Christopher Lasch Quotes
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Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
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The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
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The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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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.
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The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
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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.
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It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment of doing it - it gets your brain going.
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Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
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In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
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Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
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The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
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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.
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The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
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Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
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The family is a haven in a heartless world.
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I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
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Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
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Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
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The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
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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.
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Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
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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.
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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.
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The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
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We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
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