THE PURSUIT OF LONELINESS
American Culture at the Breaking Point
208 Pages
Beacon Press
Published in 1971, 1975, 1990
SYNOPSIS
While new governments around the world strive for democracy, the United States is becoming increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic. Sociologist Philip Slater shows how Congress-bashing and low voter turnout are symptoms of a larger decline in our faith in the sharing of power and information. He explains what democracy means at a personal level -- at work, in politics, in religion, and at home -- and how some of our most familiar and unquestioned assumptions tend to undermine it. In documenting the costs of American authoritarianism, Slater convincingly demonstrates that democratic processes, however messy and confusing, ultimately yield the most intelligent and flexible responses to a complex world.
REVIEWS
“A brilliant, sweeping and relevant critique … An insightful, well-written, and thought-provoking book that illumines each of the many aspects of American culture that it touches.”
Kenneth Keniston, The New York Times
“If I had to select a single book by which to tell a stranger what life in this country has become and why, it would be this one.”
Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The New York Review of Books
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EXCERPTS
“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”
“We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.”
“An excess of individualism thrives in the isolated family, where inordinate Oedipal pressure generates extreme narcissistic hunger, inner futility, stressful self-making, ferocious and disabling competition, and a “servility toward technology” which aims to solve the problems generated by individualism and rootlessness in the first place. At the same time, unbridled individualists try to compensate for their centrifugal tendency by delegating authority upward. Unable to find social solidarity horizontally, through cooperation, they search for it vertically, through authoritarian imposition.”