"Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible"
About this Quote
Progress, in Dundes's framing, is less a prediction than a cultural posture: a way of training people to look ahead and treat the future like a solvable problem. The pairing of "future orientation" with "expectation of progress" is doing quiet but pointed work. He is naming a mindset common to modern, especially American, institutions where optimism isn’t merely encouraged; it’s institutionalized. Schools, technologies, and bureaucracies run on the assumption that tomorrow must be better, and that improvement is not a hope but a schedule.
The kicker, "nothing is impossible", reads like a motivational poster until you hear the anthropologist’s warning inside it. Dundes spent his career taking folklore seriously as data - the stories a culture tells itself to justify how it lives. In that light, "nothing is impossible" becomes a folk belief, not a scientific claim. It’s the narrative glue that makes endless growth, constant reform, and personal reinvention feel morally mandatory. If nothing is impossible, then failure is rebranded as insufficient effort, and structural limits disappear behind willpower.
Context matters: Dundes wrote and taught during decades when "progress" was both triumphant (postwar expansion, space race, consumer abundance) and increasingly suspect (Vietnam, environmental crisis, widening inequality). The quote captures that tension. It’s an anatomy of a dominant faith: forward motion as virtue. The subtext asks what gets sacrificed when a culture can’t tolerate limits - memory, tradition, grief, even realism - and who gets blamed when the future refuses to cooperate.
The kicker, "nothing is impossible", reads like a motivational poster until you hear the anthropologist’s warning inside it. Dundes spent his career taking folklore seriously as data - the stories a culture tells itself to justify how it lives. In that light, "nothing is impossible" becomes a folk belief, not a scientific claim. It’s the narrative glue that makes endless growth, constant reform, and personal reinvention feel morally mandatory. If nothing is impossible, then failure is rebranded as insufficient effort, and structural limits disappear behind willpower.
Context matters: Dundes wrote and taught during decades when "progress" was both triumphant (postwar expansion, space race, consumer abundance) and increasingly suspect (Vietnam, environmental crisis, widening inequality). The quote captures that tension. It’s an anatomy of a dominant faith: forward motion as virtue. The subtext asks what gets sacrificed when a culture can’t tolerate limits - memory, tradition, grief, even realism - and who gets blamed when the future refuses to cooperate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Optimism |
|---|
More Quotes by Alan
Add to List
