Christopher Lasch Quotes
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. 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. Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction. 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. Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all. Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes. Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy. News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda. Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button. Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger. Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order. 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. Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising. 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. The conservative revival cannot be dismissed. The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life. 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.
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