What is the solution?
Lasch proposed a "return to basics": self-reliance, the family,
nature, the community, and the Protestant work ethic. To those who
adhere, he promised an elimination of their feelings of alienation
and despair.
But the clinical term "Narcissism" was abused by Lasch in his books.
It joined other words mistreated by this social preacher. The
respect that this man gained in his lifetime (as a social scientist
and historian of culture) makes one wonder whether he was right in
criticizing the shallowness and lack of intellectual rigor of
American society and of its elites.
There is a detailed analysis here, in a reaction I wrote to Roger
Kimball's "Christopher Lasch vs. the elites""New Criterion", Vol.
13, p.9 (04-01-1995):
http://samvak.tripod.com/lasch.html
6. Are all terrorists and serial killers narcissists?
Terrorists can be phenomenologically described as narcissists in a
constant state of deficient narcissistic supply. The "grandiosity
gap" - the painful and narcissistically injurious gap between their
grandiose fantasies and their dreary and humiliating reality -
becomes emotionally insupportable. They decompensate and act out.
They bring "down to their level" (by destroying it) the object of
their pathological envy, the cause of their seething frustration,
the symbol of their dull achievements, always incommensurate with
their inflated self-image.
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