Ep. 10. Graduates, Reject the American Dream

The following exhortation was delivered to the first graduating class of BASIS Goodyear High School on May 17, 2019. Minor changes have been made to protect the identities of the graduates. This speech reflects the thoughts and views of the author alone. They do not represent the official views of BASIS Ed. 

Esteemed Graduates. Congratulations on your graduation! Graduating with the BASIS diploma is a fine accomplishment, and you should be very proud of what you have accomplished. That said, though it does not feel like it, your lives are really just beginning. And today, I deem it necessary to give you one last lesson, perhaps the most important lesson, as you are now choosing what course of life you will embark upon. Let me tell you a story.

It is 399 BCE and Socrates has just been unjustly sentenced to death by an Athenian jury for impiety and for corrupting the youth of Athens. He stands before that jury, and delivers these parting words:

“When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing,—then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

Why does Socrates deliver these parting words? Why does he ask this favor of those that have just sentenced him to die? Probably, in my opinion, to make yet another statement about the best way to live. You see Socrates, was obsessed with answering the following question: “what course of life is best?” And, according to the writings of his protege, Plato, it seems that Socrates believed the best course to follow in life was one that pursued truth, goodness, virtue, and love, among other things. And these attributes were the exact opposite of those commonly pursued in Athens at the time; you see, the Athenians, it seems, were concerned primarily with wealth, status, and power. And so Socrates stands before his murderers and exhorts them one last time to live a better life. But he doesn’t simply exhort them, he exhorts us here today. And through Socrates, I now exhort you to deeply examine the course of life you are about to take.

For the false ways of living that gripped Athens in the 4th Century, BCE are the same ones that plague and have plagued the United States since its inception. We can read about this plague in the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

You see, in the 1840s Thoreau observed an America that was, even in his day, absolutely dominated by materialism and the desire for wealth and status. As he walked from farm to farm in Concord, Massachusetts, he noticed that his fellow citizens were absolutely working themselves to death, not to make ends meet, but so they could have as large a farm and as grand a house as their neighbors had; so that they could have fine clothes and other material goods that supposedly proved their status, their worth. What these farmers did not realize was that they were exchanging their very lives for that supposed wealth and status. Thoreau put it this way:

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

“It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not