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.
It sometimes makes people feel better about themselves, you know, to put other people down, or make fun of them, or maybe make mockery of their work and that doesn't make me feel good at all.
There are subtle ways and overt ways of alienating a child from a parent, but either way it's evil
If you are a woman living, you've been done wrong by a man.
Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.
Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.
The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.
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