Masses accept mass culture as survival training, not out of stupidity

Evidence

Today anyone who is incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgements of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual. … 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. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s institutional economics — the idea of competence certification / signaling functions of social institutions, though Adorno’s is coercive rather than voluntary.
• SHARE: Adorno’s point that conformity in speech functions as a survival passport in monopolized life is the kind of line a media-studies colleague would chew on.

Related

• Audiences accept mass culture as a survival passport, not through stultification (similarity 0.92)
• Mass media’s audience demands undermines their own ideological work (similarity 0.83)
• Mass culture makes audiences enact their own manipulation. (similarity 0.82)
• Mass culture absorbs critique preemptively so that no ideology need be injected (similarity 0.82)
• Mass culture must pose as realistic while steadily lowering its intellectual demands (similarity 0.82)
• Nonconformist culture gets co-opted by mass-distribution before it can reach anyone (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture reproduces subjects already shaped by systemic coercion rather than influencing them (similarity 0.81)
• The culture industry rules by manufacturing the needs it satisfies (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy (similarity 0.80)
• What condemns mass culture is its false reconciliation, not its contradictions (similarity 0.80)
• Repetitive standardized mass culture automatizes reactions and weakens individual resistance. (similarity 0.80)
• Mass culture perfects its technical presentation while the content remains fatuous and standardized (similarity 0.79)
• Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation (similarity 0.79)
• Adorno’s theory denies audiences relative autonomy of consciousness (similarity 0.79)
• The cliché now gives birth to the culture that keeps people from what matters (similarity 0.78)