Walking with the Wise #393: The American Nightmare

“Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man's dwelling,

but a foolish man devours it.”
—Proverbs 21:20

We are a culture that has lost our way. In America, we have become addicted to stuff, “having it all,” and the “American dream.” What most don’t know is that the “American Dream” didn’t really come into existence until James Tuslow Adams coined the phrase in his book The Epic of America in 1931. His understanding of the American dream was rooted in the equality of man and the opportunity that each man would have to move beyond the social environment and accomplishments of his forefathers.

As the previous generations of our grandparents and great-grandparents pursued the dream, they understood that money was a tool, and if one were to have it, then it required personal responsibility, hard work, simplicity, and discipline. Not so today. With the invention of the credit card, along with what has morphed into a culture of entitlement through the spread of well-intentioned but myopic governmental programs, men and women have gradually lost sense of their priorities and succumbed to greater and greater consumerism, losing the previous generation’s sense of thrift and saving. The first credit card was introduced to the American public in 1958, making credit possible, where individuals didn’t need to have the money on hand to buy something, but would pay for it later. Each decade has seen an increase in the build-up of debt, as each generation has sought to have its best life now, never fully realizing that it was constructing a prison of purchase with each item bought.

The shift of the American dream worsened and became almost completely unshackled from the foundation of its ideals—replaced by credit approval, buoyed by lifestyles of the rich and famous, nurtured in our children as we gave them a greater sense of entitlement, preferring to give them more stuff rather than teaching them the ethics of working for it.

While Americans began to make more money and received more education, their individual debt increased astronomically. In the book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, author Greg Easterbrook noted that many academic studies by political scientists and mental-health experts had detected a marked uptick in the mid-century in the number of Americans who considered themselves unhappy. Interestingly enough, the more money that was made, the more people became unhappy. And as David Camp writes,

“The American Dream was now almost by definition unattainable, a moving target that eluded people’s grasp; nothing was ever enough. It compelled Americans to set unmeetable goals for themselves and then consider themselves failures when these goals, inevitably, went unmet. In examining why people were thinking this way, Easterbrook raised an important point. 'For at least a century,' he wrote, 'Western life has been dominated by a revolution of rising expectations: Each generation expected more than its antecedent. Now most Americans and Europeans already have what they need, in addition to considerable piles of stuff they don’t need.'

And the only way that could be accomplished was by taking on more debt.  This personal debt, coupled with mounting institutional debt, is what has got us in the hole we’re in now. …The amount of outstanding consumer debt in the U.S. has gone up every year since 1958, and up an astonishing 22 percent since 2000 alone. The financial historian and V.F. contributor Niall Ferguson reckons that the over-leveraging of America has become especially acute in the last 10 years, with the U.S.’s debt burden, as a proportion of the gross domestic product, 'in the region of 355 percent,' he says. 'So, debt is three and a half times the output of the economy. That’s some kind of historic maximum.'”

Why do I cite this for you? And why do I take so much time to go through this? Because it’s in the air we breathe. We have swallowed the pill of what has become the American dream, not realizing it was Satan’s bait, and that rather than leading to freedom, it has led us into a type of slavery to status and stuff. The original ideals of the American Dream are still there, albeit covered by rampant consumerism, materialism, and entitlement, whereby we feel this is where we are “supposed” to be and that all of the things of this world—the TV’s, cars, and homes are ours by divine right, our own type of Manifest Destiny. We must sweep away the rampant materialism we have gorged ourselves on, going back to the pursuits of purpose within the Person of God.

In pursuing the American dream as it has become, we have lost God. What is there now is not the bold dream of the founding fathers, but the bloated and gluttonous tantrum of a spoiled child. We have come to epitomize Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, singing the song “I want it now.”

We have replaced the Creator with the creation. We have replaced virtue with vanity, holiness with hype, sacrifice with shopping, and have surrendered to the accumulation of stuff. Like Narcissus of old, we have fallen in love with our own image.

We are in some way the product of the generation before us, and our children will be the products of the legacy we leave behind. What we do in moderation, our children will do in the extreme. But as of now, the prospects are not great—because this upcoming generation cares more about fame than the faith, more about popularity than prayer, more about celebrity than Christlikeness, and that is in large part because that is what we have offered to them. We pursue the easy path of convenience, rather than working to instill virtue and forge character in the foundry of faith.

It is our responsibility to return to the Bible’s teachings about money. We don’t spend as the fool does in today’s passage; instead, we give to the Lord, we save, and we simplify our lives, learning to live within the parameters God has laid out for us. And we will find ourselves freed from our prisons of purchase, to freely give to God, grow in our walk with Him, and live like we have never lived before. Amen.