quotes from "The Family's Relation to Other Agencies of Social Control"
Christopher Lasch

• Page 180 "Society reinforces these patterns not only through 'indulgent education' and general permissiveness but through advertising, demand creation, and the mass culture of hedonism. At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, 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 glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in 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. The culture of consumption in its central tendency thus recapitulates the socialization earlier provided by the family."
• Page 181 "In the school, the business corporation, and the courts of law, authorities conceal their power behind a facade of benevolence. Posing as friendly helpers, they discipline their subordinaes as seldom as possible, seeking instead to create a friendly atmosphere in which everyone freely speaks his mind."
• Page 182 "The appearance of permissiveness conceals a stringent system of controls, all the more effective because it avoids direct confrontatons between authorities and the people on whom they seek to impose their will."
• Page 182 "...parents rely on doctors, psychiatrists, and the child's own peers to impose rules on the child and to see that he conforms to them."
• Page 183 "The ideology of modern management draws on the same body of therapeutic theory and practice that informs progressive education and progressive childrearing."
• Page 185 "The growing acceptance of that view make it possible to preserve hierarchical forms of organization in the guise of 'participation'. It provides a society dominated by corporate elites with an antielitist ideology. The popularization of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticized. 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. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edicts of judges, magistrates, teachers, or preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalize the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavior." "In the hierarchies of work and power, as in the family, the decline of authority does not lead to the collapse of social constraints. It merely deprives those constraints of a rational basis. Just as the parent's failure to administer just punishment to the child undermines the child's self-esteem rather than strengthening it, so the corruptibility of public authorities -- their acquiescence in minor forms of wrongdoing -- reminds the subordinate of his subordination by making him dependent on the indulgence of those above him. The new-style bureaucrat, whose 'ideology and character support hierarchy even though he is neither paternalistic nor authoritarian,' as Michael Maccoby puts it in his study of the corporate 'gamesman', no longer orders his inferiors around; but he has discovered subtler means of keeping them in their place. Even though his underlings often realize that they have been 'conned, pushed around, and manipulated,' they find it hard to resist such easygoing oppression. The diffusion of responsibility in large organizations, moreover, enables the modern manager to delegate discipline to others, to blame unpopular decisions on the company in general, and thus to preserve his standing as a friendly adviser to those beneath him. Yet his entire demeanor conveys to them that he remains a winner in a game most of them are destined to lose." "Since everyone allegedly plays this game by the same rules, no one can begrudge him his success; but neither can the losers escape the heavy sense of their own failure. In a society without authority, the lower orders no longer experience oppression as guilt. Instead, they internalize a grandiose idea of the opportunities open to all, together with an inflated opinion of their own capacities. If the lowly man resents those more highly placed, it is only because he suspects them of grandly violating the regulations of the game, as he would like to do himself if he dared. IT NEVER OCCURS TO HIM TO INSIST ON A NEW SET OF RULES."

Afterword: The Culture of Narcissism Revisited

• Page 239 "I was struck by evidence, presented in several studies of business corporations, to the effect that professional advancement had come to depend less on craftsmanship or loyalty to the firm than on 'visibility', 'momentum', personal charm, and impression management. The dense interpersonal environment of modern bureaucracy appeared to elicit and reward a narcissistic response -- an anxious concern with the impression one made on others, a tendency to treat others as a mirror of the self." "The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a 'society of the spectacle', as it has been described, encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone -- a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding committments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose, a desire to keep one's options open, a dislike of depending on anyone, an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude." [Tae ji hul poem zeyr sha: juxtapose the practical causes of these traits and the personality traits themselves, e.g. by showing a person trying to break free of the traits only to be forced back in line.] "Narcissists may have paid more attention to their own needs than to those of others, but self-love and self-aggrandizement did not impress me as their most important characteristics. These qualities implied a strong, stable sense of selfhood, whereas narcissists suffered from a feeling of inauthenticity and inner emptiness. They found it difficult to make connection with the world. At its most extreme, their condition approximated that of Kaspar Hauser, the nineteenth-centry German foundling raised in solitary confinement, whose 'impoverished relations with his cultural environment', according to the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, left him with a feeling of being utterly at life's mercy."