"Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them"
About this Quote
Lasch is puncturing the fantasy that politics is won by better arguments. His line insists that ideologies dont rule because theyre elegant; they rule when they feel like reality. The verb "embedded" does the heavy lifting: ideas have to be sunk into habit, routine, and social reward until they stop sounding like propositions and start sounding like common sense. Lasch is describing a kind of everyday infrastructure of belief, where the commute, the workplace, the family dinner, the checkout line all quietly rehearse what a society claims to value.
The subtext is a warning to both zealots and reformers. For true believers, its a rebuke: you can memorize the catechism of an ism and still lose because peoples lives keep contradicting it. For activists, its strategic counsel: if you want a worldview to stick, you have to alter the confirming experiences - wages, housing, schools, media rituals, even how time is organized - not just the rhetoric. He is, in effect, translating ideology from the realm of pamphlets into the realm of lived verification.
Context matters because Lasch wrote against late-20th-century American liberal and conservative pieties alike, suspicious of technocratic optimism and consumer culture. In a society where identity is increasingly mediated by markets and institutions, daily experience becomes the referendum on any political story. If the story cant be felt - as security, dignity, reciprocity - it stays an opinion. If it can, it becomes a habit of perception.
The subtext is a warning to both zealots and reformers. For true believers, its a rebuke: you can memorize the catechism of an ism and still lose because peoples lives keep contradicting it. For activists, its strategic counsel: if you want a worldview to stick, you have to alter the confirming experiences - wages, housing, schools, media rituals, even how time is organized - not just the rhetoric. He is, in effect, translating ideology from the realm of pamphlets into the realm of lived verification.
Context matters because Lasch wrote against late-20th-century American liberal and conservative pieties alike, suspicious of technocratic optimism and consumer culture. In a society where identity is increasingly mediated by markets and institutions, daily experience becomes the referendum on any political story. If the story cant be felt - as security, dignity, reciprocity - it stays an opinion. If it can, it becomes a habit of perception.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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