subtract 8 pages

from 52 - 66:

Contemporary cultural examples of escape through irony and self detachment (94 - 99):
Jim from The Office
Dilbert
Squidward
Bitching in the work GC to stay sane

for salon

if you enjoy the book, i definitely recommend pages 1 - 99. But the key parts i'd like us all to read are:
p 1 - 13, 52 - 66 (how it happened), 94 - 99 (irony, no exit)

Lasch, a Marxist writing in the 70s, provides a materialist reason we don't care about 'historical continuity' and are instead 'living for the moment', focusing on personal goals of mental health and happiness:

"The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have fulfilled poetic prophecy, giving concrete historical substance to the nightmare, or death wish, that avant-garde artists were the first to express. The question of whether the world will end in ire or in ice, with a bang or a whimper, no longer interests artists alone. Impending disaster has become an everyday concern, so commonplace and familiar that nobody any longer gives much thought to how disaster might be averted. People busy themselves instead with survival strategies, measures designed to prolong their own lives, or programs guaranteed to ensure good health and peace of mind... Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing them- selves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to 'relate,' overcoming the 'fear of pleasure.'" (4)

Do you agree with his origin story for 'self-improvement culture'? Can you think of other factors?

Also, many of us are focusing on pretty much every single activity he listed at the end of that quote. Are we coping, 'repudiating the recent past' or is Lasch just an asshole? (with clogged arteries who cannot authentically relate nor feel pleasure and so has a highly distorted view of the human condition)

Jesus, suddenly anxious about being crucified, goes to therapy. The therapist tells him he has 'savior complex', likely from self-imposed sexual repression. He recommends xanax for the anxiety, some neuro-linguistic programming to undo his religious conditioning, and tells him to focus on himself for a while, to stop worrying about the publicans, get a girlfriend, and replace bread and wine with a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. Jesus takes the advice, and lives a normal life, similar to many of us today. Very comfortable. Ups and downs. Feeling lost sometimes, etc. But he avoids crucifixion, gets married, and lives till 78.

Did he make the right choice? How do morality, faith, and sacrifice fit into a therapeutic culture? Who is our role model if not Jesus?

The phenomena of the 'winning image' and personal brand has obviously progressed since the 70s. The question is, are the effects as dire as Lasch says? Can one intentionally cultivate charisma without being a loveless psychopath? Or is such self-improvement inherently unnatural? Many say that humans are meant to abandon themselves in love and activity. They are not build a 'personality'. Does self-improvement necessitate a constant self-consciousness that's making us neurotic?

These are just a few questions to kick you off, but there are tons of provocative points and ideas here, I encourage you to discuss whatever stirred you up the most.

my thoughts

psychic defense / image manipulation behavior may be from a lack of trust (both due to degenerate society and due to lack of faith) that you can obtain security through 'doing the right thing' or 'doing good work' -- answer to question 1
you HAVE to be machiavellian. we worship gangsters, the 'bad bitch', etc

jobs asking you about your interests, deciding on 'culture fit', they reward you for being an 'interesting person', rather than shared purpose in usefulness and improvement

also social capital being such an important part of certain satanic sectors of the economy. 'it's all about who you know' destroys our most wholesome sense of security: loving community and support
love others unconditionally and they will love you

America's reputation as a land of opportunity rested on its claim that the destruction of hereditary obstacles to advancement had created conditions in which social mobility depended on individual initiative alone. - p. 52

man, archetypical embodiment of the American dream, owed his advancement to habits of industry, sobriety, moderation, selfd'sc'p''ne, and avo'dance of debt. He ''ved for the future, shunn,ng se,f-,ndu,gence ,n favor of pat,ent, pa,nstak,ng accumu,at,on; and as ,ong as the co,,ect,ve prospect ,ooked on the who,e so bright, he found in the deferral of gratiication not only his principal gratiication but an abundant source of proits - p. 53 - PERFECT EXAMPLE OF PLATO'S OLIGARCHIC MAN

Henry Ward Beecher deined "the beau ideal of happiness" as a state of mind in which " a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy." Russell Sage remarked that "work has been the chief, and, you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life. "

Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues-industry, thrift, temperance-still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.

In 1907, both Lorimer's Saturday EveningPost and Orison Swett Marden's-SWccss magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the "art of conversa- tion, " fashion, and "culture." The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the conidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell them- selves in order to succeed. - p. 58

At irst, self-testing through competition remained almost indistinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and inluencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged "the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires. " They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. " You can never have riches in great quantities, " wrote Napoleon Hill in his Think and Grow Rich, " unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money. " The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the

The good opinion of friends and neighbors, which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments. Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their ac- tions but their personal atributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected. Pride and acquisitiveness, the sins of an ascendant capi- talism, have given way to vanity.

Whereas fame depends on the performance of notable deeds acclaimed in biography and works of history, celebrity-the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves-is acclaimed in the news media, in gossip columns, on talk shows, in magazines devoted to "personalities. "

people pleasing on a global scale: The modern prince does not much care that " there' s a job to be done " - the slogan of American capitalism at an earlier and more enterprising stage of its development; what interests him is that "relevant audiences," in the language of the Pentagon Papers, have to be cajoled, won over, seduced. He confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others.
Thus American officials blundered into the war in Vietnam because they could not distinguish the country's military and strategic interests from " our reputation as a guarantor, " as one of them put it. More concerned with the trappings than with the reality of power, they convinced themselves that failure to intervene would damage American "credibility."

Machiavellian political strategy turns to identity and reputation, another's perception of you.

In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inlicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites sug-

material abundance and mass production extend the culture of instant gratification, previously only feasible by the elites, to everyone. only aristocrats used to throw out 'out of style' clothes. now the middle class do it too. p. 73 - 74

At the same time that public life and even private life take on the qualities of spectacle, a countermovement seeks to model spectacle, theater, all forms of art, on reality-to obliterate the very distinction between art and life p. 86

Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. Even a rational understanding of the techniques by means of which a given illusion is produced does not necessarily destroy our capacity to experience it as a representation of reality. - this actually seems to me to be paving the way for pluralism / reality tunnel based view of life. knowing that all of life is maya, and simply what we project

Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance, even when the audience claims to be deeply moved. - p. 93

In our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled to others and to interpret signals received; it also es- tablishes an ironic distance from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people, as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment.

the modern detached cynic: He takes refuge in jokes, mockery, and cynicism. If he is asked to perform a disagreeable task, he makes it clear that he doesn't believe in the organization's objectives of increased eficiency and greater output. If he goes to a party, he shows by his actions that it's all a game-false, artiicial, insincere; a grotesque travesty of sociability. In this way he attempts to make himself invulnerable to the pressures ofthe situation. By refusing to take seriously the routines he has to perform, he denies their capacity to injure him. Although he assumes that it is impossible to alter the iron limits imposed on him by society, a detached awareness of those limits seems to make them matter less. By demystifying daily life, he conveys to himself and others the impression that he has risen beyond it, even as he goes through the motions and does what is expected of him.

By means of irony and eclec- ticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he inds it more and more dificult to write about anything except the dificulty of writing. Writing about writing then becomes in itself an object of self-parody, as when Donald Barthelme inserts into one of his stories the wry relection: "Another story about writing a story! Another regressus in ininitum! Who doesn ' t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn't continuall y proclaim ' Don't forget I ' m an artiice! ' "

Escape through irony and critical self-awareness is in any case itself an illusion; at best it provides only momentary relief. Distancing soon becomes a routine in its own right. Awareness commenting on awareness creates an escalating cycle of self-consciousness that inhibits spontaneity. It intensiies the feeling of inauthenticity that rises in the irst place out of resent- ment against the meaningless roles prescribed by modern industry. Self-created roles become as constraining as the social roles from which they are meant to provide ironic detachment. We long for the suspension of self-consciousness, of the pseudoana- lytic attitude that has become second nature; but neither art nor religion, historically the great emancipators from the prison of the self, retain the power to discourage disbelief.

When art, religion, and inally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality, the banality of pseudo-self-awareness becomes so overwhelming that men inally lose the capacity to envision any release at all except in total nothingness, blankness.
p 96 - 98

the role of games: Among the activities through which men seek release from everyday life, games offer in many ways the purest form of es- cape. Like sex, drugs, and drink, they ouiiterate awareness of everyday reality, but they do this not by dimming awareness but by raising it to a new intensity of concentration. Moreover, they have no side effects, hangovers, or emotional complications. Games simultaneously satisfy the need for free fantasy and the search for gratuitous dificulty; they combine childlike exuber- ance with deliberately created complications. - p.100

modern art: Constant experimentation in the arts has created so much confusion about standards that the only surviving measure of excellence is novelty and shock value, which in a jaded time often resides in a work ' s sheer ugliness and banality. p. 106

the role of watching sports: No one denies the desirability of participation in sports-not because it builds strong bodies but because it brings joy and delight. It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which to measure ourselves. By entering imagina- tively into their world, we experience in heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity. An athletic performance, like other performances, calls up a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping unconscious perceptions of life. Spectatorship is no more "passive" than daydream- ing, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits an emotional response.

the degradation of sport, 'its just a game' culture: the majority of Greek contests were fought out in deadly earnest" and discusses under the category of piay duels in which contestants ight to the death, water sports in which the object is to drown your opponent, and tournaments the training and preparation for which consume the athletes ' entire existence. The degradation of sport, then, consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its trivialization. Games derive their power from the investment of seemingly trivial activity with serious intent.