Christopher Lasch Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

The best defenses against the terrors 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. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all. — Christopher Lasch

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

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. — Christopher Lasch

The left has lost the common touch. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. — Christopher Lasch

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

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

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

Man's collective mastery of nature - even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion - can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

The family is a haven in a heartless world. — Christopher Lasch

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

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. — Christopher Lasch

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. — Christopher Lasch

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

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots. — Christopher Lasch

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