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By Root 172 0

Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, movies, or television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed with two purposes: first, to constantly increase the individual’s appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer-goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises make it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether he wants to buy more and what he wants to buy. His appetites have to be constantly whetted, tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Man is transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling, whose one wish is to consume more and “better” things.

While our economic system has enriched man materially, it has impoverished him humanly. Notwithstanding all propaganda and slogans about the Western world’s faith in God, its idealism, its spiritual concern, our system has created a materialistic culture and a materialistic man. During his working hours, the individual is managed as part of a production team. During his hours of leisure time, he is managed and manipulated to be the perfect consumer who likes what he is told to like and yet has the illusion that he follows his own tastes. All the time he is hammered at by slogans, by suggestions, by voices of unreality which deprive him of the last bit of realism he may still have. From childhood on, true convictions are discouraged. There is little critical thought, there is little real feeling, and hence only conformity with the rest can save the individual from an unbearable feeling of loneliness and lostness. The individual does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and inner richness, but as an impoverished “thing,” dependent on powers outside of himself into which he has projected his living substance. Man is alienated from himself and bows down before the works of his own hands. He bows down before the things he produces, before the State and before the leaders of his own making. His own act becomes to him an alien power, standing over and against him instead of being ruled by him. More than ever in history the consolidation of our own product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our calculations, is one of the main factors determining our development. His products, his machines, and the State have become the idols of modern man, and these idols represent his own life forces in alienated form.

Indeed, Marx was right in recognizing that “the place of all physical and mental senses has been taken by the self-alienation of all these senses, by the sense of having. Private property has made us so stupid and impotent that things become ours only if we have them, that is, if they exist for us as capital, and are owned by us, eaten by us, drunk by us; that is, used by us. We are poor in spite of all our wealth because we have much, but we are little.”

As a result, the average man feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense to him; he is dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a “consumer.” He could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the system offers him innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquilizers, which permit him to forget that he is losing more and more of all that is valuable in life. In spite of all slogans to the contrary, we are quickly approaching a society governed by bureaucrats who administer a mass-man, well fed, well taken care of, dehumanized and depressed. We produce machines that are like men and men who are like machines. That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. We talk of freedom