Crowds and Party · 第 30 页

The decline of symbolic authority in liberal therapeutic society induces a broader cultural narcissism. As corporate games take the place of frontier survival, welfare capitalism’s bureaucratic rationality replaces the previous era’s hierarchy with administrators, technicians, and experts. Rather than having symbolic authority, experts and administrators have knowledge. This knowledge is generally contestable and provisional: experts disagree; what a bureaucrat knows may not be useful. The culture of technocratic expertise and management absolves individuals of responsibility, making everyone a victim of sickness or circumstance. Narcissistic culture infantilizes by promoting dependence on the paternalist bureaucracies of welfare liberalism (corporation and state) and at the same time encouraging the pursuit of pleasure. The narcissistic person admires the strong and rich—celebrities—for their independence, their capacity to do and have whatever they want. Mass media encourages the fascination with celebrity, amplifying the narcissist’s tendency to divide society into two groups: winners and losers, the great and the crowd. Self-fulfillment and hedonism are celebrated, yet unsatisfying and, increasingly, unattainable. In the absence of symbolic authority, people absorb themselves in a search for authenticity, their skepticism toward the falsity of mass culture’s manufactured illusions manifesting as an ironic detachment that further distances them from meaningful connections with others.

What Lasch diagnoses as pathological or secondary narcissism is a reactive individuality that accompanies changes in capitalist society associated with mass production and consumption. When consumption is a way of life, work need not be meaningful, fair, or morally necessary (as a previous generation held). Instead, the purpose of work is acquisition. Consumption solves all problems, fills all needs. Rather than postponing pleasure, consumerism enjoins gratification now. The concomitant growth in management and proliferation of technicians, experts, and knowledge professionals presents “new forms of capitalist control, which established themselves first in the factory and then spread throughout society.”¹¹ Having lost its role in production, the family is stripped of its role in reproduction as its social tasks either become matters in need of expert intervention or reducible to problems solved by the right commodities. The effect of these developments is a realization of the logic of capitalism such that “the pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival.”¹² The result, which Lasch says was already foreseen by the Marquis de Sade, is the reduction of people to objects. Each person is to be used for the enjoyment of another: “pure individualism thus issues in the most radical repudiation of individuality.”¹³ The culture of narcissism erodes the individual it ostensibly celebrates.

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