"As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesAcademics from GermanyImmigrants to the United StatesSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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pp. 57-58
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
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Herbert Marcuse
1898 – 1979
deutsch-amerikanischer Soziologe und Philosoph
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