Christopher Lasch: The Revolt of the Elites (1)
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- čas přidán 6. 10. 2018
- Historian Christopher Lasch predicted our current social divisions and political problems. Lasch didn't please liberals or conservatives, but his point of view is sorely needed today. This is the beginning of a series of videos on his final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994). Lasch is probably most famous for a prior book, The Culture of Narcissism, but this final book best exemplifies his mature political thought.
Here is a website where you can find the interview mentioned in this video. It is no longer available elsewhere: www.dailymotion.com/video/x5fdem
www.amazon.com/Revolt-Elites-...
www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcis...
www.rochester.edu/news/show.ph...
![Christopher Lasch et la critique du progrès [Renaud Beauchard]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ngdiVb1FtkI/mqdefault.jpg)
Everyone should be reading Christopher Lasch. But as always, the people who most urgently need to know where they're going in 2020, won't read him. Everyone's identity is so fragile now, practically nobody is capable of self-criticism.
"Part of the trouble is that, we have lost our respect for honest manual labor"... This sentence on page 20 (The Revolt of the Elites) and the following paragraph explain so many things. Brilliant!
I wonder if you resolve this distinction: to respect labor is not the same as to reward labor. in fact it precisely these "honest manual laborers" who do purchase the goods at Walmart
Lasch understood that unfettered unregulated capitalism has cultural and psychological consequences When rugged individualism meets the collective one understands how neoliberalism tears apart the social bonds that provides comfort and meaning and purpose for millions
Lasch was a genius. ON a side note, he also was John Updike's roommate at Harvard (and was the fictional source for the short story The Christian Roommate).
omg the cat in the background
I came here after reading "The Culture of Narcissism" and being really wowed by it. This video has some high quality discussion!
this is great! I'm going to read The Revolt of the Elites a soon as possible. It seems to describe our current political era so well.
It blew me away when I read it roughly 8 years ago or so. I kept looking at the publishing date, like, “There is no way this was written back in the 90s!”
13:00 - yes, I agree that we should learn to be able to put our own personal ideologies in a box for awhile to be able to examine the ideas of others. It is possible to entertain an idea without necessarily committing to it.
You are my favorite CZcams creator, by the way. Thanks for taking the time to make these for us!
william howard you’re welcome! I’m glad you like them. I enjoy learning by sharing.
A comrade once told me one sure sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain another's thought process/ideology without thinking one is adopting/accepting it whole cloth. We need more honest discussion with these things in mind.
Amazing! Thank you for posting
You are amazing. thank you.
Thank you for covering his work!
Thanks for posting these presentations on Lasch. A genius. So prescient. Unbelievable what he was observing and describing 30-40 years ago.
Dude was so ahead of his time.
You have the best show I'm in immediately in love... with the show
really very good!!
Amazing channel! greetings from Germany!
Your videos are so good! Some of the best on CZcams. Thank you for sharing and for all your insights 🙏 - I give the professor an A+ haha! Seriously though, I would love to have had you as a teacher when I was in college.
Still appreciating your videos. I'm still trying to will myself out of this and your videos and your teaching is something I want to promote with your permission.
I mean, the more the merrier--right? I'm glad the info is helpful to you! Understanding takes time and goes on throughout a lifetime. My videos always go out in that spirit.
Nice summary
Благодарю за Актуальное видео!
Lash was really a genius, it's a actual description of this modern world
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how good you looked." --- David Lee Roth
Contrarians keep us on our toes… 👍
one thing i always try to do when i end up talking with others is that, within reason, i debate their views on their own terms. i guess it is a little socratic. it ends up with a lot of me saying 'assuming what you said is true...'. mainly because i don't maintain stats in my head well, and because i realise the risk that using stats opens the door to them searching for those stats later, and, if i was wrong, an easy out to discredit everything else i said.
i've found that giving charitable readings and discussing on these terms (that is, acting on the notion that they believe what they've said to be true), leads to far better results, and in turn, i am given the same charitableness. it cuts out a lot of the run-around, and it nullifies the problem of 'well i don't believe your source' (tho i also get some respect for going direct to source of figures rather than through reports on those sources). it also prevents the mind-numbing game of people whipping their phones out to fact check--the stats are rarely the point and if a logic is inconsistent, you can poke holes using the stats they give anyway.
and so it goes that i find people thinking deeper on, or claiming i gave them something to reflect on, or even finding common ground with (tho certainly not drawing the same conclusion as) self-proclaimed conservatives and the like. giving charitable readings is important. it is absolutely step 1 to fostering understanding and potentially changing minds. the absolute best way to keep a group of people thinking in a precise way is to constantly display opposinh views in the most uncharitable, ridiculous light, usually cherry picked sound clips with little context and no theory explanation, perhaps paired with the phrase 'they make a parody of themselves!'
about family life, it's odd and i think that, especially, it absolutely must be opened up to different interpretations of what makes a family--the nuclear family is a relatively new concept, 'multigenerational households' are historically the norm and those could and can include taking in members who are not blood-kin, also not uncommon. strong focus on nuclear families also opens the door to racism--in america, multigenerational family homes are predominantly brown hispanic and brown people, a fact that has been used in the past disparagingly. (in western europe especially, the large multigen familiers of roma travellers also is pointed at.) but in so doing this, it hits at a crux which is: when does one go from lamenting the collapse of 'family life' into a criticism of the collapse of _private life?_ if 'family' can be determined as the people who share your home with you who can be depended on for help, comfort, secrets and a 'haven' away from the public (all its expectations and demands and norms), then it begs the question if it is the deterioration of families or _private life_ that is the concern? (and private life was long being eroded before the internet, which only exacerbated and accelerated the collapse of privacy.)
(this also begs the question tho: is that a bad thing necessarily? i would say yes without hesitation, but i must pay heed to that reaction being a kneejerk, clingy one. i understand that the concept itself is shaped by language, for example, the romani word that would best suit the word 'privacy' has an implied meaning of what is kept hidden from _gadjo_ [non-roma] but among roma, this does not apply, even groups in passing. this means my roma family, to whom i was _gadjo_ as i wasn't raised in the ways, extended that concept to me, tho not without loving me anyway. privacy and family mean very different things, then. russian famously has no word that means 'privacy', and to some degree this displays in actions too; russian personal space makes westerners uncomfortable in its proximity, and the amount of time between meeting someone and being invited to their living space is usually not very long at all.
chinese also does not have a word for privacy, and to disclose personal, private information among family, friends and acquaintances is seen as a sign of harmony and affection in chinese culture. my habit of not even disclosing names of whom i'm speaking of rather than titles (my roommate, my coworker, my best friend, etc) would be seen as rude or downright insulting in china or russia; in reality i just have a strong sense that others should be allowed to choose whether they're known to someone else, or to choose to whom they have association with regards to me. i have a strong sense of personal privacy then, for better or worse. so for me, the answer is yes. but it's not necessarily truth, if other cultures do not even have the concept named, or even look at it as a negative trait!)
Great presentation. I disagree with Lasch's assessment that in the "old days" Americans agreed in principle that individuals cannot not claim entitlement to wealth far in excess of their needs. Hello! America was FOUNDED and ruled by individuals who claimed entitlement to wealth far in excess of their needs, and the history of this country is largely about the struggle of indigenous people, poor people, and workers against those entitled individuals, a struggle which continues to this day.
While what Lasch says rings true, it implies that a return to the family, going backwards, is the way to repair our family problems.
A big problem is that we never understand the problems with the family paradigm, the failures of the family, and modeling of the family on TV shows. Very few families are like that, and by nature they are mostly closed off and destructive.
What citizens NEED, I think, is more support out of the family from the state. The trend for people is to be less individualistic, belligerent combative, less family-centric, less neighborhood-centric, less city-centric, less state=-centric, and less nation-centric.
It is critical that people need to somehow be trained to be global=centric and help other people - because in the modern world the paradigm for life is war, and it will destroy the human race.
Completely disagree with your prescription.
Global-Centric ?
Too abstract for me , mate 👋🏻
i know i remembered this book for a rational reason!
pet the kitty!!
Thanks for bringing this great thinker to my attention. At 15:30, I think you should research the radical left agenda a little and there is much to learn from the diversion tactics that are being used via MSM and basic predictive programming. I get censored on YT a lot and in life a lot, and I appreciate truthful work which you are providing.
Interesting
Where can I find the rest of the parts for this series?
Go to the playlists for my channel and there will be one on Christopher Lasch. They should all be in order. Thank you for watching!
12:17 - I am eager to understand Lasch better and I have an observation on the quote here. Is there a problem with the proposition that the 20th century's "social, political, and economic problems" were caused by an expectation of upward mobility and progress?
Surely the foreclosure of economic (and social) advancement was the product of an economic model that un-hitched productivity from wages? Once working harder no longer leads to greater rewards - salaries remaining static, while cost of living increases - the conditions for improvement diminish generation on generation. At the same time, Elites' ignorance of / insensitivity to a society that does not create the conditions that affect their communities - deindustrialization, financialization - leads culture to lag behind the economic conditions and continue to perpetuate the idea that success is intrinsic to the system, whereas in fact the economic conditions have real casualties.
Thanks Dr. Johnson for sharing this series. As I say, I'm eager to learn more about Lasch's ideas, so any help would be very welcome.
So Lasch went through some evolution. If you read his earlier work, it emphasized more some of the dynamics you mention here--that capitalism extracts more work and pays less over time, which hurts the working class, and that economic elites are cushioned from the economic blows they cause. This doesn't mean that his later work rejects these leftist insights, and that should be kept in mind when we see Lasch at any point move into what seems like a more moralistic rhetoric (such as spotlighting the materialistic expectations bred in US society that are not met and cause profound disappointment). I think what you have to do is see all of it as one piece. Lasch's sometimes Marxian analysis of capitalist economics and his complaints on materialism and greed, his observations about the breakdown of the family and debasement of culture are all correct. In other words, the truth of the matter is "all of the above." This is why Lasch's thought is so precious--it does not fit within any of our ideological boundaries. Let me know if I'm getting at your question, and if not, try again--
PS--I don't know why there's a line through my answer--that's never happened before. Hmmm
@@maurinacademy Hi Dr. Johnson. Thank you for your very full response. I see why Lasch is hard to categorize. I think you get at the critical point that his work needs to be seen as a whole, unlike writers who may reject earlier theses as they move through their careers. In short, I think I’ll read more Lasch! Thanks again. Really looking forward to the Burke videos.
The best writers are going to be hard to pin down. They don't fit into orthodox channels. The saddest thing is that there are severe deficits on both right and left, but we can't have any productive dialogue about these things. It's almost like constructive dialogue on political matters is forbidden.
8:25 conservatives and the economy
What is the noise in the background? A cat? It's kind of distracting, but thanks for posting, this is the first I've heard of Christopher Lasch.
4:15 if Lasch thought that there was a growing cancer of superficiality back in his time, I wonder what he would think now. You ever watched any of JoeyBToonz videos here on YT?
Most of what I am hearing is true .. but it is still too complicated to distribute to the people and have them understand.
hmmmm, there's a grain of truth to this, for example capitalism is certainly ruining family life. The part I disagree with is how good family life is in the first place, it's excruciatingly hard to find a family that is functional nowadays. If you were to say that this is because of the growth of capitalism I would have to disagree, a certain element of nostalgia can portray family life in the early 50s with rose tinted glasses but with further examination family life in the past was a horribly stiffling affair. I always find that the people who harp on about traditional moral values and family end upo being the least moral with a very perverse family (Paul Johnson), I'm sure that if you were to examine Lasch's family life you would find it was pretty disfunctional too. I used to believe this horsecrap about the value of family, mostly because at the time I thought my family was pretty good (partly because of nostalgia), later however, when I took a more critical look at my family I realised how it left many scars and how disfunctional it was. This lead me to realise that if even my family which was pretty good in the grand scheme of things was disfunctional, I can't imagine what other families are like. I guess to summarise, family life is glorified too often and I'm very cynical about those that do glorify it as they almost always have many skeletons in their household's closet.
Check out the ZerO Books channel for more commentary on Lasch, from a Marxist perspective
Absolutely great recommendation--they have a lot of good stuff on Lasch!
I hear an animal!
narrator sounds like barbara ehrenreich.