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.
Interpretation
Consumerism can weaken familial bonds by prioritizing materialism over loyalty and stability.
In this quote, Christopher Lasch critiques consumerism, suggesting that the relentless pursuit of material goods erodes traditional values like loyalty and permanence, ultimately harming family life. By emphasizing transient pleasures and possessions over enduring relationships, consumer culture fosters an environment that detracts from the foundational aspects of family and community, leading to instability in these essential social units.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of family values over material possessions.
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.
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.
A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
Nothing is quite so emotional and passionate as what goes on inside of a family. People are driven to distraction by a father or a mother or a husband. Or a child.
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
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