"Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection"
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Christopher Lasch suggests that conservatives are right to intuit a connection between television and drugs, but they misidentify its source. They tend to blame permissiveness, immoral content, or liberal elites, as if objectionable programs cause addiction and decay. Lasch redirects attention from content to structure. Television, as a medium, trains its audience in passivity, distraction, and dependence. It offers an endless flow of stimuli that soothes unease while keeping desire on a low boil, especially through advertising. The viewer is not engaged so much as narcotized. The experience mimics intimacy and participation without requiring effort, judgment, or commitment.
Drugs serve a similar function: they manage anxiety and social pain in an impersonal, rapidly changing order. The deeper link, for Lasch, lies in the psychic economy of advanced consumer society. When traditional sources of meaning and authority weaken, individuals live with chronic insecurity, a fragile sense of self, and a craving for reassurance. Both television and drugs promise instant respite from that burden. They relieve tension while reinforcing the conditions that produced it, which makes them feel indispensable. The result is a cycle of dependency and withdrawal, not only from politics and community but from sustained thought.
Conservatives seize on symptoms but often defend the economic and technological systems that manufacture them. They attack Hollywood yet celebrate the very commercial culture that commodifies attention and appetite. Lasch’s broader critique targets both left and right: a therapeutic culture reduces citizens to patients and consumers, while media industries convert politics into spectacle. The nature of the connection, then, is not a moral contagion transmitted by bad shows to vulnerable minds, but a shared social function. Both television and drugs pacify a populace unsettled by rootlessness and competition, providing quick comfort at the cost of agency, memory, and civic seriousness.
Drugs serve a similar function: they manage anxiety and social pain in an impersonal, rapidly changing order. The deeper link, for Lasch, lies in the psychic economy of advanced consumer society. When traditional sources of meaning and authority weaken, individuals live with chronic insecurity, a fragile sense of self, and a craving for reassurance. Both television and drugs promise instant respite from that burden. They relieve tension while reinforcing the conditions that produced it, which makes them feel indispensable. The result is a cycle of dependency and withdrawal, not only from politics and community but from sustained thought.
Conservatives seize on symptoms but often defend the economic and technological systems that manufacture them. They attack Hollywood yet celebrate the very commercial culture that commodifies attention and appetite. Lasch’s broader critique targets both left and right: a therapeutic culture reduces citizens to patients and consumers, while media industries convert politics into spectacle. The nature of the connection, then, is not a moral contagion transmitted by bad shows to vulnerable minds, but a shared social function. Both television and drugs pacify a populace unsettled by rootlessness and competition, providing quick comfort at the cost of agency, memory, and civic seriousness.
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| Topic | Art |
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