Lasch—Submission as the Line of Least Resistance

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[140] As long as authority was internalized in the form of conscience, people either complied with it because it appeared reasonable or resisted in the name of a higher authority. Today, however, authority appears as something altogether alien, sometimes contemptible, sometimes truly terrible, more often merely as an inconvenience, in the person of a nagging mother, teacher, or employer. It is not so mich arbitrary force—the traditional enemy of bourgeois liberalism—that arouses resistance today as the attempt to hold someone up to a given set of standards. The narcissist resents being judged more than he fears being punished. He submits to punishment even when he rejects its rightness, as an arbitrary exercise of superior force in an arbitrary world, but he does not like to be asked to live up to expectations. This is why the ideology of nonbinding commitments and open-ended relationships—an ideology that registers so faithfully the psychic needs of the late twentieth century—condemns all expectations, standards, and codes of conduct as "unrealistic." It condemns the attempt to live up to expectations on the grounds that "role-playing" subverts psychic stability and health. The therapeutic community insists that only equals can enter into
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satisfactory interpersonal relations ("peer-bonding"); but equality in this connection means simply an absence of demands. Equals are "peers" not by virtue of common attainments but by generational default (hence the prominence of the generational theme in modern sociology, radical politics, advertising, propaganda, and promotion). Equals ask nothing, understand everything, forgive everything. The idealized comradeship of siblings, united not by undying passion or even mutual respect but merely by a common resentment of adult authority, becomes the model of the perfect marriage, the perfect affair, the perfect "one-to-one relationship," or for that matter the commune or extended family—the distinctions have become increasingly immaterial.

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[185] In a study of the American high school, Edgar Z. Friedenberg found that high school students regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution." In response to a series of hypothetical problems in social control, Friedenberg's subjects rejected both libertarian and openly authoritaran solutions, justifying their preference for social engineering on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Thus if a teacher finds an unruly student smoking in the washroom, he should neither "beat him coolly and with emotional restraint" or publicly humiliate him, on the one hand, nor ignore the offense, on the other hand, as a minor infraction that should not add to the student's reputation as a troublemaker. Having rejected authoritarian solutions for reasons that were "cautiously bureaucratic rather than indignantly humane," the students voted overwhelmingly that the offender should be sent to the school psychiatrist. Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, would enlist his own cooperation in the school's attempt to control him.

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[187] Friedenberg's students "believe that enforcement of regulations, rather than any internal stability or homeostasis, is what keeps society from breaking down into disorder." They regard law not as a body of authoritative commandments but as "an indispensible technique for controlling behavior." This distinction goes to the root of the contemporary situation; it explains the growing devotion to "law and order" in a permissive society. The demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to attempt a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law enforcement comes to be seen as the only effective deterrent in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and wrong. The campaign to empty law of moral content—to banish the ideas of right and wrong and to replace them with an ethic of human relations—has had an unintended consequence. Divorced from the concept of justice, the law becomes nothing more than an instrument by means of which authorities enforce obedience. In former times, men regarded law as the moral consensus of the community—a means of "setting up categories," in Friedenberg's words, "under which society could subsume and isolate those whom it defined as miscreant." Today they see law merely as a means for controlling behavior. "Neglect law enforcement and the social structure decays."

The prevalence of this view does not mean, however, that subjects and citizens regard authorities as "essentially benign" or hesistate "to discuss the possibility," in Friedenberg's words, "that a social institution . . . might be hostile or destructive in its purpose." On the contrary, official protestations of benevolence elicit contempt or cynical indifference. "Apathy," widely deplored by political scientists and other observers of the political scene, greets all public statements in a society saturated with public lies. The official pretense that officials only want to "help" is rightly regarded as the biggest lie of all. People submit to the rules of social life, then, because submission usually represents the line of least resistance, not because they believe in the justice of the rules or the good intentions of those who promulgate them. The public takes it for granted that power corrupts those who wield it, but it regards this fact not with indignation but with a resigned sense of its inevitability. Dis-
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belief in official pretensions, which formerly might have aroused resistance to the state, becomes another form of obedience, another acknowledgement of the way things are. Men submit not to authority but to reality.

If submission rests not on loyalty to a moral consensus but simply on a belief in the need for law enforcement, it rests on a shaky foundation. Men break the rules whenever the opportunity presents itself, not only because infractions of the rules so often go undetected, but also because authorities themselves conspire with offenders to overlook such violations. The contmept for authority, which leads to rising rates of crime and to the "legitimation of the ripoff," originates in part in the ease with which authorities can be corrupted. Yet the corruptibility of authority serves in a curious way to strengthen the hand of those who wield power. The official who winks at an offense puts the offender in his debt. Moreover, he exposes the offender to blackmail. He keeps people in line precisely by overlooking their transgressions, a technique of control that closely resembles the "flattery of the lie," by means of which industrial supervisors assert power over subordinates by tolerating falsehood and inefficiency. Lawbreaking contributes to law enforcement. The complicity between the criminal and the crime fighter, the subordinate and the superior, the violators of rules and the enforcers of rules, contributes to the maintenance of order by keeping troublemakers in a state of chronic uneasiness.