happy slaves
Herbert Marcuse - One Dimensional Man:The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation – liberation also from what is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable – while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society….
The intensity, the satisfaction and even the character of human needs, beyond the biological level, have always been preconditioned….
We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression….
Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and to hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.
Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control….No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own….no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning – products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression….
The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced….
The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change.
Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc.
But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of a practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet….
All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual’s own.
- from Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 4-5, 7, 9, 12, 13-14, 256-7.
