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 β 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.
Personally, I think if a women hasn't met the right man by the time she's 24, she may be lucky.
Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
Being popular comes when you have everything. But to be liked, it means that you must be treating people with respect and you must be showing kindness toward them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.