via washingtonexaminer:
Having surrendered most of his technical skills to the corporation, [the contemporary American] can no longer provide for his material needs. As the family loses not only its productive functions but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.
When one observes the behavior of the new modern woke, [Christopher] Lasch’s words are stunningly prescient. The college kids literally screaming like toddlers when faced with a speaker they don’t like, the transgender people asserting that their truth is all that matters, the you-go-girl amateur psychologists helping mentally wobbly people to demand respect even if they haven’t earned it. This is the world The Culture of Narcissism predicted. These aren’t the old communists with their “dialectical materialism” and pseudoscience about the tectonic plates of evolutionary social change. These are babies with no secure sense of self throwing tantrums. A comment on a YouTube video I recently came across is very telling. The clip shows some colorful teenage dancers in a 1980s club from 40 years ago. Being in college at the time, I was actually scanning YouTube looking for my old self. Yet what caught my eye was a comment below the video, a remark left by what I assume was a younger viewer: “They all look so confident.”
The woke are not egotistical, assertive activists. They are those without a self, without history, and without confidence. More than 40 years after the publication of The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch’s screaming tyke is running the culture.
Related: The Dishonest and Dishonorable Disagreements of Former Friends.