Declining belief in values correlates with their more strident insistence
Evidence
The constant plugging of conventional values seems to mean that these values have lost their substance, and that it is feared that people would really follow their instinctual urges and conscious insights unless continuously reassured from outside that they must not do so. The less the message is really believed and the less it is in harmony with the actual existence of the spectators, the more categorically it is maintained in modern culture. One may speculate whether its inevitable hypocrisy is concomitant with punitiveness and sadistic sternness. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 236
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive inversion — the louder and more frequently a value is preached, the weaker its actual grip — is a paradigm-level observation about ideological maintenance that resists one-line summary and reframes how to read propaganda, advertising, and moral panics alike.
- XREF: Echoes the earlier complaints-about-immodesty thesis: moral panics intensify precisely where the underlying norms are losing their real purchase on behavior.