In a narcissistic society- a society that gives increasingly prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits- the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist's inner life. A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion life in the past was in any important way better than the life today. Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present. Current critical dogma equates every such reference to the past as itself an expression of nostalgia. As Albert Parr has observed, this kind of reasoning "rules out entirely any insights gained, and any values arrived at by personal experience, since such experiences are always located in the past, and therefore in the precincts of nostalgia.
- Christopher Lasch
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