Crowds and Party · 第 29 页

He continues, “Capital accumulation in its own right sublimated appetite and subordinated the pursuit of self-interest to the service of future generations.” The frontier American is egoistic and brutal, this brutality tied to a self-constraint on behalf of civilized community. Violence is channeled, put to internal as well as external use.

Lasch positions the corporation as the twentieth-century parallel to the frontier. In contrast to the fierce and rugged pioneers fighting for survival, seventies Americans are stuck in a boring, ordered, and banal society. Because the struggle for success has replaced the struggle to survive, they have lost the capacity to desire. Nonetheless US Americans in the seventies seethe with an inner rage that bureaucratic society and its injunction to cheerful getting along prevents them from expressing, the violent forces of the id now lacking an outlet.

Lasch uses the “executive” as a figure for twentieth-century narcissism. Unlike the “organization man” associated with mid-century American anxiety about conformism, Lasch’s executive is the bureaucratic “gamesman.” Seeking competitive advantage, the gamesman wants to get ahead of everyone else. He values quickness and mobility. He construes power in terms of momentum. He replaces craftsmanship with socials skills that involve seducing, humiliating, and manipulating others. The gamesman doesn’t interiorize rules as socially valid norms; he experiences both work and personal relations as power struggles. Bureaucratic emphases on rules and cooperation couple with personal exceptionalism—rules don’t apply to me. The gamesman thus looks for ways to exploit conventions for his own benefit. “Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in.”⁷ A friendly demeanor, an air of compassion, and an open, participatory approach to decisionmaking all conceal a power game that the majority will lose.

The sense that a game is being played extends beyond the corporation. The lower orders, Lasch writes,

internalize a grandiose idea of the opportunities open to all, together with an inflated opinion of their own capacities. If the lowly man resents those more highly placed, it is only because he suspects them of grandly violating the regulations of the game, as he would like to do himself if he dared. It never occurs to him to insist on a new set of rules.⁸

The “lowly man” acquiesces uneasily to expectations of friendly cooperation, suppressing dissatisfaction into a growing emptiness.

Lasch’s psychoanalytic explanation for the rise of the narcissistic personality highlights changes in the paternal function. Unlike the materially self-sufficient frontier family, the family in the second half of the twentieth century depends on help and advice from experts. Whether as medical and therapeutic child-rearing guidance or educational and juridical intervention in the domestic sphere, expertise dislodges symbolic patriarchal authority. This dislodging continues broader patterns associated with industrial development, more specifically with the separation of production and reproduction, the distancing of children from labor, and the diminution of opportunities for fathers to teach the technical skills associated with their work directly to their children. The father’s absence “encourages the development of a harsh and punitive superego based largely on archaic images of the parents, fused with grandiose selfimages.”⁹ The child doesn’t identify with parents; it introjects them, holding itself up to idealized standards and punishing itself for failing to achieve them. Put in Lacanian terms, the change in the paternal function is a decline in authority such that the symbolic law can no longer provide a site of relief from superegoic demands.¹⁰ The poor ego is preoccupied with itself because it’s always under attack.

29