/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16319778]

Does it valid outside of America/The West? Other similar books?

[Anonymous No.16319865]

If you live in a country like mine, a neoliberal tax haven shithole that vacuum-sucks American cultural and economic cock on the reg, then yes I'd say it's quite valid.

[Anonymous No.16319871]

>>16319778
Probably not when he wrote it but considering how much the rest of the world has been americanized/neoliberalized since then I'd say yes

[Anonymous No.16319889]

>>16319778
Is this book good? Seems really interesting

[Anonymous No.16319894]

>>16319889
Wondering this as well. How well has it aged?

[Anonymous No.16320024]

>>16319778
>Other similar books?
In his other book "The True and Only Heaven", Lasch has a list of the thinkers he says influenced his 60s/70s thought:
>Freud and Marx (obvious ones)
>Randolph Bourne's war essays
>C Wright Mill's "Power Elite"
>William Appleman Williams' "Tragedy of American Diplomacy"
>Galbraith's "Affluent Society"
>Ellul's "Technological Society"
>Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd"
>Marcuse "Eros and Civilisation"
>Norman O Brown's "Life Against Death"
>the English marxists Raymond Williams and EP Thompson

The only one's I'm really familiar with there are Freud, Marx and Ellul though so I can't speak to the quality of the others.

If you liked CoN , you should get round to reading True and Only Heaven as soon as possible. It's indisputably his masterpiece imo. Apart from that, you might want to check out writers like Alasdair MacIntyre ("After Virtue"), Charles Taylor ("Sources of the Self") and Philip Rieff ("Triumph of the Therapeutic"), who have sort of similar theses about modern life.

>>16319889
>>16319894
It's definitely aged but his main thesis is still a great insight about 20th century capitalism. His basic point is that "narcissism" is a kind of technique for psychic survival that develops under the hostile conditions of capitalism and modern bureaucracy and manifests at all levels of the culture. Basically, he's talking about a kind of shallowness of our interaction with the world, particularly the social world, wherein we only need others to reify our own image of ourselves, and don't care about anything beyond that. He's got various examples, like political life moving away from organisations and associations to become a kind of theatre of radicalism, where we only want to reify a particular image of ourselves as "radical" or as "liberal" or as "traditional". This is all because of a kind of fragility of the ego brought about by the severing of ties to communities, to the past, and to family (this is the conservative aspect of Lasch that a lot of people take issue with). Imo, his thesis about politics becoming nothing more than a medium for having our self-image reified has only become more true as we've moved away from the messy world of real life organisation into the online world of heavily curated online accounts ("maoist-dengist with ancap characteristics" "fashy tradcath groyper" etc.). Interestingly, while he's mostly concerned with the left given the time in which he was writing, I think online "trads" and right wingers who's politics are entirely virtual and have no significant real life component at all are probably an even better example of what he's talking about