Thomas Friedman is one of the few New York Times columnists I do not merely respect and enjoy reading, but with whom I actually agree quite often (yes, I’m one of those people who can actually respect a person and enjoy his writings when I disagree with him on virtually every issue). One of his latest columns is called “The Post-Binge World.” In it, Friedman takes a closer look at the current crisis in the financial markets and the economy in general, trying to explain what exactly is going on.

“At their core, markets are propelled by fear and greed. They’re just the balance at any given moment of those two impulses. Over the long run, you cannot spin the market. You cannot sweet talk it into going up or beg it not to go down. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do — whichever way greed and fear tug it. And the market always bats last and it always bats a thousand,” he wrote.

“We are where we are today because we went on a credit binge and we’re now paying the price. Because it was the biggest credit binge the world has ever been on, a lot of wealth is going to be wiped out. Now what you’re witnessing is the market re-evaluating and re-pricing every asset in the world, without mercy, telling each stock, bond and bank what its value is in a post-credit binge world.”

In another one of his latest columns, Friedman added: “You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream… without that eventually catching up to you.”

Now, although some may assume that he meant that the idea of the American Dream itself is subject of criticism by Friedman, the following part that I excluded from the above quote has to be cited and explained: “a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years.”

That is exactly what was wrong in the last ten to twenty years: not the idea of the American Dream as such, but the idea that this Dream could become reality, that it could be achieved, without people paying the price for it. The American Dream used to mean that you would work hard, act responsible, save your earnings, invest wisely, and then reach the top.

In the past one to two decades, however, too many people have distorted ideal of the American Dream; it came to mean having it all, without doing anything for it. Living above your means. Earning $30,000 a year, but living as you earned $100,000. Consuming more, in other words, than you produced.

In the end, this is what truly caused today’s crisis. This real cause cannot, I fear, be solved by the government alone. Rather, it will take individual members of society and society as a whole, to prevent similar crisis from occurring in the coming years: it requires a dramatic change in (popular) culture, and in the way people think about themselves, their families, and life in general.

That is what this crisis is truly, fundamentally, about. It’s cultural.

Unless politicians address this issue, and articulate it properly (even if that would cause them to lose support among the masses), all efforts to revive the economy and to rebuild into a stronger, more stable one will be in vain.