Christopher Lasch Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The left has lost the common touch.

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.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

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

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.

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.

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.