"The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways, and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one's job and one's style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also."
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Academics from the United StatesDemocratic socialistsSociologists from the United StatesPeople from TexasMarxists from the United States
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C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, best remembered for studying the structure of power in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society. He advocated relevance and engagement over disinterested academic observation as a "public intelligence apparatus" in challenging the policies of the institutional elites in the "Three" (the economic, political and military).
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