The Culture of Narcissism
by Christopher Lasch
Consumer culture didn't liberate the self. It replaced it.
For you if
you want to understand why the pursuit of self-fulfillment keeps producing the opposite of what it promises
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$19 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Lasch published this in 1979 and named something American culture had not yet found words for: the way consumer capitalism had hollowed out genuine community, genuine achievement, and genuine selfhood and replaced all three with their performance. The therapeutic culture that promised self-knowledge produced only self-obsession. The celebrity culture that promised meaning produced only the anxiety of being seen. The competitive individualism that promised freedom produced only the terror of being ordinary. Lasch challenged the left and the right simultaneously, which is what happens when someone is actually seeing the system rather than their preferred version of it. The most important American cultural diagnosis of the 20th century and the book that Capitalist Realism, Affluenza, and Born to Buy are all in conversation with whether they know it or not. Still the sharpest vocabulary available for the specific exhaustion of living inside a culture organized entirely around self-image.
Where This Book Lives
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
American Factory(2019)
dir. Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert
No villain speech. Just what actually happens.
A Chinese-owned auto-glass plant reopens a shuttered Ohio GM factory, and cultural and labor tensions surface as American and Chinese workers try to build something together.
Why it’s here: Refuses the easy version of this story — nobody here is simply the hero or the problem, Chinese management included. The first film the Obamas' production company ever released, and it earns that distinction by trusting the footage over a thesis.
Blackfish(2013)
dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite
What a captive orca's violence was telling us.
The story of Tilikum, a captive orca involved in multiple trainer deaths, used to examine the sea-park industry's treatment of highly intelligent, social animals.
Why it’s here: Uses one whale's death to ask a harder question than whether it was an accident — what decades alone in a tank does to any intelligent, social animal kept there for a marine park's bottom line.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow
Why your favorite app got worse on purpose.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
The end of the world, engineered.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Affluenza
John de Graaf, David Wann & Thomas Naylor
Consumerism is a disease. Here are the symptoms.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
George Saunders
Theme park. Corporate memos. People getting destroyed. Very funny.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST