“The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty.” AmericaWealthMoneyClassEconomyCapitalismConsumerismMarket Author:Lewis Lapham
“The definition of money as the sublime good--because it can be turned into all other goods--results in the depreciation of all values that do not pay. What is moral is what returns a profit and satisfies the judgment of the bottom line. Freedom comes to be defined, in practice if not in commencement speeches, as the freedom to exploit. This commercial reading of the text of human natures gives rise to a system that puts a premium on crime, encourages the placid acquiescence in the dishonest thought or deal, sustains the routine hypocrisy of politics and proclaims as inviolate the economic savagery otherwise known as the free market or freedom under capitalism. It is no accident that in a society that presumes a norm of violence, whether on the football field or in the conduct of its business, people speak of deals as "killings.” WealthMoneyClassViolenceSocietyCrimeHumanCapitalismCapital Author:Lewis Lapham
“Again in combination with the schools, the nation's media reflect the character of society impressed by the displays of power and opulence rather than the play of mind. The ancient Greeks admired in their art what they called the glittering play of "windswift thought." Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or statues collected in Athens, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen--self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, loyal, skeptical, marked "by refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” WealthSocietyCapitalismEconomicsCapitalLaphamLapham Quarterly Author:Lewis Lapham
“The restlessness of the American experience lends to money a greater power than it enjoys in less mobile societies. Not that money doesn't occupy a high place in England, India or the Soviet Union, but in those less liquid climate it doesn't work quite so many wonders and transformations. In the United States we are all parvenus, all seeking to become sombody else, and money pays the passage not only from the town to the next but also from one social class to another and from one incarnation of the self to something a little more in keeping with the season's fashion. The American ideal exists as a concept in motion, as a fugitive and ill-defined hope glimmering on a horizon. No coalition, no industry, no source of wealth lasts much longer than a generation, and nobody dies in the country in which he was born.” AmericaWealthMoneyClassPowerSocietyEconomics Author:Lewis Lapham
“Social rank has always been one of the pricier commodities sold in the great American department store, and the ceaseless revision of what constitutes society gives rise to the great American comedy that has been playing continuous performances since the beginning of the Republic. As one generation of parvenu rich acquires the means to buy the patents of nobility, it looks down upon the next generation of arrivistes as clubfooted upstarts.” AmericaMoneyClassSocietyCapitalismCapitalAmerican Author:Lewis Lapham
“Typographic Man wrote the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. Graphic Man elects the president of the United States. Which of the Ancient Greek forms of government will satisfy and serve the interest of both the former and the latter is a question beyond the boundaries of this book. The preliminary working toward an answer is the recognition that a nation denied knowledge of its past cannot make sense of its present or imagine its future. Human beings deprived of memory lose track of where they’ve been, who they are, and where they might be going: so do the people’s elected representatives, who forget why sovereign nations go to war or how it comes to pass that money doesn’t grow on trees.” LaphamAge Of Folly Introduction Author:Lewis Lapham
“As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else." --Domesticated Deities," TomDispatch.com 12/13/10” Television Image Author:Lewis Lapham