"What
is the outcome? Modern man...has been transformed into a commodity,
experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the
maximum profit obtainable under existing marketing conditions. Human
relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his
security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in
thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as
possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the
deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when
human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many
palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this
aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical
work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental
human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as
the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his
unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption
of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; futhermore by
the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for
others.
Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in
his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet
without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his
fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly,
such as: 'When the individual feels, the community reels'; or 'Never put
off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,' or, as the crowning
statement: 'Everybody is happy nowadays.' Man's happiness today consists
in 'having fun.' Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and
'taking in' commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people,
lectures, books, movies -- all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one
great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast;
we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones --
and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange
and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well
as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.
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