Bland Rage…
March 13, 2010 1:24 amToday Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. Having internalized the social restraints by means of which they formerly sought to keep possibility within civilized limits, they feel themselves overwhelmed by an annihilating boredom, like animals whose instincts have withered in captivity. A reversion to savagery threatens them so little that they long precisely for a more vigorous instinctual existence. People nowadays complain of an inability to feel. They cultivate more vivid experiences, seek to beat sluggish flesh to life, attempt to revive jaded appetites. They condemn the superego and exalt the lost life of the senses. Twentieth-century peoples have erected so many psychological barriers against strong emotion, and have invested those defenses with so much of the energy derived from forbidden impulse, that they can no longer remember what it feels like to be inundated by desire. They tend, rather, to be consumed with rage, which derives from defenses against desire and gives rise in turn to new defenses against rage itself. Outwardly bland, submissive, and sociable, they seethe with an inner anger for which a dense, overpopulated, bureaucratic society can devise few legitimate outlets.
~Christopher Lasch; The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Author: Christopher Lasch
This book reads like a clinical psychiatric review of Edward Norton in Fight Club. I have been tossing around the word “Narcissism” quite casually over the past year after picking it up from cultural critics who have applied the term to different aberrations of culture in the modern developed world. It is easy to be flippant with a word that is not well defined in your mind. Narcissism has carried a very general definition of “being self centered” or “egotistical” as I have come to use it. But Lasch is out to give it teeth in this book, and as the definition is derived and expounded upon for me, I do believe I am becoming less and less prone to toss it around in casual conversation… silence, and repentance would probably be a better end result.
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