"A strange new ethic of detachment is emerging: one must never allow oneself to feel, to commit, to sin or to repent, to stake one’s ground. Options must remain open. As the structures which have lent direction to the individual fall away—civil society, family, courtship, apprenticeship, citizenship, patronage, education, belief—the self is at once bared to the world and made limp. Masks drop, relations flatten—and the walls around the heart and mind draw tight in defense."
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"... emotions [must] be cauterized at the source. To be mature now is to fend off any incursions of the world on the self. The central task of the therapeutic system is to suspend this state indefinitely, to manage an increasingly feeble impetuousness of life"
" Social controls intensify in service of a vague and predictable resentment. Decorum is endlessly renegotiated. New forms of authority and litigiousness come to dominate human affairs and yet hold to no positive law. The young person is given the choice between participation in this stilted pantomime of discourse on the one hand and resigned disengagement on the other."