Buy, Borrow, Believe — and Forget Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

In the richest nation on earth, the most basic human right has become a luxury. The right to have a family — a father, a mother, a few children — living in a modest home, in a safe neighborhood, with stable jobs and decent healthcare — has become a dream beyond reach. The American Dream has been repossessed by its own creditors. The poor can buy guns but not antibiotics. They can shoot, but they cannot heal. They can vote, but only between rival servants of the same master. This is not liberty. It is a managed despair with good marketing.

The country that once imagined itself as a “city upon a hill” now looks like a gated community in decline. It preaches family values while making families economically impossible. Two parents work two or three jobs to afford what one salary once provided. Daycare replaces parenting, pills replace peace, and the child becomes a logistical project instead of a human being. A civilization that worships freedom has created the freest slaves in history — free to choose debt, free to change employers, free to lose healthcare, and free to die uninsured.

This is not the failure of individuals. It is the architecture of the system. A society that worships markets cannot sustain compassion. The Protestant work ethic has evolved into a corporate faith that glorifies endless growth. The Puritan God of salvation has been reborn as the invisible hand of profit. Both demand sacrifice. Both promise redemption through suffering. The theology of labor survived its church and was baptized in the boardroom. And like every god, it requires victims.

When capitalism globalized, America exported jobs and imported despair. The same factories that once anchored towns and families were shipped to cheaper continents. What returned was not prosperity but propaganda — a cult of consumption financed by credit. The worker was transformed into a debtor. The debtor was transformed into a believer.
Buy, borrow, believe — and forget life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Citizens became collateral. The economy devours them while congratulating them for being consumed.

America’s wealth — its land — was stolen from the Native Americans. Its early capital — human labor — was stolen from African slaves. Every skyscraper stands on the bones of those two thefts. Yet the nation still pretends its riches were earned, not taken. Its moral compass is calibrated by Calvinism: prosperity proves virtue, poverty proves sin. Wall Street thus became both cathedral and casino, where greed is sanctified and ruin is privatized. The homeless who sleep beneath its towers are the heretics of the American faith — those who remind the system that salvation was always a lie.

The contradiction is total. The United States invades nations in the name of freedom while its own citizens die from medical debt. It condemns tyrants abroad but obeys corporations at home. It boasts of democracy while running elections as auctions. Republicans worship the market; Democrats administer it. Both kneel before it. Every four years, Americans are told to “choose change.” But the slogans change more than the system. Power rotates; policy repeats; the people remain pacified.

The postwar middle class — once the moral center of the republic — now survives on nostalgia and overdrafts. The suburban home is a mortgage trap. College degrees open doors to debt, not dignity. Healthcare is a commodity, childcare a privilege, and retirement a myth. A broken bone can cost a month’s salary. A cancer diagnosis can erase a lifetime of savings. The poor are blamed for being poor, the sick for being sick, the unemployed for existing at all. America has privatized not only its economy but its ethics.

And yet, in this desert of insecurity, guns remain affordable. The right to kill substitutes for the right to live. The Constitution guarantees a citizen’s access to weapons, not to medicine or shelter. When every other institution fails, the gun becomes the last false sacrament — giving the powerless an illusion of control. It is the altar where rage replaces reason and hopelessness finds ritual. The gun reassures the broken individual that he still exists. It also reassures the system that he will never organize.

The economics of collapse follow a grim geometry. When people cannot afford children, the consumer base shrinks. When the base shrinks, demand falls. When demand falls, corporations demand “efficiency” — meaning layoffs, wage cuts, and outsourcing. The system devours its own foundation. The more it saves, the more it destroys. The more it grows, the more it dies. Late capitalism is not merely exploitative; it is suicidal — a serpent that swallows itself while congratulating its appetite.

The decay is empirical. Life expectancy is falling. Mental illness is epidemic. Fertility is collapsing. Yet politicians keep chanting “growth” as a prayer. Media peddles optimism as anesthesia. Churches bless inequality as destiny. Universities train administrators for the same dying order. Citizens scroll through despair, mistaking distraction for hope. America is not just losing its middle class — it is losing the moral meaning of existence.

The tragedy of the American poor is not just economic. It is spiritual. They were told they are free, yet they live as debtors. They were told they are sovereign, yet they obey algorithms. They were told they have choice, yet every option is a variation of obedience. They live in a theology disguised as economics — one that replaced God with the Market but kept the commandments: Believe, Obey, and Consume.

To reclaim dignity, America must perform heresy against its economic church. It must rediscover that a civilization’s greatness is measured not by its billionaires but by its ability to make ordinary life possible — a stable job, a safe home, a family that can dream. Without this, no empire endures. A nation that cannot care for its people is already conquered.

History’s mirror is merciless. Rome collapsed not because of enemies but exhaustion. Its wealth was hoarded, its citizens dispossessed, its gods hollow. America too has its priesthood — the lobbyists, economists, and media preachers — translating greed into virtue. Its emperors are elected, its tribunes televised, its bread and circuses digitized. Decline arrives disguised as entertainment. The empire of consumption will not fall with a bang but with a sigh — a generation too indebted to rebel, too drugged to dream, too distracted to care.

The American Dream is not dead. It was evicted. It has migrated to nations that still believe in public education, universal healthcare, and the sanctity of human welfare — the very “socialist” societies America mocks. One day, when the slogans fade and the debts come due, America may rediscover the truth that abundance without balance is poverty in disguise. Until then, the republic of wealth will remain a nation of beggars with bullets — citizens who can defend everything except their own future.

Citations

1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
3. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.
4. Pew Research Center (2024) — U.S. middle-class contraction.
5. OECD & World Bank (2023) — healthcare and life expectancy data.
6. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
7. U.S. Census Bureau (2023) — fertility and wage data.
8. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.
9. Federal Reserve Reports (2024) — debt and cost-of-living metrics.
10. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.