Summary of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. #1 The end of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the belief that many other things are ending too. The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, and well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have all fulfilled poetic prophecy.#2 The prevailing passion of today is to live for the moment, to live for yourself rather than for your predecessors or posterity. We are losing the sense of historical time, and this distinction is what makes the contemporary cultural revolution so different from previous outbreaks of millenarian religion.#3 The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, but for the feeling of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.#4 The Weathermen, and the American culture that produced them, were a product of their time. They were a mix of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, and moral and psychic chaos.