Pseudo-activity is rehearsal for absorption into the collective mass

Evidence

Generally speaking, pseudo-activity is the attempt to preserve enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and obdurate society. This process is rationalized through the acceptance of any small change as one step on the long way toward total change. The unfortunate model for pseudo-activity is the ‘do-it-yourself’ syndrome - activities that do that which has long been done better through the means of industrial production and which arouse in unfree individuals, hampered in their spontaneity, the confident feeling that they are of central concern. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 271 (#expands, via linked claim)

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 759 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pseudo-activity preserves false immediacy within a mediated society. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 271; Mass movements recruit isolated individuals, not brutal backward masses — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 759; Pseudo-activity functions as insurance against a feared collectivization

Broader Connections

• Pseudo-activity preserves false immediacy within a mediated society. #expands (0.92) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 271
• Pseudo-activity functions as insurance against a feared collectivization #expands (0.80)
• Mass movements recruit isolated individuals, not brutal backward masses #contradicts (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 759