Narcissism

Have been reading (rereading, technically, but I confess to being unable to remember the first go-round) Lasch's Culture of Narcissism and found it an unsettlingly accurate preview of where we are today. Here is an assessment from the Hoover Institute: http://www.policyreview.org/oct05/rosen.html
This decline of self-reliance would explain our perpetual hysteria these days. I've been a bit surprised by the lack of resilience in the American grain. We've had many many faults, but to discover that lurking behind the SUV-ribbon-Bush chest-beaters is nothing other than anxiety is alarming. Alarming because when people are afraid they make bad policy choices. Retreating to a gated community and telling the rest of the planet to get lost is not, in the long term, a workable solution to anything.