A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism–which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one's own fears and desires–not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs. The consumer feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, "information overload," and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown.
The consumer's complete dependence on these intricate, supremely sophisticated life-support systems, and more generally on externally provided goods and services, recreates some of the infantile feelings of helplessness. If nineteenth-century bourgeois culture reinforced anal patterns of behavior–hoarding of money and supplies, control of bodily functions, control of affect–the twentieth century culture of mass consumption recreates oral patterns rooted in an even earlier stage of emotional development, when the infant was completely dependent on the breast. The consumer experiences his surroundings as a kind of extension of the breast, alternately gratifying and frustrating.
He finds it hard to conceive of the word except in connection with his fantasies. Partly because the propaganda surrounding commodities advertises them so seductively as wish fulfillments, but also because commodity production by its very nature replaces the world of durable objects with disposable products designed for immediate obsolescence, the consumer confronts the world as a reflection of his wishes and fears. He knows the world, moreover, largely through insubstantial images and symbols that seem to refer not so much to a palpable, solid, and durable reality as to his inner psychic life, itself experienced not as an abiding sense of self but as reflections glimpsed in the mirror of his surroundings. (The Minimal Self, pp. 33-34)
Lasch's book, appropriately enough, was copyrighted in 1984, and the themes he develops in it are an important complement to Orwell. I don't have time today to comment on this extensively right now, but it's the beginning of a longer-term reflection I want to undertake concerning how contemporary consumer culture and the mass media it has created defines for too many of us what is believable and unbelievable, and how it reinforces collective delusional thinking and the drift toward the kind of world that Orwell warned would be our future.
This is what I really want to talk about. No matter whom we elect next week, the deeper structural problems shaping contemporary culture and our political life will remain. I endorse the Obama candidacy not because I think he offers any real solutions, but because he represents constituencies that are less dangerous than those Romney represents. I really do believe the GOP is capable of driving us off the cliff justifying what they do in the name of patriotic platitudes and traditional Christian values. Too many of them are nuts and those who aren't are naive.
There are some sane Republicans who can see clearly what a disaster this administration has become, but cannot bring themselves to vote for a guy like Obama. I understand their dilemma. The Dems have serious, serious problems, and Obama is emblematic of them. But it's the Dems confusion and their very lack of a sense of direction that recommends them to me. Better that than to give the steering wheel to people who think they know where they are going but who really don't.
BTW. Saw the film Beasts of the Southern Wild last night. Well worth seeing and timely. Juxtapose that film with Lasch's quote.
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