- metadata: - source: https://compactmag.com/article/revolt-of-the-green-elites - people: [[Emmet Penny]] > Please support independent journalism by [subscribing](https://compactmag.com/subscribe) to [Compact Mag](https://compactmag.com/about/) --- # The Revolt of the Green Elites | Compact Mag Christopher Lasch rose to prominence just as the postwar consensus was wheezing its death rattle at the close of the 1970s. Sustained prosperity had evaporated into “diminishing expectations.” Americans no longer hoped for more; they merely hoped to survive. Lasch’s diagnosis of this predicament in _The Culture of Narcissism_ earned him a spread in _Time_ magazine, an invitation to dine with President Jimmy Carter, and a spot on the best-seller list alongside titles such as _If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, Why Am I in the Pits?_ He’d hit a nerve. After decades of neglect, Lasch has now returned to prominence. Even before the return of inflation this year, a succession of woes was again dimming our expectations. "Lasch diagnosed the effects of managerial overreach." What about his vision of American life in the ’70s has resonated nearly half a century later? Lasch presciently diagnosed the corrosive effects of the managerial rule that had already taken root in his time, and that so clearly defines ours. Yet in imagining alternatives and sources of resistance, he too often fell for an environmentalist sentimentality that today has emerged as one of the cornerstones of managerial misrule—a development he only half-recognized toward the end of his remarkable life and career. Two energy crises, stagflation, Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of the house of labor, assassinations of political leaders, and the cataclysm of the 1960s weigh heavily on Lasch’s analysis. America had bestrode the globe after World War II, but by the time 1979 rolled around, Lasch wrote, “those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York.” Americans seemed ill-equipped to handle the new reality—in part, he claimed, because of the dominance of the narcissistic personality. This new personality type belonged to a world where politics had morphed into a therapeutic pursuit of self-discovery, pulling the self back from social realms in which it might put itself at risk. The narcissist was neither a rugged individualist nor a lost spirit navigating the age of Aquarius for better self-understanding. Instead, he was a survivalist jettisoning duties, obligations, and traditions to survive the war of all against all that social life had become. “Experiences of inner emptiness, loneliness, and inauthenticity” arose, Lasch thought, “from the warlike conditions that pervade American society, from the dangers and uncertainty that surround us, and from a loss of confidence in the future.” With a “waning sense of historical time,” American society remained locked in a permanent present. In popular parlance, narcissism equates to self-love, but in Lasch’s account, the term refers to a hollowing out of the self that results from institutional tutelage and the pressures of consumer society. The real thrust of the myth of Narcissus, Lasch noted, was that “he fails to recognize his own reflection” and, in this sense, “lacks any conception of the difference between himself and his surroundings.” Patrick Bateman, the main character in Bret Easton Ellis’s _American Psycho_, offers a hyperbolic illustration of Lasch’s insights. In between his sadistic debauches and murders, Bateman painstakingly lists and describes the consumer goods he owns, as he struggles to recognize himself in the world. Whenever Bateman admits to his crimes and desires in conversation, it’s as if no one hears him or internalizes what he is saying. There is no real Patrick Bateman—he is an item in a catalog, an array of beauty products laid out on a countertop, a reservation at D’Orsia. But he isn’t himself, not really. What had caused the rise of the culture of narcissism? Lasch attributed it, in part, to the decline of the family. In his prior book, _Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged_ (1977), he described how the family had lost its importance over the preceding century: “Schools, peer groups, mass media, and the ‘helping professions’ had challenged parental authority and taken over many of the family’s child-rearing functions.” _The Culture of Narcissism_ was Lasch’s attempt to account for the psychological ramifications of this change. So who killed the family? Lasch pointed to twin causes: the rise of industrial society alongside the administrative state on one side, and the emergence of the progressive cult of managerialism on the other. Together, they robbed the family of its authority, individuals of their competence, and communities of their most important bonds. Worse still, as Lasch saw it, those who occupied the commanding heights of our major institutions no longer had control over the vast systems that governed society. Managerial control, Lasch argued, had molded workers into passive agents excised from decisions about production. They were order-takers, not order-makers. But this passivity came with new problems of morale, motivation, and what Lasch called the “human factor.” From the 1920s onward, industrial society had bred an anomie that big business soothed by encouraging consumption. The worker became a consumer—first of goods, then of therapies designed to “ease his ‘adjustment’ to the realities of industrial life.” Looking to psychologist Elton Mayo’s work on management, Lasch described how this social arrangement produced a false sense of freedom through therapeutic ease: “Complaints about low wages and excessive supervision,” managers came to believe, “could be neutralized by psychiatric counseling and observation.” Freedom to decide was exchanged for a narcotic freedom from decisions that required more invasive management. Workers reported feeling freer to Mayo, but “their opinion is, of course, mistaken: In a sense they are getting closer supervision than ever before, the change is in the quality of supervision.” Schools launched students into the labor force ready-made for this kind of management. Less concerned with vesting the next generation of citizens with the wherewithal to inherit a democracy, the “tutelary complex” instead “mediates family relationships, and socializes the population to the demands of bureaucracy and industrial life.” America had become a society in which politicians and politics were therapeutic commodities sold to customers (citizens), and whose presence in office would then further entrench the status quo. By the time managerial rule faced a series of setbacks in the 1970s, calling its capacities into question, no real political counterweights remained. “Industrial society had turned into a frightening world without autonomy.” The narcissistic personality—a shriveled self flailing in the shadow of incompetent managers—was an outgrowth of this disturbing turn. Exposed now to the chaos of the industrialized world minus the weighted blanket of managerial competence, fear and survivalism flourished. The abundance industrial society promised had turned into a frightening world without autonomy—workers and housemakers alike found themselves reliant on machines they barely understood, the products of systems yet harder to reckon. Some thought that Lasch’s concerns were shallow. There were, Frederic Jameson thought, “far more damaging things to be said about our social system than are available through the use of psychological categories.” But this misses the point. Lasch’s worry wasn’t that a bad psychological disposition had become pervasive, but that technocracy had damaged the American capacity for self-government—a fundamental requirement for a working democracy. Narcissism was an outgrowth of America’s managerial regime. Lasch’s critique of technocracy would sharpen in his posthumously published _Revolt of the Elites_ (1997), which took aim at technocracy’s intellectual farm system: meritocracy. The substantial objection to meritocracy, Lasch wrote, is “that it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership.” By plucking the best and brightest from their native milieu, technocracy siphoned off any check on its dominion and staffed its ranks with those who might otherwise be a source of opposition. It also ripped from Americans the possibility of self-government and replaced it with government by expertise. The industrial system of capital that required this social edifice couldn’t, in the long run, be sustained. Its “[footprint](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001700)” was too large. Lasch hoped that ecological “limits” and their prophesied stark consequences would force us to reckon with the current order. But this is sadly where Lasch’s analysis sometimes indulged in a soft-headed environmentalism. In a letter from 1968, he cites population growth as one of the major negative results from industrialization for which “public ownership is no solution,” a line of thought seemingly pulled directly from debunked neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich. By 1980, Lasch would come out in favor of [energy Lysenkoist](https://compactmag.com/article/energy-lysenkoism) Barry Commoner’s abortive bid for the presidency. Commoner, Lasch wrote in the short-lived journal _democracy_, was the “only presidential candidate worth listening to.” In _The Minimal Self_ (1984), Lasch would go so far as to compare our lack of regard for “nature” to our negative relationship with mothers and motherhood—as if “nature” is a loving caregiver scorned rather than a dynamic force barbed with violence and beauty. Yet toward the end of his life, Lasch seemingly abandoned and criticized the standard green critique of technology, arguing that it relied on the same “assumptions and attitudes” as the culture of technology itself: a contempt for politics and other practical arts; a hostility to inquiry leading to “contradictory conclusions \[that\] appear hopelessly subjective and relativistic”; and a demand for the sort of certainty usually associated with “scientific proof or with mystical illumination.” Lasch would also take to task the nostalgia for Arcadia that remains ubiquitous in the environmental movement to this day. Despite this shift, Lasch remained committed to more local and “flexible” sources of energy as a means to save the planet, an idea he seems to have received from Amory Lovins, an influential advocate for renewable energy who inspired Germany's [Energiewende](https://compactmag.com/article/germany-s-nuclear-fumble). Lasch believed it would mean disaster for the developing world to catch up to the West in living standards and argued for a politics of sacrifice that would level economic inequality but spare the earth’s natural resources. He claimed that we couldn’t remain on our current trajectory. These, Lasch admitted in [an interview](https://www.thirteen.org/programs/the-open-mind/the-open-mind-the-pursuit-of-progress/), were assumptions rather than arguments he cared to litigate in full. "The eco-politics of limits Lasch endorsed has become a global juggernaut." Ironically, the eco-politics of limits Lasch endorsed has today become a global juggernaut aimed against the very petty bourgeoisie he viewed as the historic stronghold of the civic republicanism he struggled to formulate. In Germany, the [degrowth agenda](https://compactmag.com/article/germany-s-nuclear-fumble) has advanced to the point that the country’s major industries might not make it through winter. The worldwide [elite attack on farmers](https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/un-war-on-fertilizer-began-in-sri), itself inspired by climate catastrophism, has prompted an explosion of street action. And in America, the attempted pivot to “green” the energy sector with wind and solar has moved [hand-in-glove](https://compactmag.com/article/the-blackouts-are-coming) with [ill-advised](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-electrical-grid/) attempts at deregulation. Not to mention the contempt for [localism, small communities,](https://www.americanexperiment.org/reports/not-in-our-backyard) [working people](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/business/economy/green-energy-jobs-economy.html) that the “energy transition” [engenders](https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34eyx/shifting-america-to-solar-power-is-a-grueling-low-paid-job). Each of these policy decisions has rhetorically hinged on the fearful survivalism Lasch critiqued and has been placed on the battle standard of progressivism. What endures in Lasch’s thought is his stubborn assertion that the accumulation of technique has not balanced out to a proportional increase in moral improvement. On this, Lasch is right, even if he undersells the benefits of abundance. When we look at our digitized democracy that operates like an h.r. department, Borges’s [Lottery of Babylon](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/political-life-in-the-lottery-of-babylon/), and a Skinner Box welded together, Lasch’s critique looks prophetic. But what truly recommends Lasch is his bold attempt to stare history in the face and step outside of conventional wisdom and his quest to find within the American tradition a bulwark against elite-centric “progress.” As he wrote in _The True and Only Heaven_: > The moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, and its understanding of the value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral temptation of resentment are the materials on which critics of progress have always had to rely if they wanted to put together a coherent challenge to the reigning orthodoxy. After the spectacular elite failure of Covid policy and the persistent mismanagement of industrial society by its progressive critics, it is these values to which we must return if we hope to steward our society in such a fashion that it can provide posterity not with diminishing expectations but a durable hope in its continuation. ###### Related Articles