It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that advertising and consumerism shape how we perceive reality through mass media.
Christopher Lasch argues that the mass media does not merely inform us but rather distorts reality by aligning it with the interests of consumerism. As advertising dominates, it influences our perceptions and societal values, often obscuring the truth and prioritizing desires over genuine understanding.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about how advertising influences social norms during a marketing class.
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.
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.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
God is not an encyclopedia whose task is to satisfy our curiosity.
Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.
Waiting and hoping are the whole of life, and as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed.
We must remember that the people of all the States are entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the citizen of the several States. We should bear this in mind, and act in such a way as to say nothing insulting or irritating. I would inculcate this idea, so that we may not, like Pharisees, set ourselves up to be better than other people.
Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural.
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