Life's Pleasures Quote by Lester Bangs

"As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before"

Lester Bangs, Critic

About this Quote

Bangs is doing what he did best: puncturing the moral melodrama around drugs by dragging the conversation out of the confessional and into the shopping mall. The phrase "truly radical conscience" is a sly provocation. He’s not praising purity; he’s mocking the idea that you can posture as politically awakened while treating drug use as a purely personal lapse or, conversely, a glamorous badge of rebellion. For Bangs, the "radical" move is refusing that tidy romance.

The pivot is "historical inevitability", a deliberately deflating term. It shrinks the era’s hot takes about decadence into something closer to infrastructure: if you build a "leaguer society" (Bangs’s mordant shorthand for bureaucratized, standardized, middle-classed life), you also build the psychic conditions for chemical escape. Drugs aren’t framed as a counterculture lightning bolt; they’re a predictable consumer adaptation to a world that’s been made orderly, surveilled, and numbing. That’s the subtext: the system doesn’t just repress; it produces its own anesthetics, then acts shocked when people reach for them.

The rambling syntax matters, too. It mimics a mind thinking in real time, dodging the clean moral verdict. Bangs is allergic to sermons, whether they come from straight society or the hippie wing of it. The intent isn’t to absolve anyone; it’s to relocate blame and meaning. If drug use rises with "leaguer" modernity, then the real scandal isn’t the chemical. It’s the society that makes chemically mediated relief feel like the most rational option.

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About the Author

Lester Bangs (December 14, 1948 - April 30, 1982) was a Critic from USA.

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