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
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
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.
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
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.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
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.
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
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.
Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
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.
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
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.
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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.
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.
The left has lost the common touch.
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
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.
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
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.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
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.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
