Advanced society suffocates the very needs that demand liberation while sustaining repressive ones

Evidence

All mass culture is fundamentally adaptation. However, this adaptive character, the monopolistic filter which protects it from any external rays of influence which have not already been safely accommodated within its reified schema, represents an adjustment to the consumers as well. The pre-digested quality of the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot digest anything not already pre-digested. It is baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 113 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The memory of the old injury persists, though the physical pain and the immediate fear have been removed by civilization. Society constantly casts woman’s self-abandon back into the sacrificial situation from which it freed her. No man, cajoling some poor girl to go with him, can mistake, unless he be wholly insensitive, the faint moment of rightness in her resistance, the only prerogative left by patriarchal society to woman, who, once persuaded, after the brief triumph of refusal, must immediately pay the bill. She knows that, as the giver, she has from time immemorial also been the dupe. But if she begrudges herself, she is only duped the more. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 113; Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 106; Technical administration makes the possibility of liberation progressively more unimaginable — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 119 (+3 more)

Related

• Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy (similarity 0.85)
• The culture industry rules by manufacturing the needs it satisfies (similarity 0.83)
• Mass culture’s technical rationality masks class domination as consumer demand. (similarity 0.83)
• Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish (similarity 0.82)
• Mass culture functions as baby-food that manufactures the very needs it satisfies (similarity 0.81)
• Advanced industrial society suffocates any need that demands liberation from comfort (similarity 0.81)
• Adaptation of cultural to material needs already concedes production’s manipulation of desire (similarity 0.79)
• Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry (similarity 0.79)
• Mass culture must pose as realistic while steadily lowering its intellectual demands (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 113
• Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106