Ebook: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

The awareness movement and the social invasion of the self. The waning of the sense of historical time -- The therapeutic sensibility -- From politics to self-examination -- Confession and anticonfession -- The void within -- The progressive critique of privatism -- The critique of privatism: Richard Sennett on the fall of public man -- The narcissistic personality of our time. Narcissism as a metaphor of the human condition -- Psychology and sociology -- Narcissism in recent clinical literature -- Social influences on narcissism -- The world view of the resigned -- Changing modes of making it: from Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker. The original meaning of the work ethic -- From "self-culture" to self-promotion through "winning images" -- The eclipse of achievement -- The art of social survival -- The apotheosis of individualism -- The banality of pseudo-self-awareness: theatrics of politics and everyday existence. The propaganda of commodities -- Truth and credibility -- Advertising and propaganda -- Politics as spectacle -- Radicalism as street theater -- Hero worship and narcissistic idealization -- Narcissism and the theater of the absurd -- The theater of everyday life -- Ironic detachment as an escape from routine -- No exit -- The degradation of sport. The spirit of play versus the rage for national uplift -- Huizinga on Homo Ludens -- The critique of sport -- The trivialization of athletics -- Imperialism and the cult of the strenuous life -- Corporate loyalty and competition -- Bureaucracy and "teamwork" -- Sports and the entertainment industry -- Leisure as escape -- Schooling and the new illiteracy. The spread of stupefaction -- The atrophy of competence -- Historical origins of the modern school system -- From industrial discipline to manpower selection -- From Americanization to "life adjustment" -- Basic education versus national defense education -- The civil rights movement and the schools -- Cultural pluralism and the new paternalism -- The rise of the multiversity -- Cultural "elitism" and its critics -- Education as a commodity -- The socialization of reproduction and the collapse of authority. The "socialization of workingmen" -- The juvenile court -- Parent education -- Permissiveness reconsidered -- The cult of authenticity -- Psychological repercussions of the "transfer of functions" -- Narcissism, schizophrenia, and the family -- Narcissism and the "absent father" -- The abdication of authority and the transformation of the superego -- The family's relation to other agencies of social control -- Human relations on the job: the factory as a family -- The flight from feelings: sociopsychology of the sex war. The trivialization of personal relations -- The battle of the sexes: its social history -- The sexual "revolution" -- Togetherness -- Feminism and the intensification of sexual warfare -- Strategies of accommodation -- The castrating woman of male fantasy -- The soul of man and woman under socialism -- The shattered faith in the regeneration of life. The dread of old age -- Narcissism and old age -- The social theory of aging: "growth" as planned obsolescence -- Prolongevity: the biological theory of aging -- Paternalism without father. The new rich and the old -- The managerial and professional elite as a ruling class -- Progressivism and the rise of new paternalism -- Liberal criticism of the welfare state -- Bureaucratic dependence and narcissism -- The conservative critique of bureaucracy -- Afterord: The culture of narcissism revisited.;Argues that American society has become increasingly self-absorbed, focused on self-gratification to the exclusion of higher values, and that the mass narcissism of the culture is based on fear.