I don’t even think he was wrong about a lot of stuff.
But he seemed like one of those “I don’t own a television” guys.
And I hate those guys.
Anyhow, while this woman is also a bit wrongheaded herself, being an old hippie and all, she makes some good points:
It was Lasch who, more influentially than any of the others, beat the drum for America having become a society of middle-class consumers on the one hand and radical protesters on the other. Between them, they were like the malignant, fantasy-ridden children everyone knew narcissists to be, destroying the only thing that mattered: social stability.
And what was the essential form that social stability took for Lasch? The family. The family, he claimed, that “haven in a heartless world” for men such as himself, was more important than any argument for individuation that anyone could be making. Individuation, for Lasch, was narcissism. (…)
The subtitle of Lasch’s book is “An Age of Diminishing Expectations.” That, unfortunately, was the way the world looked to a white, middle-class man without the gift of empathy who found all the social tumult depressing rather than stimulating, and who, feeling the ground beneath his own feet beginning to give way, came perilously close to idealizing a solidity of the past that never was.
What many movement conservatives can’t or won’t understand is that for some of us, the “family” should not be the base unit of society, because it can just as easily be a locus of evil as for good.
To many people, the “world” is a haven from a heartless family.
I am forever bowled over by my Jewish friends’ affection (or at least, infinite tolerance) for their families. When one of them suggested that I set up some kind of enterprise with “a trusted family member,” I reminded him that, being a gentile, I have no trusted family members.
The idea of wanted to increase one’s ties to one’s relatives rather than snip them as quickly and permanently as possible is utterly foreign to me.
Radical leftists are half-right in wanting to reduce each individual’s forced reliance upon their families for lifelong security and prosperity. They went wrong when they held up the State as a replacement. You can always, if you absolutely have to, kill your family. But the State is, at the end of the day, immortal and a million times more powerful.