Audiences accept mass culture as a survival passport, not through stultification

Evidence

People give their approval to mass culture because they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life. This passport is only valid if paid for in blood, with the surrender of life as a whole and the impassioned obedience to a hated compulsion. This is why mass culture proves so irresistible and not because of the supposed ‘stultification’ of the masses which is promoted by their enemies and lamented by their philanthropic friends. The psychological mechanisms involved are secondary. Today the rationality of adjustment has already reached such a point that the slightest jolt would be sufficient to reveal its irrationality. The renunciation of resistance is ratified by regression. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 131

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The whole model of compliance — consent as rational survival calculation, not manipulation — is the load-bearing core of Adorno’s analysis, and it’s dense enough to sit with.