|
Herbert Marcuse
HOME | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Herbert MarcuseOne-Dimensional Man:selected excerpts“We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.” […] Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.” […] We may distinguish both true and false needs. "False" are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. 40 […] Take for example the pleasure of owning a car. For sure it would be satisfying to own a car. I can easily reach my workplace even if I am working many miles away from home. I can travel conveniently to different places I want to visit. With my car, I can spare myself from that boring and time consuming moment in the bus stop. In general, I find satisfaction in my car because it allows me greater mobility. But nowadays, it seems that the very purpose of the car is defeated. The need for efficiency and convenience is replaced by the immediate need of "identification" with the social system as a whole. The fact that an individual always replaces the model of his car as a response to a seductive advertisement or planned obsolescence strongly suggests that the car has become a false need, an instrument of domination. The same principle goes to all other needs. The spontaneous reproduction of these false needs makes the individual more insatiable and thus make himself feel "the need to buy a new automobile every other or third year, the need to relax before television...to eat enriched and soggy bread, the need to keep up with the neighbors." […] “The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.” […] “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” |