The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch

A Silent Generation member, many years ahead of everyone else, mercilessly explains everything that's wrong with Boomers. One way to read this book is as an extended intellectual "kids these days" rant: if you're a Boomer, this is almost certainly how you'll read it.

Another way to read this book, however, is as a (mostly) clear explanation--long before it became apparent to the rest of us--of what happens when our cultural environment selects for and favors certain types of behavior, and what this means over the long term. In some ways, this book, published way back in 1979, is one of the more culturally and civilizationally predictive books I've read.

The book is not without flaws. The author peers through dual lenses of Freudianism and Marxism (a Marxist Freudian? A Freudian Marxist?) to view the world. Be ready for this, and be patient. He also confuses modern crony capitalism (or oligarchic capitalism) for actual capitalism (actual capitalism died long ago in the USA, likely in the first half of the 20th Century). This a common category error that delivers many intellectuals, this author sadly included, into the waiting arms of Marx.

Despite these weaknesses, and despite some uneven chapters, this is a wide-ranging, generous book that gives readers much to think about. A final gift from the author to those readers geeky enough to peruse the endnotes: you'll get many, many ideas for additional books to read. See below.

Notes:
Preface: 
1979 America was facing a lot of the same issues it faces right now: gigantic bureaucracies, powerful corporations, a general sense that we've destroyed the environment and it's too late to fix things. The near enslavement of the individual in the face of these gigantic problems. In some ways the author was 40 years ahead of his time.

p xv The "competitive individualism" of United States culture, and how it has changed as our society has decayed. We've morphed from the individual's pursuit of happiness to "the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." According to the author this "reproduces the worst features of the collapsing civilization it claims to criticize." One shudders to think what the author would think of today's hipsters.

p xvi "The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety."

p xvii Narcissistic individuals in "a society that gives increasing prominence encouragement to narcissistic traits." That the individual has no interest in the future "in part because he has so little interest in the past." The same will be true on a societal level. Also: it makes "nostalgia" into a marketable commodity--but this is not a true realization of the past. No one seeks to gain insight from the past, in fact the word "nostalgia" has become a type of pejorative that belittles potential insights from the past or from history.

p xviii On the devaluation (and denial) of the past, an important symptom of our cultural crisis: "A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future." He's talking about the "year zero" phenomenon.

p xviii "Instead of drawing on our own experience, we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied." Again, this book was written in 1979!

Chapter 1: The Awareness Movement and the Social Invasion of the Self
p 1 Donald Barthelme's "Marivaudian being," a pastless, futureless man with no sense of history, constantly surprised, unable to even a predict his own reaction to events, and thus events are constantly overtaking him. [Fascinating parallels here with the "goldfish experience" we all have with the media openly contradicting itself as it struggles to maintain a smooth narrative over things like geopolitical issues, pandemic responses, changing data about pandemic/medical policies, etc. You can only tolerate modern media if you have the memory of a goldfish. Again, worth noting that this book is more than 40 years old.]

p 4 "Impending disaster has become an everyday concern, so commonplace and familiar that nobody any longer gives much thought on how disaster might be averted. People busy themselves instead with survival strategies, measures designed to prolong their own lives, or programs guaranteed to ensure good health and peace of mind." 

p 6 The awareness/consciousness movement as sort of collective religion, a collective narcissism where we become "connoisseurs of our own decadence." 

p 7-8 The contemporary climate is one of most people seeking psychic comfort, psychic security. People turn to politics to find "secularized salvation" (see Susan Stern's memoir With the Weatherman: the Personal Journey of a Revolutionary Woman)

p 10 interesting comparison here of narcissism and the narcissist's dependence on extrinsic validation to the individuals' dependence on the corporation (for work, for money), on the state, and on "experts" to conduct the basics of daily life. Just like the individual is increasingly "dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies... Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence." Interesting idea.

Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, ex-political radicals like Jason Zweig, all writing about narcissistic pseudo-insights usually expressed in psychiatric cliches and with false humility or humor to avoid true insight. It all devolves into anticonfession and pseudorevelation where the author has no obligation to truthfulness.

This author called out the boomers long before the ruse was visible to the rest of us. He captures their fear and horror of aging and death, their pathological addiction to therapy, their fascination with celebrity, their relentless consumption of media, their consumerism, and absorption in self-study, all rendered as a mirror of the unself-aware self in things like this actual cover of Newsweek from 2021: 

Chapter 2: The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time
Writers of the time not really getting the true definition or meaning of narcissism. An analysis of what narcissism is and how it causes the sufferer aloneness, lack of relationships, rage, a lack of tools or deep relationships to deal with aging and death, etc.

p 42 Evolution of therapy patients from "symptom neuroses" (hysteria, paralysis, hand washing compulsions) in the 1950s and earlier to character disorders (vagueish complaints, narcissistic disorders) in the late 50s and 60s.

p 43 "For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem." [In other words modernity selects for narcissism]

p 47 Parallels in "success in business" with fame/celebrity, throwing back a reflected glow on the individual who sees the world as a mirror of himself.

p 48-9 The emergence of therapeutic and clinical norms of development. "The ideal of normative development creates the fear that any deviation from the norm has a pathological source" Doctors have made a cult of a periodic checkup, etc., where we report datapoints about our development which again reflects back on us. This reinforces the individual endlessly examining himself for signs of aging and ill health, or for "reassuring indications that his life is proceeding according to schedule."

p 50 [This is as good a money quote as there is in this book summarizing the book's primary paradigm:] 
"New social forms require new forms of personality, new modes of socialization, new ways of organizing experience. The concept of narcissism provides us not with a ready-made psychological determinism but with a way of understanding the psychological impact of recent social changes--assuming that we bear in mind not only its clinical origins but the continuum between pathology and normality. It provides us, in other words, with a tolerably accurate portrait of the "liberated" personality of our time, with his charm, his pseudo-awareness of his own condition, his promiscuous pansexuality, his fascination with oral sex, his fear of the castrating mother (Mrs. Portnoy), his hypochondria, his protective shallowness, his avoidance of dependence, his inability to mourn, his dread of old age and death. 

"Narcissism appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring out narcissistic traits that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone."

Chapter 3: Changing Modes of Making It

Starting in USA cultural history with the Protestant work ethic (seeking both money and virtue), which later in the early 20th Century morphs into "money as an end" (cf: Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie) and then in the modern era morphs yet again to a sort of mode of ("convincingly performed") success that must be "seen by others." 

p 60 "There are no more invisible tycoons living in personal obscurity today. All success has to be ratified by publicity." 

p 62 "...the loyalty ethic has declined in American business among other reasons because loyalty can be too easily simulated or feigned by those most desirous of winning." Corporate gamesmanship and winning in the business world, the baby boomer version of success, the idea that "bureaucratic organizations devote more energy to the maintenance of hierarchical relations than to industrial efficiency."

p 63 "The transformation of the myth of success--of the definition of success and the qualities believed to promote it--is a long-term development arising not from particular historical events but from general changes in the structure of society: the shifting emphasis from capitalist production to consumption; the growth of large organizations in bureaucracies; the increasingly dangerous and warlike conditions of social life."

"The transition from the invisible hand to the Glad hand" [in other words, migrating from an Adam Smith to the phony, salesy guy trying to "make it" in his organization.]

p 68 Many lines in this book could be written today and be equally, if not more, true. Here's a good example: "Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security." More true today than ever before. 

p 69 The writings of Marquis de Sade uncannily anticipating the development of (increasingly decadent) personal life under capitalism.

Lasch is pretty much looking at reality through a Marxian lens. He thinks capitalism is the problem, but he seems to not understand that capitalism died a long time ago and what we have in the USA is an pseudo-capitalism that exists largely under indirect government control. 

Chapter 4: The Banality of Pseudo-Self-Awareness

p 72 "The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands--on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the 'need' is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media."

Migrating from the satisfaction of basic needs to the unending fabrication of pseudo-needs. Advertising "plays seductively on the malaise of industrial civilization."

Consumption then replaces true protest or rebellion: ("The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services."), likewise it offers a pseudo-cure for the alienation/desolation of modern life. It becomes a servant of the status quo. Likewise, consumption/consumerism allies itself with certain social pseudo-revolutions, for example the companies can sell products that offer "pseudo-emancipation" of women by encouraging them to smoke, to drink etc. (e.g.: Virginia Slims "you've come a long way, baby.")

It is also interesting how every generation thinks that everything happens to them for the first time. For example, the current generation considers it living in an era of post-truth media, while Christopher Lasch points out from his own era how "truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information" and then cites a hilariously disturbing example of post-truth government from Richard Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler. (The example is worth quoting for its own reasons: "Ziegler admitted that his previous statements on Watergate had become 'inoperative.' Many commentators assumed that Ziegler was groping for a euphemistic way of saying that he had lied. What he meant, however, was that his earlier statements were no longer believable... The question of whether they were true or not was beside the point." We have always lived in a post-truth era, just like we have always been at war with Eastasia.

p 90 the "Performing Self" how we live as if we're in an escalating cycle of self-consciousness, a performer under scrutiny of friends and strangers. A type of self-consciousness, of role-playing in everyday life.

p 94 "ironic detachment as an escape from routine." He saw hipsterism decades ahead of its time too.

One tremendous irony about this book's cynicism about the future: it came out just a few short years before the longest economic expansion and the greatest bull market in modern history. This book, while highly perceptive and observant, was a compete and total bottom tick. 

The author's relentless use of a Marxist lens to interpret reality causes him to make consistent generalizations about the meaninglessness and insult of jobs in modern industry: not all people are condemned to "jobs that insult their intelligence" in the modern era, nor are we all automatically forced into "meaningless roles prescribed by modern industry." It's an unfortunately predictable Marxist view that all jobs in modernity are somehow no different from those of early Industrial Revolution-era England, like we are all losing fingers in Spinning Jennys all day long.  

Cathexis: the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).

Chapter 5: The Degradation of Sport 

This chapter is a bit of a giveaway that the author never played organized sports. See for example this quote: "The cult of victory, proclaimed by such football coaches as Vince Lombardi and George Allen, has made savages of the players and rabid chauvinists of their followers." The chapter itself makes little sense: sports are too competitive with too many victory-addicts like Vince Lombardi, but then sports are not competitive enough because there exist  "radicals" who try to remove this competition, which degrades sports. Whatever it is, it's narcissistic and wrong! The author force-fits it into his narrative.

Chapter 6: Schooling and the New Illiteracy

p 127 "Mass education, which began as a promising attempt to democratize the higher culture of the privileged classes, has ended by stupifying the privileged themselves. Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy, but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy."

Mid 19th Century immigration and a wish to Americanize European immigrants drove the introduction of national compulsory education.

Erosion of academic standards under various reasons/guises: ending white socialization for black students, condemning basic education as cultural imperialism, seeking "relevance" in coursework, criticism of "elitism" of higher ed, grade inflation/"passing" everyone through school, condemning academic standards as an apparatus of white sociocultural control, instituting make work courses like home economics in place of "real" academics, etc. All of these movements by various critics or progressives in education merely "perpetuate the inequalities they seek to abolish" and "bring about a reign of universal ignorance."

This chapter is also weak: it is unclear what his point is, unclear how it ties into the greater theme.

In the 1960s, universities morph from "offering a rounded program" into a "cafeteria" serving credits. One wonders why this author participated in it in his role as a professor at the University of Rochester.

Education, formerly reserved for those of high birth, later reserved for those of high intelligence, now becomes a commodity by which anyone can buy, without effort, creative fulfillment. 

Chapter 7: The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority

Advertising, media, health and welfare services, etc., took over many socializing functions of the home. School appropriation of household arts, social manners and sex ed.

"Enlightened" social reforms end up abrogating due process and peoples' rights. "The new therapeutic conception of the state." This "proletarianizes" parenthood.

The psychological repercussions of the "transfer of parental function." Mothers pursuing parenting information as if to produce a child that would "win some contest," but then having an affectless relationship with her child. 

This author's Freudian Marxism gets thick here: he uses this lens so often it borders on weird. Not all cigars are Freudian symbols and not all modern things are examples of bourgeois decadence. As a reader you start to feel sympathy for a guy who sees Freudian symbols and signs of the revolution everywhere, all the time. 

 

p 178 The decline of parental authority reflects the decline of the superego in American society as a whole. Permissive, consumerism based, little self-restraint or self-discipline, etc. Parental over-permissiveness leads to narcissism in the next generation. [Gee, I had no idea my generation was so fucked!]

p 179-180 I think a modern reader would be surprised by this book's tacit approval of corporal punishment in parenting.

p 180 Good indictment of media-induced consumerism here: "...modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones. By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with a glamour of celebrity and success, modern culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, and his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement. Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously makes him acutely unhappy with his lot. By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt."

p 183 "By the 1950s, almost all psychiatrists, social workers, and social scientists condemned the values associated with the traditional or authoritarian family." Astute readers might also see proto-indications in this book of what students of modern media would describe as "the poz": essentially the normalization and the mass media of dyscivic or anti-civilizational behavior. 

Even the movements to openness and having more participatory workers in the corporate enterprise is a therapeutic view of authority, and it merely preserves hierarchical forms of organization under the guise of participation: p 185 "Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation." By eliminating overt hierarchy, they groove hierarchy in a subtle and more irresistible form. We no longer order people around, we've "discovered subtler means of keeping them in their place." This institutional "soft power" is showing up right now with the executive branch of the US government indirectly "enforcing" vaccine mandates not via law or direct executive order but through pressuring institutions to impose the mandate second-hand. Quite an interesting parallel that we're seeing right now in our society.

Chapter 8: The Flight From Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War

More "kids these days" commentary on the decline of childbearing, the increase in divorce, etc.

Everyone knows chivalry is dead: according to this author chivalry simply made male "domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse... All women share in the burdens as well as the benefits of "liberation," both of which can be summarized by saying that men no longer treat women as ladies." p 189-191.

p 196 Lasch was already seeing the second order consequences of second-wave feminism of the 1970s: "Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formally associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions." And: "...feminism itself has caused women to make new demands on men and to hate men when they fail to meet those demands." And: "Women's rage against men originates not only in erotic disappointments or the consciousness of oppression but in a perception of marriage is the ultimate trap, the ultimate routine in a routinized society, the ultimate expression of the banality that pervades and suffocates modern life." Ouch. Unfortunately, Lasch does not make clear how this ties into his main theme.

Chapter 9: The Shattered Faith in the Regeneration of Life

Longevity is due to sanitation and diet not "medicine" and healthcare, conclusively demonstrated in Thomas McKeown's The Modern Rise of Population.

p 209 "...the fear of death takes on a new intensity in a society that has deprived itself of religion and shows little interest in posterity." "The well-known cult of youth further weakens the social position of those no longer young."

p 217 "But the dread of age originates not in a "cult of youth" but in a [narcissistic] cult of the self."

Chapter 10: Paternalism Without Father

This quote is as good as any for a summary of the book itself: p 218 "Most of the evils discussed in this book originate in a new kind of paternalism, which has risen from the ruins of the old paternalism of kings, priests, authoritarian fathers, slave masters, and landed overlords. Capitalism has severed the ties of personal dependence only to revive dependence under cover of bureaucratic rationality. Having overthrown feudalism in slavery and then outgrown its own personal and familial form, capitalism has evolved a new political ideology, welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance. It has evolved new modes of social control, which deal with the deviant as a patient and substitute medical rehabilitation for punishment. It has given rise to a new culture, the narcissistic culture of our time, which has translated the predatory individualism of the American Adam into a therapeutic jargon that celebrates not so much individualism as solipsism, justifying self-absorption as 'authenticity' and 'awareness.' Ostensibly egalitarian and anti-authoritarian, American capitalism has rejected priestly and monarchical hegemony only to replace it with a hegemony of the business corporation, the managerial and professional classes who operate the corporate system, and the corporate state. A new ruling class of administrators, bureaucrats, technicians, and experts has appeared, which retains so few of the attributes formally associated with ruling class--pride of place, the "habit of command," disdain for the lower orders--that its existence is a class often goes unnoticed. The difference between the new managerial elite and the old property elite defines the difference between a bourgeois culture that now survives only on the margins of industrial society and the new therapeutic culture of narcissism."

p 219 The author's perceived paradigm of new rich versus old rich would be under tremendous threat in the current cryptocurrency era. It may have been under tremendous threat for the entire second half of the 20th century. The idea of propertied rich who partake in Veblen-esque pastimes like horse riding and tennis lessons would sound hilarious to a young person today.

Genuine entitlement of the old rich dwindles to narcissistic entitlement in the modern era. "An ethic of leisure, hedonism and self-fulfillment."

Now that I'm almost done with a book, I can't help but notice that it is absolutely bereft of any solutions. No advice, no ideas, no counsel from the author on how to navigate this system that he describes, nothing.

One also wonders what the author would think of the modern era of heavily prescribed SSRI meds. If anything, this is just further evidence of his "therapeutic culture as a system of control."

p 229 "The family's dependence on professional services over which it has little control represents one form of a more general phenomenon: the erosion of self-reliance and ordinary competence by the growth of giant corporations and of the bureaucratic state that serves them."

Reading List: 

Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

John G. Cawelti: Apostles of the Self-Made Man

Daniel Boorstin: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

Erich Fromm: Escape From Freedom

Margaret Mead: And Keep Your Powder Dry

David Reisman: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character

Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle

Ibsen's plays

Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Richard Poirier: The Performing Self

Marshall Mcluhan: The Mechanical Bride

Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens

Paul Hoch: Rip Off the Big Game

Douglas McGregor: The Human Side of Enterprise

John J. Tarrant: The Corporate Eunuch

Bertrand Russell: Marriage and Morals

Alvin Toffler: Future Shock

Ludwig von Mises: Bureaucracy

Frederick Hayek: The Road to Serfdom