The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the notion that family can be entirely based on individual choice, highlighting the unrealistic expectation of maintaining endless options.
Christopher Lasch's quote reflects on the contemporary belief that family structures can be purely voluntary and flexible. He suggests that this perspective stems from a misguided idea that individuals can always choose from an array of options without facing the constraints or commitments typically associated with family ties. In essence, he argues that real familial relationships involve responsibilities and bonds that cannot simply be discarded at will.
In practice
In a discussion about modern family structures at a community event.
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.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.
Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering “I will ne'er consent”—consented.
I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.
A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.
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