Christopher Lasch Quotes
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
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.
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.
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
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.
Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
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.
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.
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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 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.
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.
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.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
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.
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
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.
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
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.
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 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 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.