Enlightened capitalism captures workers with diversions that dissipate their transcendence

Evidence

And certainly the proletarrian is no more naturally a moral man than another; he can flee from his freedom, dissipate it, vegetate without desire, and give himself up to an inhuman myth; and the trick of “enlightened” capitalism is to make him forget about his concern with genuine justification, offering him, when he leaves the factory where a mechanical job absorbs his transcendence, diversions in which this transcendence ends by petering out: there you have the politics of the American employing class which catches the worker in the trap of sports, “gadgets,” autos, and frigidaires. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the serious man’s flight from freedom, but now applied to the oppressed — shows bad faith can appear even in the working class; also resonates with contemporary critiques of consumer distraction. — connects to: Capitalist production confines workers so thoroughly they fall victim to offerings; Workers compensated for meaningless rationalized jobs with glittering distractions instead of class consciousness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 469; Society compels laborers to sublimate diversionary drives into focused work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1409 (+6 more)