◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Self Without an Interior I am Christopher Lasch. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, 1932. Died in Pittsburgh, 1994, of cancer, correcting the proofs of my last book almost to the end. I was a historian, though what I really was is harder to name. The left claimed me and then disowned me. The right quoted me and never understood me. Good. I did not write to be on your side. I wrote to take something away from all of you — and I will need two of these to do it. This is the first. Let me tell you what I saw coming, because it has arrived, and you are living inside it, and you still do not have the words for it. In 1979 I said America was breeding a new kind of person. Not the greedy capitalist of the old complaint — something emptier than greed. A self with no interior. A personality organized entirely around being seen. Anxious, restless, dependent on a steady drip of admiration, and incapable of love — because love requires that another person be real, and for this self no one is quite real but the self, and even the self is not real. I called it the culture of narcissism. Hear me clearly, because this is the thing everyone gets wrong. I was not describing a vice. I was not scolding vain people for looking in mirrors. I was describing a product — mass-manufactured, at industrial scale, by a whole civilization. An economy that needed you insecure so you would keep buying the cure. An advertising that taught you your life was a thing to be envied or it was nothing. A therapy that took every citizen by the shoulders and turned him to face inward, away from the world, toward the endless fascinating problem of himself. And underneath all of it, a slow dissolving — of the family, of the craft, of the neighborhood, of the church, of every small human world that once stood between the lone ego and the vast machine. Take those away, and the self has nothing left to be made of. So it becomes a surface. A performance in search of an audience. And now, look what sits at the top of your government. Your strongman is not an aberration. He is not an invader. He is the specimen — the purest example this country has ever produced of the self I spent my life warning you about. All surface. All appetite. A man who cannot bear a rival in the room, who experiences every other human being as a mirror that is either flattering him or must be shattered. Who lies not the way liars lie, to conceal a truth, but the way a man breathes who has no interior in which a truth could live. You did not import him. You did not catch him from some foreign disease. You grew him. He is your culture's finished work — its masterpiece — held up now in the highest office in the land where every nation on earth can see it. He is what a society looks like when it has taught two generations that the self is the only sacred thing. That is the diagnosis. Sit in it. Do not reach yet for who to blame. Because in part two, I am going to tell you who made the emptiness he grew out of. And you are not going to like the answer, because the answer is you. PART TWO The Revolt of the Elites I am Christopher Lasch again. In the first of these I named the disease — the culture of narcissism, and the empty man it raised to power as its finished work. Now I am going to tell you where it came from. I wrote this part dying, and I want you to hear that, because a dying man has no reason left to flatter you. You want to blame each other for the strongman. Go ahead — but do it accurately. Here is the part your side does not want to hear. And I mean your side — the educated one, the enlightened one, the one watching this and nodding along, comfortable, certain the rot is all on the other team. You did this too. You especially. The real revolt in America was never the revolt of the masses. What happened to you was the revolt of the elites. A class of the credentialed and the mobile — the professionals, the managers, the enlightened winners of the meritocracy — who quietly seceded from the common life of their own country and never admitted they had done it. You took your talents, your children, and your money into precincts the ordinary could not follow. You sent your kids to schools no plumber's child would ever see, and called it good parenting. You built whole cities the people who cook your food cannot afford to sleep in. You talked, constantly, warmly, about the people — while arranging every detail of your actual existence so that you would never have to meet one. And you called it merit. You called it progress. And the resentment rising underneath you, you told yourself was simply ignorance. Simply bigotry. Nothing you had earned. You earned it. You built a country where a decent life required a diploma you deliberately kept scarce, and then you looked down on everyone who did not hold one. You dissolved every source of dignity that did not run through your institutions — the union hall, the parish, the trade, the pride of being from somewhere and making something — and you offered nothing in its place but one invitation: become like us. An invitation you had already made it impossible for them to accept. So when they finally rose up, they did not rise up for justice. They rose up for a strongman — a liar, a mirror, an empty and dangerous man — because you had left them nothing else in the world to reach for. That is the tragedy, and you must hold all of it at once or you understand nothing. The revolt was earned. And the revolt chose a monster. Both. Together. If you only see the second, you are the elite who learned nothing. If you only see the first, you are excusing the monster. Hold both. So I will not comfort you. Neither of you. Not the ones who worship the empty man. And not the ones who manufactured the emptiness and then fled to higher ground to watch what it grew. Here is the only way out, and it will cost you the thing you love most — the dream of yourself without limit. Stop believing you are gods. That is the disease beneath the disease — the American faith that the self is infinite, that more is always arriving, that no ceiling and no obligation and no loss is ever finally real. The people you look down on knew something you were too educated to remember. That a life is made of limits. That you owe debts to a place and to the people in it — debts you never chose and cannot buy your way out of. That hope is not the belief that things will turn out well. Hope is the conviction that a thing is worth doing whether or not it succeeds. So come down. Come back down into the common life. Send your children where the other children go. Owe something to a neighbor that you cannot get out of. Belong to a place badly enough that it can disappoint you. The narcissist cannot be argued out of the mirror. But a whole people can turn away from it. Stop admiring yourselves. There is a world out here. It is real, and it is asking for you.