In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal "growth" and "awareness"—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.

— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations 1991