Manufacturing Social Distress by Robert W. Rieber

Author:Robert W. Rieber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
Published: 2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

5

Dreams Money Can Buy

Robert W. Rieber1

(1) John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA

You only live twice or so it seems, one life for yourself and one for your dreams. You drift through the years and life seems tame. So one dream appears and love is its name. And love is a stranger who becomes your own. Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone. This dream is for you so pay the price. Make one dream come true, you only live twice. Theme song from the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice1

We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV. i.

We have observed the institutionalization of distress as it reveals itself in several personal and social phenomena. These include the pathology of normalcy, the social breakdown of the mass society, the loss of personal reverence, the decline of the family and the neighborhood, the institutionalization of the value conflict, and the elaboration of the seven institutionalized stressors. Throughout the preceding chapters, we have examined the extent to which certain degrees of normalized psychopathy have become a part of everyday life, as evidenced, for instance, in the character of various national heroes, spanning the outlaw of the wild frontier and the gangster of the modern metropolis.” From characters like P. T. Barnum to W. C. Fields, Ronald Reagan to Charles M. Keating, Jr., the social conditions fostering the attitude constitute the foundations of American pluralism. The readiness to cast aside the veneer of respectability, exemplified by Mark Twain’s advice to the uncertain, “When in doubt, tell the truth,” makes up an indispensable mark of the American national character.

The political tolerance of our confused century, coupled with the intense economic competition of the capitalist system, nourishes an attitude of loyalty to one’s primary reference group, accompanied by a willingness to exploit outsiders to the limit of the law. As we have already asserted, the United States—particularly the urban areas—hardly resembles any type of melting pot. Rather, this country has become a salad bowl that allows homogeneous neighbors to exist with one another in an ethnic patchwork. This process results in the hyphenated American, whose loyalties have been divided by the overall society.

As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, the objective disturbances in a society’s mode of functioning produce social stress, while the term “social distress” refers here to the inner value conflicts that arise in the wake of rapid social change. We cannot ignore the precipitous increase of social distress in existing institutions burdened with ineffective value systems that inevitably propagate contradictory doctrines. This “modus operandi” is self-defeating and it significantly adds to daily stress, for the individual as well as for the society as a whole.

By examining our conception of social dreams, we will have a clearer understanding of the psychopathy of everyday life as it takes place in our contemporary society.

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