There is something very deep about Hume rediscovering Buddha's insight that we don't suffer because we lack the object of desire but rather because we desire it and his friend Adam Smith soon after noting that this trick (wealth=happiness) is the foundation of modern society.

Survivorship bias means that every artifact of a lost empire you unearth will have been created by an Alexander the Great, not Diogenes.

Societies function by inducting the young into identities that work—with "work" defined close to the mechanics sense—for society.

This is an unconscious process, though it is possible to become aware of it and for your awareness to impact it ("awakened from dogmatic slumbers").

I mean yeah, but it's deeper than that. Why destabilize thick, traditional identities and folkways—who benefits? (And note I mean this in a functionalist way, as in, what industry segments, etc. benefit?) https://twitter.com/CityBureaucrat/status/1324474147561447427?s=20

A very high-level answer is that, at an accelerating pace since the industrial revolution first created a demand for "distaff" workers, there has been increasing demand for model Workers and Consumers denuded of all moral or political conviction such that they can be programmed.

Marx accurately critiqued some aspects of this emerging culture, but Marx's critiques were rapidly absorbed and synthesized into superior methods of turning out serfs under the dominant soft-totalitarianism of world corporatist culture.

Without getting into too much detail, this process—which I'll note is just the modern form of the socialization process in all societies—has given us the New Man, in these circles often referred to, after a passage from Orwell, as the Bug Man.

The Bug Man is in a state of what previous generations—generations in which it was possible to "grow up" and a society of grownups to grow up into—would call "perpetual adolescence". He is noisy and insistent about his preferences, but inside he is empty.

He is empty because he's never experienced the cycle of dying and rebirth that marks a man's maturation. His life is an eternal present—to be caught in time and causality would be horrifying. He thinks he cannot die, so he'll never live.

Lasch's observation on the type were somewhat shallow, since Lasch (AFAIK) was unaware that the neutral, callow, narcissist state he observed in his young wards is not some new innovation, but a modern adaptation to the general state of adolescence.

And who does this adaptation serve? Well, consider that the most effective persuasion works at the identity level. If you can get people to see you as part of "we," you are in. Having a shallow, manipulable, shallow population = consumer sales, pliant workers, political power.