Conservative critics condemned mass consumerism for being too pleasurable and thus insufficiently alienating.

Evidence

Achieving the heights of the personality was only possible for an élite, whichaccording to Schelsky, citing Gehlen’s 1952 essay On the Birth of Freedom out of Alienation'entered into institutions with open eyes, viewing them as those great orders and fates that preserve us and consume us, and will long outlast us’, and at least allowed themselves to be burned up and consumed by their own creations rather than by raw nature, like the animals. But a reflection of this greatness could also be passed on to the masses, whose sexualizationhowever manipulated and standardizedand whose fascination with spending money on consumer goods, etc., Schelsky was unable to tolerate, since these seemed in the long run too dangerous and costly, and not normal enough. Institutions should protect people from an immediate, conscious confrontation with their instincts, but not from the struggle for survival. Precisely for those who lacked sufficient greatness to allow themselves to be consumed by institutions, with open eyes, freely and even with pleasure, in order to achieve a possible higher form of freedomprecisely for people like this, it was particularly important that they should be given a taste of the severities of life again. According to Schelsky, Gehlen and Freyer, modern alienation had failed to alienate people enough from their search for pleasure and from their need for immediate freedom precisely to the extent that it provided them with a surfeit of other satisfactions, albeit compensatory ones, which allowed them to forget the severities of life. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2475

Categorization

• CANDY: The conservative critique that modern society is not alienating ENOUGH — consumer plenty lets people forget life’s severities — is a striking inversion worth a tweet.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly this Schelsky/Gehlen/Freyer position — consumption as false mercy shielding people from hardship — sits against Frankfurt School critiques of mass culture.