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In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.
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Section 14

 

Theodor Adorno

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In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one.

 

Benjamin Franklin

 

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.

 

Theodor Adorno

 

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth.
As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings.

 

Eugene V. Debs

 

The high and noble purpose to pursue the friendship between people, when it is seen in a perspective of friendship between civilizations suddenly reduces the many facets of human beings to one dimension only, placing the muzzle to the variety of ties that, for many centuries, have provided fertile ground for transnational interactions and varied, in fields like mathematics, games, politics and other spheres of common interest to humans. [...] Focus only on religious classification, however, in addition to neglect other important ideas and interests that motivate people's actions, also has the effect of amplifying, in general, the voice of religious authority. [...] The main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies rather in the plurality of our identities, which intertwine with each other and are resistant to drastic divisions along lines impassable border that you can not resist . The nature of human beings that we contradidstingue is severely tested when our differences are reduced to an artificial system of classification and predominantly single. (Chapter: p. 14 ff.)

 

Amartya Sen

 

Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.

 

Karl Marx