Christopher lasch quotes

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

The left has lost the common touch.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.