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 family is a haven in a heartless world.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

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.

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

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.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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