Word: lasch
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...abstract goal can lead one from mere intellectual confusion to damnable, personal corruption. It is through such hunting, so often mistaken for the pursuit of happiness, that cultured or half religious people are transformed into mere snobs, feminists to shrews, athletes to books, and scientists to subversives. Lasch has metamorphosed from a would-be thinker into a rather loose writer...
...Lasch claims that two basic personality types. Narcissus and Prometheus, are prototypical in Modern society. Both are variants of the lower-case narcissistic self, which is unable to accept its postnatal existence separate from nature. Narcissisus continually seeks to rejoin nature, while Prometheus tries to impose his infantile fantasies of omnipotence on it. So far so good...
...this observation immediately plunges Lasch into the difficult work of splitting infantile hairs. While the author agrees with scientists and industrialists that control over nature is a good thing, and with environmentalists that nature must be preserved (these two groups being loosely identified with Prometheus and Narcissus), he wants their actions to be motivated more by reality than by infantile fantasy. Lasch evidently fears right actions performed for the wrong reasons more than he fears wrong actions or their consequences. Psychologically, one supposes, this is typical and perhaps sound. However, from a practical, political, on ethical point of view...
...there is any grounds for picturing our present culture as one of narcissism, Lasch writes, "it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of "evolutionary" solutions..." New ways of raising children and organizing families deprive people of old models of authority which, while inadequate, provided a resting place on the road to maturity. Therapy is being used, Lasch argues, not to help but to confuse and to take advantage of people; in the workplace, especially, psychological legerdemain is used to cloak management's lack of substantive responses to the needs of working people...
...workers, citizens know that a good image is more important than real work. As consumers, they are programmed to define themselves in terms of ever-changing products and commodities; they lose their sense of a permanent identity and of their lives as a narrative in the public world Lasch observes that...