Looking at Personal Development and the American Dream as Possible Solutions to Overcome the European Identity Crisis and the European Nightmare

Abstract

Europeans speak, both through their leaders and through the media, about the crisis of the European civilization. They cultivate the image of Europe threatened in its own existence by the waves of population wishing to settle in Western European countries. Additionally, the threat is sensed in the context of their belonging to other religions but the Christian one.

To solve this crisis, we start from the premise that the European dream in the refugees' case may be deemed similar to the American dream of the Europeans settling in American territories where they were to build the American Civilization.

Although the anguish of incoming foreigners is psychologically natural, problematic is the fact that they are not perceived as individuals driven by the dream of prosperity and happiness as the European dream. Lacking identity and engulfed in a diffuse mass, they are perceived as an amorphous, threatening and violent collective. I propose to reevaluate alterity in terms of that consecrated in the cultural imaginary as the American dream (the model for what was to be the European dream), by means of the philosophy of success as construed in the theories and practice of personal development.