“ Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. ”
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.
~ Christopher Lasch
Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
