The Culture of Narcissism

Lasch published this in 1979 and named something American culture had not yet found words for: the way consumer capitalism had hollowed out genuine community, genuine achievement, and genuine selfhood and replaced all three with their performance. The therapeutic culture that promised self-knowledge produced only self-obsession. The celebrity culture that promised meaning produced only the anxiety of being seen. The competitive individualism that promised freedom produced only the terror of being ordinary. Lasch challenged the left and the right simultaneously, which is what happens when someone is actually seeing the system rather than their preferred version of it. The most important American cultural diagnosis of the 20th century and the book that Capitalist Realism, Affluenza, and Born to Buy are all in conversation with whether they know it or not. Still the sharpest vocabulary available for the specific exhaustion of living inside a culture organized entirely around self-image.