The Happy Consciousness Is Shaky Enough A

The Means Of Communication, The Irresistible Output Of The Entertainment And Information Industry Carry With Them Prescribed Attitudes And Habits, Certain Intellectual And Emotional Reactions Which Bind The Consumers To The Producers And, Through The Latter To The Whole Social System. The Products Indoctrinate And Manipulate; They Promote A False Consciousness Which Is Immune Against Its Falsehood...thus Emerges A Pattern Of One-dimensional Thought And Behavior.

The Intellectual Is Called On The Carpet... Don't You Conceal Something? You Talk A Language Which Is Suspect. You Don't Talk Like The Rest Of Us, Like The Man In The Street, But Rather Like A Foreigner Who Does Not Belong Here. We Have To Cut You Down To Size, Expose Your Tricks, Purge You.

Our Mass Media Have Little Difficulty In Selling Particular Interests As Those Of All Sensible Men. The Political Needs Of Society Become Individual Needs And Aspirations, Their Satisfaction Promotes Business And The Commonweal, And The Whole Appeals To Be The Very Embodiment Of Reason.

The Neo-conservative Critics Of Leftist Critics Of Mass Culture Ridicule The Protest Against Bach As Background Music In The Kitchen, Against Plato And Hegel, Shelley And Baudelaire, Marx And Freud In The Drugstore. Instead, They Insist On Recognition Of The Fact That The Classics Have Left The Mausoleum And Come To Life Again, That People Are Just So Much More Educated. True, But Coming To Life As Classics, They Come To Life As Other Than Themselves; They Are Deprived Of Their Antagonistic Force, Of The Estrangement Which Was The Very Dimension Of Their Truth.

The Existing Liberties And The Existing Gratifications Are Tied To The Requirements Of Repression: They Themselves Become Instruments Of Repression.