Christopher Lasch Quotations

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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

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.

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity,

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.

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.

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.

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

The left has lost the common touch.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.

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.

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 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.

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

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

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.