Dangerous Ease of Claiming Class-Consciousness

To "possess" class consciousness means that individuals must understand certain group characteristics.  At the same time, having class consciousness means an individual can be aware of a group's collective feelings.  So, either a person is "class conscious" or they are not.  If they're judged unconscious by someone who claims to know the difference, then they're immoral beings.  Who'd wanna be class unconscious?  Please don't let it be me, moral deciders!

This topic reeks of context.  This is group determination of “truth” about individuals.  So, economic data along the lines of income, a number, or a person’s  plight as they sort through garbage for food are experiences that are part of reality, not descriptive pieces that depict the whole that one can absorb without experiencing.   

While facts about a person may cause humans to empathize and assist each other, it is impossible to “think” like a class.  I base this declaration on two assumptions and they might be a tad philosophical.  First, as far as I know I’m the only person inhabiting this body and thus, I’m the only person who can have imperfect knowledge of my mind (me), my experience, and thus my reality as I move through time.  “I know me best," which is a modified version of the Cartesian idea of “I think therefore I am.”  Second, I can’t mindtravel, which means  I can’t enter your brain and comprehend how you view life or even this note.  You could type your response, but I might misinterpret it or you could alter or even deceive others about what I’m trying to argue.

So, it stands to reason that if two person-interaction is flawed, because two imperfect, self-validated individuals can't understand each other "perfectly," then assumptions based on testimonials or data also do not present a “truth” free of doubt of individual reality.  Likewise, the amount of doubt increases as the number of persons involved increases, say to the size of an economic class.  

Even less so, trying to think “socially” does not mean a solution presented for the purposes of altering everyone else’s reality is the right decision.  There is no way to verify social consciousness the way you can validate your sole presence in your mind or your individual ignorance of another being controlling it.  Did God use me as his instrument to write this?  Are martians controlling me?  I can live my life believing so, thus believing in my lack of control, but unless proof appears that I'm NOT it in here, I can only validate "me" as making the decisions.  Nor does declaring that you must act "socially conscious to help the poor" suggest that a problem of whatever scope or complexity has been accurately diagnosed and the remedy valid.

So the question remains:  what's the value of economic data classed by certain criteria?

Under traditional Marxist theory, communists assume they possess the ability of working class consciousness and with that ideological foresight, they are instructed to seize the "means of production" as a "moral imperative (mission)" and then assume a dictatorship of the workers.  Aside from the flawed assumptions on the communist’s part, which subsumes worker differences for “collective truth,” scarce resources etc., the prescriptions to further “class consciousness” are even more horrifying.  So, Stalin’s programs to bring about socialism by fostering it at home in Russia led to purges.  Those millions of lives and families destroyed were bad influences, cancers to be eliminated because they did not fit his conception of class consciousness.  Connecting people by an abstraction led to violence for those that didn’t fit the ideal.

Now, I’m not writing that being aware of poverty is a bad thing or that purges must result.  Rather, I’m arguing that the debate over what to do about the problem of “poverty” should be approached as a rational weighing of different complex solutions.  A debate within the confines of our imperfect “law and order society” should prevent easy abstractions like class consciousness from directing people, based on their subjective view of what the objective should be.   Advocating for solutions because they believe they know what “it’s like to be poor” and therefore their program must be best is not good enough for me. 

The difficulty is that humans need to reduce complex problems to abstractions like class consciousness, because as proponents argue, it helps you to “understand the difficulties they are going through.”  Instead, the concerned public should ask the abstracters who claim social awareness how they know what they claim to know.  A healthy dose of skepticism is important.  I am under no illusions that abstracters will always choose “rational” arguments to defend their viewpoints, because why argue with someone who doesn’t believe in what you believe to be the truth?  

It's easier to call them an idiot or if you're a hardline North Korean Stalinist, label them immoral and shoot them. I am also not confident that by arguing with people who believe that they follow the ideal to its perfect form, they will ever feel obligated to present evidence to support their viewpoint.  It’s just that when challenging an imperfect system with at best a bright idealism or at worst a harmful, ephemeral feelings, humans need to be extremely critical about the prescriptions so that life isn't remade into a bloody gulag from humanity's past. 

The Complexities of Race in Schuette v. BAMN

 Let me break down the main ideas of both the majority and the dissenters so as to avoid any misconstruction of my analysis or to allow any hyperbolic oversimplification of what I have to say.

 Main arguments:

• Whether voters can EVER remove racial preference policies in the university admissions process.
• Whether that reversal can EVER be a valid political process OR whether de facto segregation is present whenever a reversal occurs because it burdens the minorities who were disadvantaged at the time of the original admission policy's creation.
• Whether NOT using a racial factor in an admissions policy places a special burden on certain races.
• Whether it is possible to change an admission process through democratic means.
• Whether or not Supreme Courts "are fooled" when political processes are altered that disfavor minorities as found verbatim in Sotomayor's dissent (2). 

Recently, the Supreme Court decided an important case about the issue of admissions policies based on race.  Schuette v. BAMN concerns the legality of using race factors in admissions.  Specifically, the Michigan voters approved a law removing race as a consideration for admission to undergraduate colleges.  Lower courts reversed this law as violating the political process doctrine.  This process is used to determine if changing a law can lead to negative impacts on certain groups of people.  Because the law's reversal would take away race as a factor, the Sixth Circuit reasoned that this would put an undue burden on racial minorities whose access to university admissions would be affected.  The Supreme Court struck the law down as unconstitutional.

However, they narrowly reversed the lower court's decision and stated that there was no reason to overturn the democratic decision of voters because there was no instance of blatant segregation to favor one group over another.  Basically, the majority's view is that they are unable to force a population to include race as a factor and the democratic process is not itself automatically suspect when it addresses racial issues if no instance of a violation of equal protection occurs.  If voters can NEVER decide issues related to race, because they can never reverse a race-based policy and only courts can, then the value of "democracy" in America is diminished.

  Democracy and Race

People exercise democratic principles and may bypass public officials.  In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor believes that people have many opportunities to express themselves politically, but if they oppose a policy of ending racial preference, they can never have that viewpoint become ensconced in law by popular vote.  She believes that violates the "political process doctrine," which by extension from her opinion forever keeps racial preferences.  

However, the main issue resolved by the majority is that the Michigan law does not inflict injury on those previously preferred (4).  The key question goes back to Hunter v. Erickson, Mayor of Akron, et al. in 1969.  Courts must use a different approach when looking at political decisions that are nonneatural or having a racial element.  The question is whether the Michigan law is nonneutral.  I believe that no racial preferences is neutral and that secondary effects of that change do not constitute segregation or legal racism.

As precedent, Hunter barely applies to the Schuette case.   Sotomayor places too much emphasis on this precedent.  In Hunter, the City Council of Akron passed laws to desegregate housing.  They were elected officials who passed through the political process and were seeking relief for minorities adversely affected by discrimination (Kennedy 7).   However, voters passed an amendment to overturn the ordinance that would desegregate, which then altered the process so that similar laws could not be passed again.  This manipulation of the process had discriminatory intent and was declared unconstitutional because it changed politics.  

The Hunter case overturned the voters opinion NOT because voters could never change the law in racial matters, but because the supporters of the amendment had created a law with the specific intent of targeting minorities.  Elected officials had acknowledged the unfair and discriminatory practices of landlords and acted.  By overturning that action to perpetuate inequality, the amendment was unconstitutional because it violated equal protection.   Another way of summarizing it is that removing the authority to address a racial problem has practical effects.  That may lead to a special burden on a minority group, which means the public can't take away the authority to address a racial problem from existing decisions.  It also means that advocates must seek relief for a denied service.  The most abstract implication is that demonstrated injury as a result of a change policy because of state encouragement or participation means that a racial problem could be made worse (Kennedy 7).

Seattle School District

Another key precedent to this case was Washington v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 458 U. S. 457. 
Then, it was decided that one level of government cannot take away authority from another part of government to resist desegregation IF the desegregation policy is still deemed necessary to achieve equal justice and integration (4).  The NAACP sued a school board in Seattle, Washington.  Seattle responded with the court-mandated "Seattle Plan," which used busing and mandatory reassignments to reduce racial imbalance (Kennedy, 9).  A state initiative seeking to overturn the Seattle Plan was determined to be unconstitutional.  Busing students to achieve racial balance was a valid remedy (Ken 10.).  Passing a law to overturn a legitimate remedy is unconstitutional.  Therefore, even a democratic initiative can be unconstitutional if it violates a court specified remedy.

As a precedent, Seattle seems to favor Sotomayor's line of reasoning as a democratic initiative was struck down because of the burden it placed on minorities that had successfully sought relief.  However, Sotomayor misreads Seattle as much as she accuses the majority of doing the same.  Unlike Seattle and in Shuette, remedial action in college admissions policies required "a showing of de jure segregation," meaning specific actions that Sotomayor calls  "invidious" and a "reallocation of power whose practical effect was condemned in Hunter" (Sotomayor 14).  

Kennedy rejects this broad reading of Seattle because there is no principled limit, no principle requirement for the court to determine the interests served by political policies of  a specific racial group according to Seattle (Kennedy 11).  Using the broad interpretation would allow "the creation of incentives for those who support or oppose certain policies to cast the debate in terms of racial advantage or disadvantage.  He believes this furthers "racial antagonisms and conflict (Ibid).  Seattle could be used expansively to gain benefit or even that certain interest groups could demand an equal protection ruling where decisions could be kept from voter review or participation simply of the possibility that a decision could be made on race" (Kennedy 13).  In the end, Kennedy decides that voters must be given the power to determine IF race-based preferences will be adopted and the court may "not dis-empowers the voters from choosing which path to follow" (Ibid).  Maybe they will vote for race-based preferences.  But, the court can't overturn that unless a violation exists.  

Kennedy also strikes at Sotomayor's assertion that the voter's decision should be overturned.  He states that Hunter and Seattle are not valid precedents, therefore rejecting Sotomayor's claim that the majority violates stare decisis (Kennedy 10).  He rejects the precedent that in this case the government can be instructed not to follow a course that defines racial categories and then one that grants special consideration to some races and not others (Kennedy 18).  Voters thought such a categorization and preference system was unwise. 

 

The Hunter-Seattle cases "direct courts to determine whether the challenged act "places effective decisionmaking authority over the racial issue at a different level of government"" (5).  Kennedy also exposes a contradiction in how courts have made decisions because states get almost limitless sovereignty as to how their states are structured.  Individuals still have the ability to participate in meaningful political processes regardless of race.  In fact, Kennedy argues that this idea doesn't even apply because voters were given the ability to decide and opponents of the law had the ability to engage in meaningful political engagement to stop it.  The Court can't invalidate 15 years of state public debate on this issue, nor can they pick and choose which policy interests are at stake with regard to the constitutionality of laws forbidding racial preference (Kenn. 15).  They failed, and it is against precedent to take away a mandate just because that outcome was not what the opponents wanted.  Therefore, Seattle and Hunter do not apply (6).  According to Kennedy, no precedent exists that limits racially disproportionate impacts (5).

This opinion is contrary to Sotomayor's characterization of the majority opinion that there was a transfer of discrimination across populations simply because a majority of the population changed its mind.  If that range has a racial component, then the court must scrutinize that decision.  The question remains if any state can address a racial problem by creating laws to remedy discrimination and create a law that helps one race.  If the state is given the power to remedy a situation, can the state EVER reverse its view of the state of race amongst the people it represents? 

To contradict Sotomayor, Kennedy wrote that those changes involved moving the ability to make a decision around the levels of government so that a racial preference could be established (for whites, against minorities).  In Schuette, unelected officials used race in admissions as one factor.  The Michigan law reversed the ability of these officials to use race.  The electorate is not too sensitive to handle the debate of complex issues like racial preference in the admissions process (Kennedy 16).  Furthermore, he argues that you can't simply take an issue out of the hands of voters just because you don't trust their result.  That, he argues, goes against the country's democratic principles. 

"Race-Neutral Laws"

Race-neutral laws CAN be created in states if they do not actively create discriminatory practices.  Kennedy wrote that one BROAD interpretation of equal-protection, like that found in Justice Sotoymayor's dissent, is unhelpful and can actually lead to more racial problems.  Some laws can have language that appears neutral, but when put into action, it can have adverse racial effects.  He and past courts categorically rejected that precedent because laws must show discrimination or the intention of it (5).  In Schuette v. BAMN, opponents of the law were unable to prove that voters intended to discriminate against minorities by altering the Regents board process and rules so race was no longer considered a factor in college admissions.  Basically, one cannot claim that a law violates equal protection only to remove equal protection from others.  

While the reasoning of the majority in the case may not be perfect, the decision was also NOT a reversion to the principle of "separate but equal" or the legal segregation as found in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson.  That leap of rhetoric is anachronistic as it assumes the same level of racism of institutions still exists comparable to over a hundred years ago in areas predominately in the South.   It does a disservice to those who might be convinced that there are factors which disproportionally affect minorities and keep them from attending college at a number consistent with whites.   This slippery slope fallacy has found its way to Justice Sonya Sotomayor's dissent.  She assumes an outcome, a return to segregation, from the propositions provided and automatically suspects race to be a factor in changes to the admissions policy.  She also implies  that any equalization of minority and majority rights in the political process is a deceptive practice on the part of the majority.  But, I believe she is mistaken.

Justice Kennedy and the majority more correctly assess the historical precedent set.  If judges can invalidate any law relating to race, even one that removes a race preference policy, then no democratic decision can be made concerning race at all.  In 2014, Michigan is not a region targeted for the kind of remedial efforts to break segregation in the South in the 1950s.  States with a history of actively integrating students should be able to make judgements about their laws especially if there is no blatant discrimination that results.  

Whether or not minorities will be affected in college is not the issue.  What is important is the ability of voters to engage in democracy even if their decisions are not universally accepted.  We engage in political debate not for some purposeless talk, but to find solutions to problems in a more orderly way than mudslinging or outright violence.  "American democracy" works best when we thoughtfully consider the implications of words, our abstractions, and recognize that even when discussing complex issues like race, where real injustices have occurred and still occur, we must work together to avoid bitter terminology and the oversimplification of the other side.  So please avoid comparing
Schuette vs. BAMN to Jim Crow or slavery.

Source:

 Schuette vs. BAMN.  572 U. S. (2014)

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-682_j4ek.pdf

Can a "Dream" Work for You?

Some "American Dream" Isn't Working for You?  Really?

"Happiness" abstractions are ideas different from our thoughts during sleep, which are comprised of   elements from our daytime lives.  Awake, we produce numerous thoughts that neither you nor I could ever count.  Yet, we use these same abstractions as tools much as a hammer is used to physically pound in nails.  Conscious thoughts do mental work for us as we roam the earth; sleep thoughts are scrambled ideas that we occasionally recognize if we remember them upon waking.  Conscious, mental tools are applied especially if we're exposed to them and if they're useful.  Yet, it matters little whether we're conscious believers or if we're nurtured into belief.  We believe because it helps us survive.

Dismiss this if you want, but why do you believe you need to work typing on a keyboard every day?  What's the real importance of your social life to your physical survival?  Is the "bad day" you've had without coffee really so or would it be trivial by other standards?

Arguing about abstractions is the reason why we have art, culture, or even war.  We dispute ideas from our own perspective, our own understanding of  ourselves, our happiness, and our comparison of ourselves with others.  Maybe, it's shared with others because they are "like us."  Maybe, it isn't and that's why "they" are wrong and maybe we should even hate them.  Whether it is the concept of "land ownership," "social justice," or some "holy war," mankind fights over what it thinks the real world is about.

We can still fail as species despite our best efforts.  Feelings of "failure" and "misery" are probably still going to be present in the real world, even if some people in places like America continue to feel happier.  Unless, some savior figure or some abstract system has some kind of world more perfectly organized and gifted to us because of their benevolence.  Wait!  Marxism and Nazism have failed in the real world so far, yet maybe someone can do them right?  Thank you future benefactor, whoever you are. (end sarcasm)

This unrelenting difference in belief is why humanity has disagreements.   Our undefined, abstract happiness stems from us as disagreeable beings because there are others that we can never have absolute control over.  What we've done with these beliefs is history.  But, how and why we believe in things often veers into a fruitless, metaphysical, and unsolvable debate.  (See Haybron for Happiness metaphysics).  Nowadays, does the average person really know what metaphysical means anyways?

Some abstractions should be useful as positive tools for individuals.  "The American Dream" should just be a goal-setting device, a positive, abstract direction that many people living in this "country" use to challenge themselves and to bring some greater sense of "happiness."  It's an explanation for individual drive and motivation here.  It is not the full attainment of all physical and emotional desires either for the individual or for society.  The abstraction does not describe happiness now, in the present.  Likewise, believing in the dream doesn't mean you believe that everything is perfect right now or that improvements can't be made to our lives.  So, why hamper or attack a belief that simply motivates individuals because it doesn't encompass a completely happy society?

It's just a future belief, something good and helpful.  It's a positive belief, a tool, that I've never felt wrong accepting.  Am I wrong to believe in "American Happiness" as INDIVIDUALS striving for a better future rather than having some objective state of happiness that MUST be given to everyone?  Why should we despise positive challenges when short of perfect luck, we're all going to face the good and the bad ones?  Can we  really socialize challenges so that everyone must rise to them?  Should the State do this?  Can the dream be imposed and should it?

(Don't answer...now)

Can anyone really say what "Happiness" SHOULD BE?

 

I saw an advertisement for the television show "Enlightened" that inspired me in a different way than the writers probably intended.  In the ad, Laura Dern said about America that "people are living under the illusion that the American Dream is working for them."  My first instinct was to groan.  What a defeatist attitude towards life and the problems we all face!  Recovering, I tried to figure out why this criticism was so widespread, why the "American Dream" abstraction was being attacked from such a lame show? What illusion was I under because I thought differently than these unhappy fictional people?

I researched and came to a different conclusion.  Many intellectuals groped about their existence in this place (America), yet did not flee to "better" places with less people, less diversity, and less responsibility in the world.  Apparently these other places have greater social systems where happiness flutters down from controlling governments. Where was this ultimate happy place?  Some say Denmark was it, the so-called happiest place in the world.  Really?

Others support this notion.  Writer Kerry Trueman believes that "Denmark" is better and happier.  Her idea of the place benefits many more people especially when put into contrast to the supposed failures of America and its huge impoverished underclass.  Denmark's social happiness comes from trust in each other and "at least in part to Denmark's legendary income equality and strong social safety net."  In the same article, she also attacks a strawman she sets up, whereby "Tea-party types" would probably attack Denmark as a hotbed of socialism, when it's really "just practicing a more enlightened kind of capitalism."  Again, America's critics view themselves as enlightened, with better ideas based on rationality, while those content with the ambitious nature of the American dream are uninformed, supportive of a system she believes willfully impoverishes millions.  As a group of "unenlightened capitalists," they hope for a ridiculous dream that will not come to pass with society left the way it is.

So, Danes must be happier all around.  The stats show it and their people must believe it.  And those who possess this positive formulation, a "pro-American interpretation" of some of the most complex abstractions mankind has ("aspirations," "happiness," "contentedness," etc.), don't rationally understand why Denmark is better or why a social safety net is necessary.  In fact, they probably don't understand much of what enlightened people like Ms. Trueman have planned for them.  Right?

Not exactly.  If these "Enlightened" are right, why was this foreign happiness so restrictive to tiny Denmark and not made available to people like me in America?  Nordic countries have smaller problems than the American superpower that has protected them.  They're smaller geographically, have smaller shares of the world's resources, and that's just a few of the geographic factors that don't allow for easy comparisons.

The people themselves are different.  Interconnected as though the two peoples might be, the USA has a lot more people, a greater cultural diversity, more immigration from more places and the problems that result from that complexity.  And there's the ideas that certainly differentiate the two.  The US is much younger than its Nordic competitors for happiness.  At its best, it is seen as a beacon for people seeking freedom everywhere.  At Denmark's best, they are Danish people with a shared identity, race, culture, as well as a long and colorful history that is incomparable to the American Republic.  Denmark even has a popular constitutional monarchy.  America threw out its king 238 years ago.

Denmark welcomes non-Danes to its country, but citizenship is different from cultural or ethnic identity.  Does being "Danish" have the same relation of shared historical, ethnic, cultural, linguistic abstractions to its believers as being "American" has with someone living in the USA?  I do not think so at all.  Those differences result in different institutions, in different acting people, and a translation of that difference to how those societies function.  Basically, they're just different "nations" with different people.  Some objective level of happiness between them would be nearly impossible to determine and trying to do so is self-serving for those seeking to change the lives of Americans.

Skepticism of Remedy:  A Critical Look at "Happiness" Abstractions and Their "Truthfulness"

I'm accepting the critic's form of argument about the American Dream.  We're putting two abstractions, two "countries" into a contrived confrontation along the lines of Ms. Trueman, one that she does for the purpose of boosting one side to chastise another.  Clearly, I do not intend to boost Ms. Trueman's side because I never perceived "American enterprise" to be a futile tool, or even one that is threatened with extinction if desired changes aren't made.  Is there a better model that can be rationally constructed and applied to reality so that the most or ALL people can achieve some objective level of happiness?  Maybe.  But, I'm not willing to give up my life for another person's conception of the world unless I feel it improves the good things we have now. 

And the better model question opened up a thousand more.  If Denmark was MORE happy, what were the requirements, the standards set by these Danish adjudicators of happiness?  What did Americans  have to do to make happiness appear as it apparently manifested elsewhere?  Should we empower these judges just so that we could meet their standards?  What authority of argument should we confer on Ms. Trueman or the fiction writers at "Enlightened" to allow them to disrupt and change the world we know?  In other words, why pick them to change us and what makes their vision of happiness right while others have to be wrong?  I didn't know.

Was it because Ms. Trueman claimed the Danish system was enlightened?  Was it because she attacked the Tea Party who, regardless of their arguments, must be bad and thus not worthy of us reading or deciding the validity of their beliefs ourselves?  Name-dropping and sarcastic references used in conjunction with logical fallacies must be acceptable forms of argumentation IFF they come from enlightened people.

A Glorious Past as Evidence of the American Dream?

(subtext: Certain things worked better in the past.  Therefore, empower the "Enlightened") 

 

America's social critics often look towards material happiness at either a desired future point of existence, someplace so designated on the planet today, or in some society that has gone or is in danger of going.  Yet, I easily found a more comfortable version of the dream, something still more familiar to 70% of Americans even today after all of our national troubles (See the Economic Mobility Project).  It was and is defined as something useful that many Americans still understand despite the turmoil in their individual lives.  It is individualistic and motivational, yet from our past.  It is without perfect social safety nets or "enlightened"  philosopher kings.   Yet, we've held on to this abstraction despite the negativity of the materialists who'd change us to be more like them. 

Let's look at the past because that at least doesn't venture into fortunetelling and these views resonate with at least surveyed opinions of what the American dream should be today.  Alexis De Tocqueville provides the most interesting early view of American material happiness and the American dream.  At the same time, de Tocqueville never painted an utopic picture  of America, bereft of some abstract concept of inequality or poverty.  America was not perfect, nor necessarily better, just different in outlook as he perceived it from "Old Europe" back home.

In Book two, Chapter ten of "Democracy in America," De Toqueville writes of the "general" feeling of Americans for the "passion of physical well-being. "  He contrasts the complex American democracy and the general feelings he observed of its citizens to equally abstract "aristocratic communities" where the wealthy, "never having experienced a condition from their own, entertain no fear of changing it."  In 19th century Europe, the rich, landed and heredity-privileged possessed economic and social stability and did not feel the need to advance.  Likewise, in such abstract societies, the poor become used to their lot.

But, he saw "America" differently.  He saw the love of well-being as the main taste of the nation where even the wealthy continue their quest for more because many knew poverty at some point in their lives.  It is this attitude of happiness that best exemplifies the "American Dream."  Americans enjoy "the bootless chase," where only death ends their unending quest for happiness.  We are "restless" in a land De Tocqueville called abundant (Book 2, Chapter 13).

I find this vision of the American dream vastly more appealing not because it places Americans at some higher level of humanity.  Rather, it presents an "American Dream" for what it is.  A tool, an ambitious one at that, but one that provides opportunities for good and bad among those who accept the challenge.  The challenge is not a social directive, where more rational people (like Trueman) or more socially unhappy people (like the "Enlightened" characters) decide what is best through more abstractions and government actions.  Rather, the American Dream is fundamentally individual and can only be conceived as motivation. 

De Toqueville's theories have further interesting applications for those who complain about the American Dream today.  He wrote that abolishing all privilege and fortune (let's say chance of birth or circumstance) is essentially impossible and dangerous.  Cloners or social planners beware!  When all jobs are made open to all, total equality would mean all citizens are less able to attain happiness because of "universal competition" where endless struggle overwhelms those individuals willing to use their unique talents to get ahead.

De Toqueville is also correct logically when he states that we will "never establish any equality with which [American] can be contented."  How does everyone enjoy independence and freedom without "anxiety and impatience?"  Critics today worry about the equality of condition, that altering the physical must translate into the mental.  But, De Toqueville contradicts this position when he wrote that a people "will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level."  Even if they did, "the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape the laws of man."  That's plenty abstract.

Natural law aside, why has the circumstance of my birth, education, and growth rendered me unable to comprehend the vision of happiness that reduces the element of "freedom" and "motivation" and increases the role of the government as a helping hand?  Can I ever understand this view point, to comprehend a powerful safety net at the expense of individual choice?  Is disagreeing with the critic's understanding of happiness simply to be dismissed, relegated to an irrational criticism coming from a privileged elite group?

Clearly, we have an inequality of minds as a people about the truth of the American dream.  But, why destroy my conception of the abstraction to justify your actions in affecting my freedom, namely by taking away more things I believe I own?  While you believe you are helping the needy become "happy" by taking stuff from some, to those who object to your seizure, you are making others less happy by violating their beliefs in working and owning what is theirs.  Both conceptions of happiness cannot then be acted upon by the two groups at the same time, with the same limited resources in contention, while keeping both opposing groups happy.

Is it your right and responsibility to increase the number of happy people in society because creating a social safety net will neccessarily result in that action?  Is that action guaranteed to increase happiness if we are going to alter reality for all to meet your vision?

In my case, I am motivated to achieve my own sense of happiness.  Because I am struggling with a positive attitude, I am not recklessly or even intentionally acting in a way that takes from other people.  Remember, ownership is simply believing that something is yours and not someone else's. Yet, I believe that we all benefit when people of all races, incomes, or creeds are motivated to do things for themselves so we share some useful concept of "America." 

Remember, getting angry about complex abstractions like "the American Dream" and "Happiness" is a waste of our limited time on earth!

 --> Do something yourself first and encourage motivation in those who lack it!  

Then we'll all be better off!

Sources:

Adams, John Truslow . “The Epic of America.”

"Does America Promote Mobility as Well as Other Nations?" Economic Mobility Project, November 2011. www.economicmobility.org

Daley, Suzanne.  "Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault."  The New York Times.  April 20, 2013

Isaacs, Julia B., Sawhill, Isabel V., and Haskins, Rob.  "Getting Ahead of Losing Ground: Economic Mobility In America."  The Brooking Institution
http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/Economic_Mobility_in_America_Full.pdf

Haybron, Dan, "Happiness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/happiness/>.

Kamp, David.  "Rethinking the American Dream." Vanity Fair.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904

O'Brein, Matthew.  "RIP, American Dream?  Why It's So Hard for the Poor to Get Ahead Today."  The Atlantic

Traub, Amy and McGhee, Heath C.  "State of the American Dream: Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle Class."
"http://www.demos.org/publication/state-american-dream-economic-policy-and-future-middle-class"

Trueman, Kerry.  "Looking for the American Dream?  Try Denmark."  10/07/2011  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/looking-for-the-american_b_1000928.html

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/here-comes-the-tidal-wave-on-enlightened