Quote

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.

Christopher Lasch

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Christopher Lasch
Age: 61 †
Born: 1932
Born: June 1
Died: 1994
Died: February 14
Historian
Journalist
Social Critic
Sociologist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Robert Christopher Lasch
Possession
Appropriation
Child
Possessions
Lying
Ownership
Desire
Toys
Use
Appeal
Comes
Appetite
Children
Status
Appeals

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Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
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The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
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Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
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The left has lost the common touch.
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Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.
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The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
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The work of art is a scream of freedom.
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The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.
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Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
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Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
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Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
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The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
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Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
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Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
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Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.
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The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.
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The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
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Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.
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I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
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The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
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