The editors of the UTNE reader focused on Christopher Lasch’s landmark book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979, and called it "a sort of Silent Spring (an allusion to Rachel Carson's book, 1962) of America’s psychological journey inward."
With permission they excerpted a number of passages from the book which still seem to resonate to this day:
'This book describes a way of life that is dying—the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self....
Economic man . . . has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism. The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety...
Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of 19th-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire....
The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security....
Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. [His insecurity can be] overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design....
Today people complain of an inability to feel. They cultivate more vivid experiences, seek to beat sluggish flesh to life, attempt to revive jaded appetites...'
It's interesting to reflect on these passages and others in the article to see how they measure up to our mindset today.
Image: Cover of UTNE, May/June 2011
