Oh Mr. Alger...

Dalton tells that, “Confronting the reality is made that much harder by a mythology that assures us we can have it all.” (p.253) Meaning that by exposing the faults in a myth, we can understand and show what is behind it. If I were to agree to this, that a myth can be buried like exercise 9 tells us to do, I would find it incredibly hard to achieve.

This reminds me of back in middle school when we read “tall tales”. They were stories that had a lot of untrue things about them, but we read them anyway. Knowing they were false, we still continued to study them. If we know a myth is false, how do you stop people from talking about it? We submerge ourselves in a society that strives off of negative stories. I don’t think it’s possible to inter a myth that Alger presents.

How can we put down a myth that if you try with all your might, that you’ll succeed? How do you shut down the people that continue to believe that? If for a moment, I agreed that it could be accomplished a couple of things would need to happen. The first being that more books, advertisements, television shows, ECT need to agree with the concept that it’s impossible to live life starting out with nothing and then reaching the top. It would need a lot of support and credibility to bury this myth.