Christopher Lasch

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

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

“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 (1932-1994)

“The family is a haven in a heartless world.”

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

“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 (1932-1994)

“Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience— in the individual, in the form of personality.”

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

“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 (1932-1994)

“When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.”

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

"Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success."

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

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

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

"The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction."

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

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

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

"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 (1932-1994)

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

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

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

—Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)