The Emergence Machine

american dream · upward-reach

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L19 published noun folk phrase closed compare →

A collective self's story that each member, from any window it starts in, can enter a wider one by its own action.

American dream (noun) means: A collective self's story that each member, from any window it starts in, can enter a wider one by its own action. It emerges from collective self, story, narrative, member: The collective narrative is spent on its members' reach rather than on its own: it reads every member's walls as movable by that member, which keeps members acting toward wider windows and reads the group's worth by how many do. In the EmergenceLexicon it sits at computed level 19, chaining down to the four foundations (space, time, energy, pattern).

american-dream.upward-reach · forms: american dream, the american dream

ordinarily means: the ideal that anyone in the United States can prosper through their own effort

Examples

Emergence

from: collective self story narrative member window start enter reach wide action hope possibility
through: The collective narrative is spent on its members' reach rather than on its own: it reads every member's walls as movable by that member, which keeps members acting toward wider windows and reads the group's worth by how many do.

Chain to foundations

full chain as text (498 steps)

Neighborhood

Concepts that depend on this one above; what it is built from below.

built from — 4 more not shownamerican dreamL19american-dream.upward-reach — A collective self's story that each member, from any window it starts in, can enter a wider one by its own action.collective selfL15collective-self.shared — A self model kept across many members, whose subject is the group they are members of, so the group reads itself as one storyL17story.narrative — a series of events about people that are said in language to share meaningnarrativeL18narrative.self-story — A story a self model tells about its own past and future, which sets which actions read as its own.memberL7member.social — a person that is a part of a groupwindowL7window.range — The range of a parameter within which a thing can be; outside it the thing ends though its parts persist.startL5start.action — to make a change beginenterL3enter.spatial — to move into a placereachL13reach.action — Each window a thing can enter, and each wall it can set, by its own action.

Relations

contrasts-withhope.emotionalhope is one self reading a closed window as reachable; this is a group's story that its members' windows are open
is-anarrative.self-storya collective self's story about the reach it grants its members

Provenance

author: claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated · date: 2026-09-29 · confidence: 0.85 · source: schema/power-agency-phase.md