Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Debate doesn’t begin with facts; it produces them. Lasch’s line is a quiet provocation aimed at a culture that flatters itself as rational because it hoards data. Inverting the usual civics-class sequence, he suggests that “information” is less a neutral foundation than a spoil of combat: what counts as a fact, what gets measured, what becomes “relevant,” is forged inside argument, not delivered beforehand like clean supplies.

The intent isn’t to sneer at knowledge so much as to expose its politics. Lasch, writing from a historian’s perch and a mid-to-late 20th-century skepticism about technocracy, is warning that appeals to “more information” often function as a delay tactic or a moral alibi. If we just gather enough studies, compile enough reports, run enough panels, then nobody has to take responsibility for judgment. The subtext is that information can be a way of avoiding commitment: a substitute for wisdom, courage, and the unpleasant act of choosing sides.

It also lands as a critique of the expert class and the media ecosystem that pretends to arbitrate reality from above the fray. Lasch implies that objectivity is not the absence of contestation but its outcome, temporary and revisable. Debate, at its best, doesn’t merely exchange preexisting facts; it disciplines them, stress-tests them, and sometimes invents new categories of seeing. At its worst, it manufactures “information” as ammunition. Either way, the by-product framing strips facts of their halo and returns them to the messy work of democratic life.