Word: symptom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Professor Lasch is not amused by what he calls a "cultural radicalism": the decadence of American individualism. Its chief symptom: "The pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." The Narcissus of mythology, infatuated by his own reflection, pined away because he could not consummate self-love. Lasch's new narcissist has similar anxieties but feels no guilt. He has drunk the waters of progressive education and popular culture, and has little memory of traditional values and religious beliefs...
...that search for God, it is all too easy to blunder into the arms of Satan instead." Added the Vatican news paper L'Osservatore Romano: "Christianity is a religion of life, not of death." West Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung philosophized less cosmically: "It was not just a symptom of America or its system's shortcomings. Mystic sects and pseudoreligious groups exist in this part of the world as well and in worrisome numbers. The Jonestown deaths pose the vital question of whether in our modern way of life our institutions provide a sense of sufficient stability." Commented...
...casual observation confirms that many weave through the holidays feeling vaguely like victims-acutely aware of the supposedly malignant pressures that the diagnosticians always talk about. No mystery here. With a consciousness razed by standard holiday pathology, even an intelligent adult may tend to construe the pressure as a symptom of something bad and imminent. In fact, that pressure is primarily only the moving power of a vast communal celebration. This coercive atmosphere is not just an incidental effect of the season, as some suggest, but its very essence...
FIFTY YEARS HENCE, some ingenious historian will come along and demonstrate how Gary Gilmore's institutional suicide was a symptom of the same sort of alienation that led the 900 cultists to their deaths--and he may, or may not, be right. But we should not wait 50 years to search for the deeper causes of the affair; else we are left with such media inanities as "madness," "bizarre rite," "programmed minds," "spoiled dreams" as explanations, and they explain nothing...
...came when I tried to put the pack back on. One arm wouldn't move. No matter how hard I tried and concentrated it remained immobile and useless. And the other couldn't bend enough to be of any use. Meanwhile I'd started to shiver uncontrollably--the first symptom of hypothermia. I jumped up and down trying to keep warm. I couldn't laugh, the irony was too bitter--I'd made it across the stream, but to what...