The stridency of asserted values varies inversely with their lived substance

Evidence

The constant plugging of conventional values seems to mean that these values have lost their substance, and that it is feared that people would really follow their instinctual urges and conscious insights unless continuously reassured from outside that they must not do so. The less the message is really believed and the less it is in harmony with the actual existence of the spectators, the more categorically it is maintained in modern culture. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 221

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inverse relation between emphatic assertion and actual belief is a genuinely supply-side, counterintuitive mechanism for analyzing what loud cultural moralizing signals — honestly falsifiable against a contemporary object.
• QUESTION: How cleanly does this inverse-relation claim survive testing on e.g. contemporary streaming-era prestige drama, where ‘values’ seem cynically deployed? Worth a sharp case study.
• XREF: connects to: Unmoored values lose force but persist as fungible instruments — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 278; Narrated exclusivity hardens over time into constitutive claims of positional superiority. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 114; Distinction suppresses similarities just as adequation suppresses differences — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 80