A nugget I came across recently by the social critic Christopher Lasch, via John Freeman's book, "The Tyranny of E-Mail":
"The best hope for emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in recognition of others not as projects of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods."
In Christopher Lasch’s book “The Culture of Narcissism,” he writes:
ReplyDelete“We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. It is the waning of the sense of historical time — in particular the erosion of any strong concern for posterity — that distinguishes the spiritual crisis of the ‘70’s.”
Written in 1981, perhaps Lasch saw far into the future of the “Me Generation” which George Harrison put to music in his song “I Me Mine.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an awakening and adults began to actually CARE about the people they care about.