Christopher Lasch - The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

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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

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

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

Economic man has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism. The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety.

Christopher Lasch

In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal "growth" and "awareness"—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse.

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

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

Christopher Lasch