The social theorist Theodor Adorno’s works are as prophetic today as they are brilliant. He meticulously documents how the current neoliberal system designed by the oligarchy has kept us from throwing off our shackles.
As he explained, when the working class had time off or free time, Adorno believed they should be expanding their minds intellectually or helping to better their communities. Instead, the culture industry keeps the populace distracted and unable to challenge their reality. Adorno writes, “The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
The effects of the culture industry are worrying. Americans are spending less time in the pursuit of growing intellectually. According to a Gallup Survey, “Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.”
When Americans are not being overwhelmed by the culture industry, market forces are constantly peddling products we don’t need. These forces are distracting us from what we really need: healthcare, education, and universal basic income. Pleasure is pushed as a distraction. As Adorno admonished, “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.”
In the political and societal space, authoritarianism is everywhere! Adorno designed a questionnaire called the F-Scale that highlighted the authoritarian proclivities in the United States. He even sent it to parts of Germany before World War II.
As Adorno warned in his writings, “As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.”
Learning how the oligarchs oppress us is the first step to our liberation. Adorno’s research documents how they have kept us in chains. Now, it is up to us to break them.
thanks for this.
Adorno deserves acclaim for being the perceptive cultural critic that he was, but I think he was also a bit of a snob. The culture he decried was that of the working class. I don’t think he had any criticisms of the elite culture on display, for example, at classical music concert halls. Preferring classical music myself and having little appetite for popular culture, I myself have to keep my elitist proclivities in check. I don’t get the sense that Adorno worried about that very much.