The way we always thought we were doesn’t work and never did – not as we so boldly and blindly assumed

Has the American Dream become our Nightmare? Mary Sykes, alternet.com

I recommend you read Syke’s well written piece from top to bottom.

“The time is ripe for us to rethink some of our deepest beliefs about the way this country should work, and how we should live our lives.” – Mary Sykes

Excerpts:

The American "mind-cure" or "new thought" movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries (that morphed into the New Age and self-help industries later on) built a phenomenally successful market around the proposition that God, or Jesus, or World Spirit, or Universal Mind, or the Great All, wanted you to have whatever you desire, particularly success and money (which amount to the same thing). Of course, as the mind-cure gurus constantly exhorted their flocks: you have to do your part to help the universe along—that is, concentrate with dogged, single-minded focus on the object of your wish and believe with unflagging confidence and relentless optimism that you will get it.

Among thousands of books with this numbingly repetitious message, some a hundred or more years old and still being published, are Think and Grow Rich, The Science of Getting Rich, The Magic of Believing, The Miracle of Right Thinking, In Tune with the Infinite, Prosperity God's Way, and two all-time breadwinners, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, and The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale, a liberal Presbyterian minister. Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, which has sold five million copies since its 1952 printing and is still popular, is a classic of the genre. To achieve success, Peale writes, "Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. That is most dangerous, for the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. So alwayspicture Ôsuccess,' no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment."

… According to the holy canon of the true faith of the unimpeded free market, if people are allowed to individually pursue what they regard as their own enlightened self-interest, their collective behavior will result in a general state of robust, healthy economic equilibrium overall. The market is by definition "perfect." Most people will generally make rational choices about how to make and spend money, if given their druthers. Even the personal failings of individuals—greed, ignorance, dishonesty, fear, "irrational exuberance"—will cancel themselves out and the system will act "as if" every person were a perfectly rational, responsible Homo economicus.

Since everybody in the market is, in effect, a paragon of economic virtue and propriety, the free operations of the marketplace will be perfectly transparent, automatically and naturally providing access for all to the information people need to make prudent, well-informed decisions: buyers and sellers will have equal power and opportunity to settle on a fair, mutually-agreed-upon price. Self-interest will lead every person to act wisely, ethically, and with nice concern for the other players in the game.

This almost comically na•ve view of human behavior and how real human economies actually work has been the foundational dogma of academic economics and a linchpin of capitalist ideology for much of the past century. Given today's ongoing financial train wreck, it now seems amazing that so many big economic brains held beliefs that are such an assault on ordinary common sense. Many of these experts are now walking around shell-shocked.