The Real American Dream

By Pierce K. Kozlowski

The Founding Idea

America was founded on an idea. That idea was the product of nearly 3,500 years of philosophical evolution and was formally conceived in 4th century BCE Athens, with Socrates and Aristotle and their views on the duties of citizens; that idea was better developed and later lost in the 11th century with St. Thomas Aquinas and his works on Natural Law; that idea was rediscovered in the age of Humanism during the 14th-century Renaissance with Francesco Petrarca and his translations of Cicero's writings on Stoicism; that idea was then reinforced in the age of Enlightenment during the 17th century, during which time Montesquieu’s model of a checked & balanced government and John Locke's ideas of Natural Rights were fully expressed. That idea posits that individuals have natural rights which predate government, thereby making the sole purpose of government to diligently protect those natural rights.

Whereas the government has a moral duty to protect the rights of citizens, citizens have a moral duty to conduct themselves virtuously and as beneficiaries of these protections. In essence, freedom is not free. Therefore, the communal duties of the citizenry are to exercise freedom and pursue virtue with their natural, inalienable rights—with virtue consisting of qualities such as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. Nowhere is this value and calling echoed louder in history than at America's founding.

The American Dream was a developing idea during the gilded age in the mid-to-late 19th century, coming to fruition in 1931. James Truslow Adams, a famous historian who coined the phrase The American Dream, referred to it as this: “That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” Adams expounded upon one of the core founding philosophies originally devised by Locke in 1689, which recognized and championed humanity's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (Locke, 1689).

This founding article of faith—the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"— was in response to the over saturated, European culture of brutal autocracy and royal hierarchy, where despotic leadership and authoritarian monarchism were real and present threats to the freedom of Europe's inhabitants. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson reinforced the Lockean tenet, which addressed the right to lead a life free from the oppressive shackles and draconian tendencies of government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Jefferson, 1776).

After all, one has the right to pursue their convictions of true happiness within the confines of decency and reason. Of course, there is no equal guarantee of success. However, there is a guarantee of equal access to natural rights, endowed to you from nature and nature's Creator.

The Founding Idea Fully Realized

Given that the cords of the Constitution and pillars of the Declaration of Independence lay forth a philosophy which suggests humans ought to have a free and unobstructed route to pursuing happiness, the American dream is both feeling and being free under a blanket of freedom-based, negative rights embedded within the constitutional framework—a framework forged upon the foundations of Judeo-Christian values, Greek reason, and English tradition.

The American Dream—the truths laid forth in America's founding core principles—is the inextricable entwinement of both nation and culture; the American Dream is the idea that individuals possess natural, God given rights which must be protected as sacrosanct; the American Dream is the championing of moral duty, pursuing good and virtuous endeavors as both an individual and a community; the American Dream—developed not in 1931, but in 1776—is in and of itself inseparable from the doctrines of the nation; the American dream is neither materialistic nor idealistic, but rather virtuous and revolutionary because it recognizes the inherent worth and intrinsic value of human life, and bolsters that worth and value with natural entitlements granted not from government, but from humanity's Creator. That is the American philosophy, the American culture, and the American History.

That is the American Dream.

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