The Culture of Narcissism (1979) Christopher Lasch

Accepting Life's Limitations & Regaining Spontaneous Feeling

I made it through about 1/3rd of this book, in bits and pieces; author makes a number of incredibly pithy remarks (and hot-takes), but does little to play up much that is good in the modern World, taking an everything-is-awful vantage point to modernity.  Written in the late 70s, Lasch lambasts an American culture void of virtue and full of self-aggrandizement, void of the capacity for self-help, a reversal of JFK’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you.”  Everyone turns into someone waiting for a preferential treatment, “… everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by a paternalistic state.” Expresses a hope that localization will lead to a civic revival, similar to many pundits (Murray, Russell Brand).  “Modern bureaucracy has undermined earlier traditions of local action, the revival and extension of which holds out the only hope that a decent society will emerge.”  Points out the real source of power, which holds true to this day, not ‘white supremacy,” but, “… corporate bureaucracies… the real centers of power in contemporary society.”  It is the competitive nature of the United States, not narcissism, I do not think, that leads to what Lasch calls, “… the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”  Points out 50 years prior to Murray the draw of so-called “radical” politics, “Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo.”  The #Resistance movement that focuses its eye of Sauron on places which are not the real source of power.  “Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose.”  He describes Hoffer and Dostoevsky’s true believer, the one who makes their entire life a parody of devotion to the revolutionary cause, “… the fervor of her revolutionary commitment, the group’s endless disputes about fine points of political dogma… the attempt to remodel every facet of one’s life in conformity with the revolutionary faith…She needed to establish an identity, not to submerge her identity in a larger cause.” “The left has too often served as a refuge from the terrors of the inner life… As long as political movements exercise a fatal attraction for those who seek to drown the sense of personal failure in collective action—as if collective action somehow precluded rigorous attention to the quality of personal life—political movements will have little to say about the personal dimension of social crisis.” Points out the vanity of many take-to-the-streets movements i.e. Students for A Democratic Society, “The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerrilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards… As the black power rhetoreticians co-opted the civil rights movement, they also captivated white liberals who sought to appease the guilt associated with “white skin privilege” by adopting the gestures and language of black militancy. Both whites and blacks embraced radical style in place of radical substance.”  Get your own house in order, first.  He disparages libertines, “His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace.”  Via specialization, self-help has eroded general competence, which, “… has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies” – perhaps an inherent trade-off in a World with seven billion people?  He says narcissism reflects “the psychological dimension of this dependence… the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience.  His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality.  On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others… the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.”  The narcissist has an “…infantile illusion of omnipotence that precedes understanding of the crucial distinction between the self and its surroundings.”  This in a way echoes Burke’s notion of society as being the not-natural state-of-affairs, which leads to… war.  No one wants to be lorded over by another, ‘You’re not better than me!’  “Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, ‘are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich, and powerful, and of belonging instead to the ‘mediocre,’ by which they mean worthless and despicable…’” Continuing his assault on the bureaucracy-dependent individual, “As the workings of the modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly inaccessible to everyday intelligence [Taibbi], art and philosophy abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective sciences of society, which themselves have retreated from the effort to master reality into the classification of trivia. Reality thus presents itself, to laymen and “scientists” alike, as an impenetrable network of social relations—as “role playing,” the “presentation of self in everyday life.” To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions...”  Thus, in an ever-complex World, what else is someone to do if they cannot master the web of bureaucracy; better to just grab some Beats-By-Dre, an iPhone and a Dodge Charger to construct an image of coolness and mastery.  True cooperation is substituted for authoritarian control (via corporate management, the state).  The citizen is reduced to “a consumer of expertise,” no one knows why they are doing what they are doing.  Bureaucracy also crushes our thinking we can change it, “The disparity between romance and reality, the world of beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvements in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life.”  He later says this can be re-born through localization.  The former American cultural beliefs, however untrue in practice, imagined a safe community, “the American pioneer gave full vent to his rapacity and murderous cruelty, but he always envisioned the result—not without misgivings, expressed in a nostalgic cult of lost innocence—as a peaceful, respectable, churchgoing community safe for his women and children. He imagined that his offspring, raised under the morally refining influence of feminine “culture,” would grow up to be sober, law-abiding, domesticated American citizens, and the thought of the advantages they would inherit justified his toil and excused, he thought, his frequent lapses into brutality, sadism, and rape.”  Is it not inherent that such hypocrisy cannot be maintained in perpetuity in an age of information?  “As the public world came to be seen as a mirror of the self, people lost the capacity for detachment and hence for playful encounter, which presupposes a certain distance from the self.”  No one can joke around anymore, no one can say hello to a stranger on the sidewalk.  “Imprisoned in his self-awareness, modern man longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling.”  Echoes Crime and Punishment’s recognition of our mutual dependence, “The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own… The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods... the ancient religious insight that the only way to achieve happiness is to accept limitations in a spirit of gratitude and contrition instead of attempting to annul those limitations or bitterly resenting them.”  A little bit of humility would be in order; everyone is different, everyone has their own desires, the World does not evolve around you, but you too are entitled to desires, but should not expect them from others.  What are these limitations?  “Our standards of “creative, meaningful work” are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of “true romance” puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”  You have to give yourself to life, you cannot merely take.