Lasch and Scientific Management of Mankind

[Anonymous No.18932598]

Is Lasch the most clear and well-argued critic of the contemporary United States?

Many Marxists continue to fall into the same traps they have always been predisposed to (namely, the primacy of materialism and the facile reduction of the existing order into relations of oppressed/oppressor). Many postmodernist analyses are either too strange and vague to truly know how applicable they are to reality (Baudrillard) or too totalizing and specific and, as is clear after some time, plainly incorrect (Foucault, much of Ellul). Contemporary conservative critiques are in my experience not worth reading. While many analyses from all these frameworks clearly strike common chords and seem to be attempting to explain the same thing, and can be very illuminating, they all leave much to be desired.

Lasch on the other hand strikes at the heart of the matter as far as I'm concerned almost from the beginning of his notable works (Culture of Narcissism, Haven in a Heartless World). Lasch identifies and distills what is common to all the above: the alienation of mankind in the midst of the ongoing campaign to scientifically manage human beings at every level, and the ongoing unintentional contributions provided by contemporary camps (political parties, socioeconomic groups, activisms, etc). Lasch's historical analyses provide convincing arguments for how we got here, for how we fail to recognize it, and for the disastrous and cataclysmic consequences of it (Culture of Narcissism, Revolt of the Elites). The erosion of recognition of individual responsibility or any sense of duty to me seems like the nail in the coffin, though perhaps in this long winter of humiliation after humiliation (elections of Trump and Biden, military failure, rising prices, COVID, lack of faith in country institutions and leaders, etc) will finally break the faith in Progress that prevents substantive action from occurring.

Is there any other writer like Lasch?

[Rafael No.18932686]

Bliss = energy
Suffering = entropy

Our Lord God, in his infinite wisdom, wrote the laws of physics so that suffering creates entropy in the universe while bliss creates energy.
The closer a system is to a dystopia the worse it’s bliss: suffering ratio becomes and consequently its entropy increases exponentially until it collapses shortly thereafter.
Hence why totalitarian dictatorships last less than a human lifespan, the suffering they generate causes it to consume far more energy than they could ever hope to produce.
Conversely the closer a society comes to the utopia ideal the better it’s bliss: suffering becomes and it generates more energy than it consumes (aka it slows down entropy).
Sistema ex divino aka Heaven aka Paradise generates only bliss therefore it creates infinite energy and will never remain for eternity.

t. knower

[Anonymous No.18932692]

How is Ellul wrong and Lasch right?

[Anonymous No.18932963]

>>18932692
I'm mostly talking about Ellul's Propaganda book and how his attempt to overly-totalize it left it with some pretty severe anachronisms if read today that at least need to be reconciled. Especially considering the advent of social media.

>>18932686
This is reductive, bliss and suffering is a false dichotomy if bliss is taken to mean anything past simple amusement/pleasure. I reject a world where we are all artificially given "bliss" and protected from suffering. This is covered in the other Ellul in the last chapter I believe.

[Anonymous No.18934097]

BUMP
should've made a thread about rc waldun instead

[Anonymous No.18934307]

>>18934097
what he reading

[Anonymous No.18934368]

>>18934307
Pongostotle

[Anonymous No.18934532]

>>18932963
What do you mean by “over-totalizing”?

[Anonymous No.18934582]

>>18934532
He means to say that Ellul's analysis was so based that he has been unable to attribute what was true then to what is true now.

[Anonymous No.18935331]

>>18932598
Lasch seemed to be on the path of the NazBol pill but in one of his 1970s books he discounts any action because of the atrocities of Stalin and the holohoax, if Lasch had only known those were Jew capitalist lies, then he could have proposed solutions and action; or he could have become a doomer and moved to someplace comfy. I spoke to Lasch's friend Richard Westbrook and asked if there was any place that Lasch liked or he thought as an ideal place close to his vision and he answered Denmark. Lasch took a lecture trip to Denmark near the end of his life.

Denmark seems pretty close to his vision. The Danish left is realistic about refugees and integration and if they weren't such NATO pig dogs and reestablished diplomatic relation with Syria they would have already deported the refugees back to Syria, though I wish they were deported to Israel and the U.S

[Anonymous No.18935347]

>>18935331
So basically Nazbol lite? Or what do you call a relatively homogenous nation with social welfare?

[Anonymous No.18936918]

>>18935347
I am not sure exactly what it was Lasch liked about Denmark, as far as I know he never wrote about it. I would venture to say he liked the strong social ties and networks and grassroots politics. Be aware I know little about Denmark and the country has never called my attention.

About social welfare, Lasch hated the welfare state. The role of the family should be fulfilled by the family and not the state nor the markets and corporations or helping professions e.g counselors, social workers, therapist and nowadays influencers.

The elites controlling the state and the capital are the enemies of a society.

My reference to the NazBol pill is not so much that race is a missing ingredient in Lasch vision but that a Leninist path is the only path to reviving and protecting Lasch's vision of human dignity and freedom.

[Anonymous No.18937287]

>>18936918
>but that a Leninist path is the only path to reviving and protecting Lasch's vision of human dignity and freedom.

imbecile

[Anonymous No.18937341]

>>18932598
I think you’re ready for pic related, OP.

Also, read this essay:

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/up-from-liberalism-richard-weaver.html

Weaver is one of the most articulate critics of capital-P progress there ever was.

I love Lasch, but the way he writes is desultory, aphoristic, and highly idiosyncratic. He has a lot of interesting ideas but I don’t think he substantiates them well.

[Anonymous No.18937347]

>>18932686
Read The End of History by Francis Fukuyama his idea is similar.

[Anonymous No.18938505]

>>18937287
You likely not know what I mean by Leninist

[Anonymous No.18938537]

Lasch is just the typical feudal socialist stupid

>>18936918
>Marxism
>human dignity and freedom
Top fucking kek

[Anonymous No.18939546]

>>18938537
>kek

[Anonymous No.18940570]

Bump for interest
So MacIntyre and Weaver are similar?

[Anonymous No.18942115]

Bump. We hardly get any Lasch threads.

[Anonymous No.18943304]

>>18942115
Because Lasch falls into the category of only being understood by genuinely intelligent genuinely poor people.

The elites are deracinated midwits who can't understand Lasch and if they could it would be contrary to the social conditioning.

And the poor are below average intelligence deracinated meat puppets who wish to be elites.

The only people who can understand Lasch are the same people who would comprise a vanguard party to overthrow the elites. And people of such qualities have always been few in the decadent deracinated West and even fewer in the U.S.

Dropping out and doomerism is the only path forward. Or supporting the Chinese in their quest to build an authentic human centric sovereign country

[Anonymous No.18943415]

>>18943304
China is hardly a better alternative. Talk about the scientific management of human beings.

>>18938537
Lasch isn't feudalist nor is he socialist. Probably more of a romantic if anything; it is abundantly clear after reading his works that what his "ideal" (not to use the word utopian) vision places emphasis on family and community, holistic or fulfilling work done in close proximity to the home, civic/civil duty and responsibility, etc, not to mention democracy (as opposed to what we have today).

>>18935331
>>18936918
I have trouble believing Lasch would be on board with any solution that is as artificial and violent as what you talk about, especially considering the consequences of such a path must necessarily look like.

>>18937341
I'll check out the essay, thanks. I've read and love that MacIntyre.

[Anonymous No.18943416]

>>18932598
>Contemporary conservative critiques are in my experience not worth reading
This is where your ideology blinds you, anon. But regardless, good critique. This book is on my to-read list so it's nice to hear other's thoughts on it

[Anonymous No.18943489]

>>18943416
Do you have one on your mind? I am much more lenient and partial to contemporary conservative voices than liberal in general. The problem for me is that many critiques in that category fall back on faulty foundations like hardline individualism, capitalism/market expansionism, utilitarianism, etc. Plainly they advocate directly for much of what their ideological opponents use as their own foundations. If an argument goes "it is better for the economy if x instead of y" or "you and I each will be more free if we are able to do z" it is going in the wrong direction from the first. Also, the toleration and even advocation of unbounded accumulation of capital is unacceptable. No man can serve two masters.

[Anonymous No.18943517]

>>18943489
Well we'd naturally disagree on any sources given, as you seem to be based in theology, whereas I am not, I'm afraid. And I suppose there is libertarian and there's conservative. I'm more of the former but do recognise that only conservatives based in a theologit context are able to provide actual moral arguments these days, when everyone else ascribes to "if it ain't hurting nobody, then what's the big deal?"

[Anonymous No.18943845]

>>18938505
idiot

[Anonymous No.18943847]

>>18943304
>Dropping out and doomerism is the only path forward. Or supporting the Chinese in their quest to build an authentic human centric sovereign country

what a fucking retard

[Anonymous No.18943864]

>>18943415
Lasch probably would not support violence, however that does not mean the path to the Lasch ideal is peaceful. >>18943845
>>18943847
Is this board infested with conservatives only capable of generic insults? Do you not have the shame to even pretend to present an argument?

Complete narcissists.

[Anonymous No.18943884]

>>18943864
Stop shilling Leninism in a Lasch thread.

[Anonymous No.18944604]

>>18943884
You have failed to present an alternative path to Lasch-land.

If someone posts something you disagree with either engage and prove them wrong or at the very least present an alternative. That is the intellectual tradition.

[Anonymous No.18945596]

Bump
>>18944604
>Leninism must be the path
>no reason why

[Anonymous No.18945807]

This seems like an interesting book. From a Goodreads review:

>The Minimal Self was written in the early 1980’s, a pivotal point in the cultural and political life of America. Greed was good. Communism was bad. Reagonomics reigned. And Americans were paranoid - certainly not for the first time but in a manner that was signally more desperate after their defeat in Vietnam, in the midst of profound economic woes and racial tension, and with a general feeling of being unable to control their lives. In a word, used by Lasch, the country was beleaguered.

>Like the Boers in South Africa, Americans hunkered down. The national ethos became one of resistance - to ‘non-traditional values’, to economic and military challenges from elsewhere, but mostly resistance to itself. Its fear of what it might become in a future over which its influence was questionable had a dramatic change on its politics that few but Lasch noticed: an obsession with survival. Survival of a ‘way of life’, survival of the environment, survival of institutions like the family, survival of ‘democratic freedoms’. America had adopted a sort of “siege mentality,” the consequences of which wouldn’t be visible for decades as it persisted, festered and matured.

>Politically, America had reached a pivotal ideological and cultural point: “The hope that political action will gradually humanize industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Lasch diagnosed this condition as a sort of national narcissism. Narcissism is not the equivalent of selfishness or egotism but a “confusion of the self and the not-self.”

>“The minimal or narcissistic self is”, Lasch says, “above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.” The narcissist inhabits a world of struggling fantasy, discovering and fighting battles against the world in general. Illusion is the narcissist’s life-blood. He (and I suppose she) strives continually to “attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence.” Crucially the narcissist has no ideal as an end point of such striving, no vision, no strategy; merely the objective of being in control.

[Anonymous No.18945873]

>>18945807
That last paragraph sounds likes a description of our NazBol friend in this thread. He says:

>>18943304
>Dropping out and doomerism is the only path forward. Or supporting the Chinese in their quest to build an authentic human centric sovereign country
I like China and running around in the woods too, but isn't that what Lasch is talking about? Longing to remake the world in your own image (or rather, your psychological projection of what China is) or merging into your environment in blissful union?

This is what Lasch says about narcissism:

>“...narcissism...[is] a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires—not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs.”

The talk about a "siege mentality" and "survival" as a reigning ethos of this culture is also worth thinking about. I see it on the right, obviously, but on the left, too. But it's articulated differently on the left and by liberals and so on. "We will persist" stuff. Maybe what comes after modernism and postmodernism is "survivalism."

[Anonymous No.18945997]

>>18943304
>The only people who can understand Lasch are the same people who would comprise a vanguard party to overthrow the elites.
This is correct. Marx neglected the lumpenproletariat, that is, the proletariat organised according to anything but Marx's hyperspecific autistic interpretation of industrial era class conflict. Bakunin rightly critiqued this autism and its complete neglect of voluntarism and faith in man as man (as opposed to faith in abstract socio-technological dialectics), but Bakunin was himself blind to culture, faith, family, and nation as legitimate, because in his age these had all become decadent expressions of a bourgeoisie desperate to justify the status quo.

Lasch and other post-Marxist critics of capitalism, liberalism, and bourgeois ideology like Piccone and the Telos crowd are just the result of critical theory waking up from this 19th century fugue, with its bygone historical contingencies and concomitantly outdated analyses (this whole industrial revolution will inevitably produce a socialist revolution any day now! it CAN'T get any worse than this, so it MUST be about to get better!), its utopian naivete and hatred of working with what always already exists (unconscious holdover of Enlightenment and Rousseauist radicalism, with its immature bourgeois disdain for anything "traditional" i.e. "irrational," and love of imposing its total revolution on the dumb tradition-grubbing plebs), and its frankly Jewish autism and idées-fixes of enforced cosmopolitanism and fetishistic post-racialism.

It took a century of horrific failures and fuckups like the Soviet Union (Piccone: "red capitalism"), but we're finally ready to inherit the actual legacy of leftism and critical theory, without the juvenile autism. As a bonus, things have become so bad that utopianism is no longer possible. Flights of tranny fancy about working with the bourgeoisie to deconstruct the nuclear family are no longer live options except for total retards, and thus only serve to identify fake, retarded, and otherwise compromised leftists. The stakes thus get clearer and clearer every day, the choice between trannybourgeoishedonism and humanity becomes more and more obviously a zero-sum, binary choice. And the modesty and sobriety of someone like Lasch's counter-proposals to utopianism are finally, properly visible for the gold that they are, now that they're no longer drowned out in the fool's gold of over-educated college pseudo-leftist bullshit.

[Anonymous No.18946007]

>>18945997
>Dropping out and doomerism is the only path forward. Or supporting the Chinese in their quest to build an authentic human centric sovereign country
This is incorrect though, and it's a line often pushed by CCP shills seeking to capitalise on the decline of the bourgeois pseudo-left in the west, just like the USSR did. The Chinese are not fascists or nativists, they are technocrat bugmen ruling over a termite mound they're already genetically modifying into sub-castes like the hivemind alien species in a real-life RTS game. They don't care about anything, they will consume everything and convert it into abstract production tokens for their bug empire that has no ground and no purpose other than acquiring more tokens so it can acquire more tokens.

The CCP will have a great role to play in saving the world, but it will be because those nations strong enough to shake off the trannybourgeoisie and rediscover their essential humanity in the coming years will have a natural enemy to face. No human can ally with a CCP CRISPR-cyborg chinaman, nobody can be friends with one, nobody can want to inhabit a planet ruled by them. The coming century will be structured by two basic choices that have to be made continuously every day from now on, two basic pivot points: Do you want your kid to be a fuckin tranny? and Do you want CCP bugman eating all the birds and insects in your local park until there's nothing left of reality except styrofoam highrises and Weibo? No and no? Then stop enabling trannies, and start realising the CCP are the Orcs from Mordor, totally unredeemable monsters from Gog and Magog.

[Anonymous No.18946032]

>>18945997
>Marx neglected the lumpenproletariat ... neglect of voluntarism and faith in man as man ... over-educated college pseudo-leftist bullshit.
You might be right, but the heroic archetype I'm expecting to fulfill the role of leading the masses through revolution, chaos and death might be different than some here would like. There is an assumption sometimes that the people with the "correct" leftist ideas or presentation or aesthetic will be in charge in a leftist revolution. I think at this point it's almost better to assume your own perspective will be a submerged and possibly repressed part of the process.

https://youtu.be/QM9xgHibvzM

[Anonymous No.18946044]

>>18946007
>The Chinese are not fascists or nativists, they are technocrat bugmen ruling over a termite mound they're already genetically modifying into sub-castes like the hivemind alien species in a real-life RTS game.
Real Command & Conquer hours

https://youtu.be/sxcE8a5X9aE?t=121

[Anonymous No.18946056]

>>18946007
>CCP CRISPR-cyborg chinaman vs. trannies
What about both?

[Anonymous No.18946070]

>>18946007
I encourage everyone not just you in particular to think about exactly where the information you have used to form your opinion of China and the CCP comes from. In the world we live in today, particularly the west i am of the opinion that anyone who at least claims to have "intellectual integrity" questions western media in regards to not only China but the global south in general. If you want to truly understand the media you consume. Follow the money.

[Anonymous No.18946327]

>>18945807
>>18945873
https://digitalcollections.lib.rochester.edu/ur/future-self-march-1987

In that lecture Lasch goes over three solutions for preservation or non-preservation of the self, without ensuring one and moreover going over the problems each has.

I also found this Lasch lecture on odysee
https://odysee.com/@IntellectualDeepWeb:8/Christopher-Lasch-The-Culture-of-Narcissism:1
>I like China and running around in the woods too, but isn't that what Lasch is talking about? Longing to remake the world in your own image (or rather, your psychological projection of what China is) or merging into your environment in blissful union?

Your interpretation of narcissism insinuates political castration. A man wanting cleaner local parks is suspect as a narcissist under your incomplete and selective interpretation.

A strong self is one capable of challenging the overwhelming forces that call one to subordinate the self to the status quo. It is the loss of this ability in many people that lead to bunker and survivalist mentalities. 'If I cannot challenge, I must at least resist'

I have more to say but I work 12 hour night shifts and should be sleeping now.

About Leninism, it is the only path because there cannot be a revival of community life, values without a revival if community property and that cannot be accomplished by relying on democracy or elites, because both are controlled by the elites who are the enemies of communal property. In a world of narcissism it is easy to upload political spectacles and illusions and archetypes into people's psyche and perception. Given that, the people are unable to exercise democracy to confront the enemies of Lasch-land and much less even able to imagine a future not uploaded to their brains by the elites. A lack of political imagination, comprehension and willpower. Not to mention that the ability of the people to organize without elite patronage has been destroyed, you can't have a loneliness epidemic and grassroots democracy at the same time. The few who understand and have the ability are too few to accomplish political action so they must either pursue dropping out or just grind their life away until they can get away from the bullshit

[Anonymous No.18946389]

>>18946327
Well, when you put it that way, you're probably right.

https://youtu.be/6eh2B-g3owY

[Anonymous No.18947606]

China's trash, any attempt to synthesize Leninism with what Lasch advocates is a Leninist Romantic folly

[Anonymous No.18947683]

>>18945997
I side with trannybourgeoishedonism

[Anonymous No.18948085]

>>18947606
This is the Aryanischer path.
What is the alternative?

[Anonymous No.18949034]

>>18948085
this is an attempt to not try to provide an argument

[Anonymous No.18949753]

>>18949034
>any attempt to synthesize Leninism with what Lasch advocates is a Leninist Romantic folly
I am in total agreement, and there is no other path for a noble strong self to take.

China is literally the greatest country on Earth at the moment, but that can be discussed elsewhere.

What is your alternative? What is your path?

[Anonymous No.18950020]

>>18932686
>i'm a teenager and I understand everything

[Anonymous No.18950336]

[Anonymous No.18950347]

>>18950336
she got married btw

[Anonymous No.18950949]

Here's a fairly sympathetic reading of Lasch from a leftist podcast

https://bungacast.com/2020/06/16/128-backlasch-ft-anna-khachiyan-2/

[Anonymous No.18951062]

>>18946327
can you restate what you said in the last paragraph in more simple english? I want to understand

[Anonymous No.18951107]

>>18950949
What's her reconciliation with Lasch on trannies, gender "equality", and personal responsibility in general?

[Anonymous No.18951166]

>>18945997
>the choice between trannybourgeoishedonism and humanity
you mean between trannybourgeoishedonism and COMMUNITY
the idea of 'nation' was always too broad to do any good
the intellectual, devoid of nationalistic propaganda, cannot and should not be able to think of community outside of about 250 people who are aligned in purpose through life and death. your 'village'
of course, this existed profoundly before agriculture, and today is largely non-existent and hard to imagine for westerners, whose '250' essentially is a bunch of people spread out over thousands of miles who on occasion speak to each other.

[Anonymous No.18951183]

>>18947683
The trannies are lunpen biopolitical clientele for capital its like talking like an NPC from a videogame these people believe they are liberated individuals for prostituting themselves, since their identity is based off"science" they will obey every technocratic mandate without question and shut down any dissent from the corporate monoculture. And notice how they are openly going after children now

[Anonymous No.18951302]

>>18951183
sexuality and gender simply aren't great in defining identity
you can't imagine asking alexander the great to define himself and getting something about his sexuality
there comes a time and place for these things to become important in identity, specifically when they have been somehow 'oppressed' and now need liberation
the oppression has been christian morality, the effects of which are wearing off in western society
we now are firmly under the hand of 'humanism', which, to be honest, is whatever anyone wants it to be. not that christian morality is not malleable.

[Anonymous No.18951359]

>>18951302
These people just want to replace the church with mass media psychiatrists and the democratic party. They have no moral vision or personality beyond their coomer sexualidentity and lack the respects christians had for the individual soul. They want everyone to be the same. A miion identities all converging in the same corporate atomized ideology.

[Anonymous No.18951543]

>>18951359
yeah, essentially what you said
the lack of bedrock principles defines liberalism in my eyes
it is the appearance of being right, rather than the feeling of being right
homogeneity reduces the possibility of opposing views, which supposedly hurt society and stunt the grand human future

[Anonymous No.18951573]

>>18943304
>Dropping out and doomerism is the only path forward. Or supporting the Chinese in their quest to build an authentic human centric sovereign country
The CCP is everywhere gentlemen. Stay frosty.