Society cripples imagination so people cannot enjoy actual freedom

Evidence

It is also, however, symptomatic of the deformations perpetrated upon man by the social totality, the most important of which is surely the defamation and atrophy of the imagination (Phantasie). Imagination is suspected of being only sexual curiosity and longing for the forbidden by the spirit (Geist) of a science which is no longer spirit. Those who want to adapt must learn increasingly to curb their imagination. For the most part the very development of the imagination is crippled by the experience of early childhood. The lack of imagination which is cultivated and inculcated by society renders people helpless in their free time. The impertinent question of what people should do with the vast amount of free time now at their disposal - as if it was a question of alms and not human rights - is based upon this very unimaginativeness. The reason why people can actually do so little with their free time is that the truncation of their imagination deprives them of the faculty which made the state of freedom pleasurable in the first place. People have been refused freedom, and its value belittled, for such a long time that now people no longer like it. They need the shallow entertainment, by means of which cultural conservatism patronizes and humiliates them, in order to summon up the strength for work, which is required of them under the arrangement of society which cultural conservatism defends. This is one good reason why people have remained chained to their work, and to a system which trains them for work, long after that system has ceased to require their labour. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 262

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘atrophy of the imagination’ mechanism is the psychological micro-foundation of administered free time — connects to how pseudo-activity in passage 265 fills the void. — connects to: Subjugated groups lack great art only because they lack freedom — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952; Fiction remains the only medium for values the administered society suppresses — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 861; Comfortable consumption closes off imagining any alternative society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 166
• SEED: Angle: test this against streaming recommendation algorithms — ‘you’ve finished, here’s what’s next’ as the institutional formalization of imagination-atrophy, where even the desire for novelty is supplied rather than generated.