Amusement serves as flight from resistance and thought, not from suffering

Evidence

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that pleasure is not escape from misery but escape from the last thought of resistance inverts the commonsense reading of entertainment — dense enough to sit with.
• DEFINE: Pins down what the culture industry sees as the true function of ‘amusement’: freedom from thought and negation, i.e. a pacifying ideology.
• XREF: connects to: Mass amusement functions as the modern catharsis that tragedy once provided; Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics; Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 289 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 289