K–12 is reducing education to mechanical skills, and undermining creativity and independence—both on the part of teachers and students. That’s what “teaching to the test” is, “No Child Left Behind,” “Race to the Top.” I think these should be regarded as methods of indoctrination and control. Of course, one of the other ways to do that has been to simply reduce or eliminate free education.

In fact, what are called international “free trade agreements” are not free trade at all. The trade system was reconstructed with a very explicit design of putting working people in competition with one another all over the world.

The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. What that means is the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that what the population wants, and what was once mainstream, now looks radical and extremist.

A major reason for the concentrated, almost fanatic attack on unions and organized labor is they are a democratizing force. They provide a barrier that defends workers’ rights, but also popular rights generally. That interferes with the prerogatives and power of those who own and manage the society.

The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has an immediate goal. “It’s not just getting kids to whine,” one marketer explained in Selling to Kids, “it’s giving them a specific reason to ask for the product.” Years ago sociologist Vance Packard described children as “surrogate salesmen” who had to persuade other people, usually their parents, to buy what they wanted. Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads—such as “leverage,” “the nudge factor,” “pester power.” The aim of most children’s advertising is straightforward: Get kids to nag their parents and nag them well.

Then comes the Bush and Obama bailout, which reconstructed the powerful institutions—the perpetrators—and left everyone else floating. There was severe harm to people, who had houses taken away from them, jobs diminished, and so on. That’s where we are now. It was done with impunity, and they’re building up to the next one.

You hear it in every political speech, “vote for me, we’ll get the dream back.” They all reiterate it in similar words—you even hear it from people who are destroying the dream, whether they know it or not. But the “dream” has to be sustained, otherwise how are you going to get people in the richest, most powerful country in world history, with extraordinary advantages, to face the reality that they see around them? Inequality is really unprecedented. If you look at total inequality today, it’s like the worst periods of American history. But if you refine it more closely, the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1 percent. There were periods like the Gilded Age in the 1890s and the Roaring Twenties and so on, when a situation developed rather similar to this, but the current period is extreme. Because if you look at the wealth distribution, the inequality mostly comes from super-wealth—literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super-wealthy. This is the result of over thirty years of a shift in social and economic policy. If you check you find that over the course of these years the government policy has been modified completely against the will of the population to provide enormous benefits to the very rich. And for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

It means that students, if they don’t come from very wealthy families, they’re going to leave college with big debts. And if you have a big debt, you’re trapped. I mean, maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, but you’re going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those debts. And by the time you’re part of the culture, you’re not going to get out of it again.

If you take the Fourteenth Amendment literally, then no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if they’re a person. Well, the courts, in their wisdom over the years, have carved that away and said they’re not persons. Undocumented aliens who are living here and building your buildings, cleaning your lawns, and so on, they’re not persons, but General Electric is a person, an immortal, super powerful person.

A major question was to what extent should we permit real democracy? Madison discussed this pretty seriously, not so much in the Federalist Papers—which were kind of propaganda—but in the debates of the Constitutional Convention, which are the most interesting place to look. If you read the debates, Madison said the major concern of the society—any decent society—has to be to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” His phrase.

And they make sure that their own interests are very well cared for, however “grievous” the impact on the people of England, or others. Now it’s not merchants and manufacturers, it’s financial institutions and multinational corporations. The people who Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind”—and they’re following “the vile maxim,” “All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” They’re just going to pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else.

A society in which normal human instincts and emotions of sympathy, solidarity, mutual support, in which they’re driven out. That’s a society so ugly I don’t even know who’d want to live in it. I wouldn’t want my children to. If a society is based on control by private wealth, it will reflect those values-values of greed and the desire to maximize personal gain at the expense of others. Now, a small society based on that principle is ugly, but it can survive. A global society based on that principle is headed for massive destruction.

But from the point of view of the masters of mankind, it doesn’t matter much—“as long as we make plenty of profit tomorrow, who cares if our grandchildren won’t have a world to live in?

In all post-emancipation societies the balance between the possibility of land ownership and self-sufficiency for ex-slaves and their dependence on wager labor determined the tightness of this labor control. In the US South planters effectively transformed ex-slaves into an agricultural proletariat with a gamut of labor relations ranging from tenancy to sharecropping to debt-peonage. The necessary political corollary of this labor system was the preservation of white supremacy.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Short, January 8, 1825 Men, according to their constitutions, and the circumstances in which they are placed, differ honestly in opinion. Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please; others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, etc. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society. The former consider the people as the safest depository of power, in the ultimate, they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent. This is the division of sentiment now existing in the US.

Basically, the idea of the aristocrats is that power has to be vested in a special class of particularly distinguished and privileged people, who will make the decisions and do the right thing.

I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is about giving, not getting. HUBERT SELBY JR. Requiem for a Dream (Preface, 2000)