Life's Pleasures Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch goes after drugs the way a moral diagnostician goes after a fever: not because the symptom is trivial, but because it’s theatrically visible. Calling drugs “merely the most obvious form of addiction” is a deliberate demotion. The real target is a culture that has learned to treat dependency as normal so long as it wears respectable clothes: consumer credit, therapy-speak, mass entertainment, careerism, even politics as a steady drip of outrage and reassurance. Drugs, in this framing, aren’t the aberration; they’re the bluntest confession.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “Traditional values” isn’t nostalgia for its own sake so much as a shorthand for self-restraint, obligation to family and community, and the idea that freedom requires limits. Lasch’s subtext is that addiction isn’t only chemical; it’s social and spiritual, produced by institutions that profit from want and by a public trained to outsource meaning. If drugs “undermine” these values, it’s because addiction rewires time: everything collapses into the next hit, the next purchase, the next fix. A culture built on immediacy can’t sustain patience, fidelity, or civic responsibility.

Context matters: Lasch was writing against the grain of mid-to-late 20th-century American triumphalism, skeptical of both market solutions and therapeutic liberation. His point lands as a critique of modernity’s bargain: endless choice, thinner commitments. Drugs just make the deal impossible to romanticize.