Lasch Daily

It is either naive or cynical to lead the public to think that dismantling the welfare state is enough to ensure a revival of informal cooperation—”a thousand points of light.” People who have lost the habit of self-help, who live in cities and suburbs where shopping malls have replaced neighborhoods, and who prefer the company of close friends (or simply the company of television) to the informal sociability of the street, the coffee shop, and the tavern are not likely to reinvent communities just because the state has proved such an unsatisfactory substitute. Market mechanisms will not repair the fabric of public trust. On the contrary the market’s effect on the cultural infrastructure is just as corrosive as that of the state.

The psychoanalytic tradition gives little comfort to the notion that contempt for women is ever natural in adults or that men achieve autonomy only by extinguishing every trace of femininity in themselves.

A government that maintains a deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons and talks casually about 'winnable' nuclear wars in which millions would be incinerated can no longer claim very plausibly to protect its citizens against foreign invasion. A government that preaches law and order but fails to guarantee public safety, to reduce the crime rate, or to address the underlying causes of crime can no longer expect citizens to internalize respect for the law. From top to bottom of our society, those who uphold law and morality find themselves unable to maintain order or to hold out the rewards formerly associated with observance of social rules. Even middle-class parents find it increasingly difficult to provide a secure environment for their offspring or to pass on the social and economic advantages of middle-class status. Teachers can no longer claim that education promises upward social mobility. In many schools, they find themselves hard pressed even to keep order in the classroom. Authorities can promise neither the security of inherited customs and social roles, the kind of security that used to prevail in preindustrial societies, nor the opportunities to improve one's social position, which has served as the secular religion of egalitarian societies. The fiction of equal opportunity -- the basis of what used to be called the American dream -- no longer has enough foundation in fact to support a social consensus. In a rapidly changing and unpredictable world, a world of downward mobility, social upheaval, and chronic economic, political, and military crisis, authorities no longer serve very effectively as models and guardians. Their commandments no longer carry conviction. The nuturant, protective, benevolent side of social and parental authority no longer tempers its punitive side. Under these conditions, nothing will be gained by preaching against hedonism and self-indulgence.

To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light.

The 'best and brightest' were those who knew how to exploit institutions for their own advantage and to make exceptions for themselves instead of playing by the rules. Raw ambition counted more heavily, in the distribution of worldly rewards, than devoted service to a calling -- an old story, perhaps, except that now it was complicated by the further consideration that most of the available jobs and careers did not inspire devoted service in the first place.

Both the growth of management and the proliferation of professions represent new forms of capitalist control, which first established themselves in the factory and then spread throughout society. The struggle against bureaucracy therefore requires a struggle against capitalism itself.

Modern psychiatry's insistence on the harm parents unwittingly inflict on their children appeared to relieve them of direct responsibility, but merely intensified the irrational sense of guilt and failure which so many psychiatrists complained of in their clients. The health industry assumed most of the responsibility for child rearing, while leaving parents with most of the guilt. This growing sense of guilt in turn increased the demand for psychiatric services.

The question is not whether Negro music provides a 'rich' record of suffering, the question is whether the ghetto subculture gives much support to its members. It is precisely because the chief characteristics of the ghetto culture are despair and self-hatred that black nationalism has arisen as a radical cultural therapy for the ghetto.

Radicalism -- socialism -- is the only long-term hope; but the almost overwhelming difficulties confronting the radical movement in America are suggested, more clearly perhaps, than by anything else, by the vagueness and imprecision of the term 'socialism.' What is 'socialims,' particularly in an advanced country? For most Americans, the word has ugly overtones of bureaucracy, centralization, and forcible repression. Nor is this unjustified or surprising, considering the nature of most of the existing socialist regimes. Because socialism first came to power not in the seat of industrialism, as Marxian theory assumed it would, but in countries where the material basis for a socialism of abundance did not yet exist, twentieth-century socialist regimes have had to address themselves first of all to the task of capital accumulation --a task that in the West was performed by capitalism itself. For this reason if for no other, socialist regimes in undeveloped countries cannot serve as models for advanced countries. Their very existence, however, has helped to impede the development of socialist theory and programs appropriate to advanced industrial societies, since it was always easier...for Western socialists to import a ready-made theory than to fashion one of their own. The blinding prestige of the Russian and later the Chinese revolution tended to conceal not only the monstrous character of Stalinism but its total irrelevance to the attempt to build socialism in the West.

Psychic survival replaces intimacy and parental guidance as the goal of domestic life. Each member of the family attempts to protect himself from the dangers threatening to annihilate him, while as a group, the domestic circle clings to a flimsy equilibrium by attempting to exclude everything that might disturb it. Conditions in the family thus mirror conditions in society as a whole, which have created an ever-present sense of menace and reduced social life to a state of warfare, often carried out under the guise of friendly cooperation.

The isolation of the family widens the gap between childhood dependence and the anatomy expected of adults, and thus lengthens the distance a child has to travel in order to grow up.

The narcissist resents being judged more than he fears being punished... He does not like to be asked to live up to expectations.

Even when both father and mother are present, black parents find it difficult to insulate their children against the dangers and temptations of the street. Parents complain that children 'see too much' and become prematurely wise to the ways of the world. Children use this knowledge to negotiate their independence from parents. At first, when children are young, parents seek to imprison them in the house, but as these efforts inevitably fail, the parents become resigned to their own lack of influence. The sense of impotence further undermines their attempt to teach the child what he needs to know in order to master his surroundings. Elders retreat from painful confrontations by not enforcing their own standards on the young. The child learns to fend for himself and to get what he wants by manipulating, seducing, or exploiting the emotions of others.

The effect of mass education changes the character not only of the university but of the student body as well. It removes masses of young people, at a crtical period in their lives and for a considerable time, ffrom the productive processes and, more generally, from inssttitutional ties to  the rest of sociiety. The university takes young people in great numbers from t their families and from loocaal and communty affiliations, at a time when they have not yet acquired jobs, families of their own, property, or other ties to society.

The history of American ethnic-group pluralism does not support the [racial] integrationist assumption that individual initiative has been the traditional mechanism of social mobility. Those who urge Negroes to advance themselves through the 'regular' channels of personal mobility ignore the experience of earlier minorities, the relevance of which is obscured both by the tendency to view the history of immigration as a triumph of assimilation and by the individualist premises which persistently blind Americans to the importance of collective phenomena and therefore to most of history.

Manipulative and managerial, twentieth century liberalism has adapted itself without difficulty to the corporation's need to soften conflicts and to reconcile irreconcilable forces -- capital and labor, bureaucratic efficiency and personal intimacy, the life of the production line and the life of the spirit -- to which it has given rise.