Life's Pleasures Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is skewering a familiar moral panic while refusing the comfort of an easy villain. Conservatives, he notes, aren’t wrong to intuit a relationship between television and drugs; they’re wrong about what kind of relationship it is. The jab lands because it punctures the tidy, law-and-order narrative in which drugs are an outside contaminant and TV is merely a corrupting influence that can be regulated back into innocence. Lasch implies the connection is structural, not incidental: both function as technologies of mood management in a society that frays attention, community, and purpose.

Written out of Lasch’s broader critique of late-20th-century consumer culture, the line treats television less as a pipeline for depravity than as a training ground for passivity. TV doesn’t just “show” escapism; it rehearses it, normalizing the idea that distress is something to be anesthetized rather than interpreted. Drugs, in this reading, aren’t an aberration from American life but an intensified version of a mainstream habit: outsourcing satisfaction, soothing, and meaning to commodities. Conservatives “sense” the link because they can see the symptoms (numbness, dependency, withdrawal), yet miss the diagnosis: the same cultural logic that sells entertainment also sells chemical relief.

The subtext is a rebuke to selective outrage. If you condemn narcotics while treating mass media as harmless leisure, you’re moralizing the wrong target. Lasch’s sentence forces the uncomfortable thought that the problem isn’t a handful of bad substances or bad shows; it’s a civilization increasingly organized around sedation.