too much self

I've been reading a lot lately, I guess - and too preoccupied to post here....


"I now think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self - individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization - is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation."

"For six decades the worship of the self has been the central preoccupation of our culture - molding the self, investing in the self, expressing the self. ...When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And that is what has happened to us. We are down in the valley. The rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot in our moral and cultural foundations - in the way we relate to one another, in the way we see ourselves as separable from one another, in the individualistic values that have become the water in which we swim."


                                                        - David Brooks, The Second Mountain


Not that I didn't already know this, but he puts it very well, and I think has enough popularity and maybe influence to really get the point across.