20.4.25

Changing modes of making it

 

In a lawlees, violent, and the unpredictable society, in wich the normal conditions of everyday life come to resemble those formely confined to the underworld, men live by their wits. They hope not so much to prosper as simply to survive, although survival itself increasingly demands a large income. In earlier times, the self-made man took pride in judgment of character and probity; today he anxiously scans the faces of hits fellows not so as to evaluate their credit but in order to gauge their susceptibility  to his own blandishments. He pratices the classics arts of seduction and with the same indifference to moral niceties, hoping to win your heart while oiching your pocket. The happy hooker stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal sucess. If Robinson Crusoe embodied the ideal type of economic man, the hero of bourgeois society in its ascendancy, the spirit of Moll Flanders presides over its dotage.

Christopher Lasch
1932 - 1994