Fifties complacency was a false happiness indistinguishable from its own misery.

Evidence

Here too the content seems somehow to contaminate the form, only the misery here is the misery of happiness, or at least contentment (which is in reality complacency), of Marcuse’s “false” happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favorite program on the sofa — which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn’t know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfillment since it has presumably never encountered this last. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Directly invokes Marcuse, connecting to Frankfurt School lineage; documents the ‘misery of contentment’ that the fifties generation later rebelled against.