The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
Christopher Lasch
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
The left has lost the common touch.
