Subjects, Totalitarianism, Mass Culture,
Capitalism and Modern Societies
The postmodern position on individual identity and society (as an early statement): the world is fragmented and in a flux--in which individuals are liberated from any "repressive" notions about the rationality, unity, or stability of the self.
The modernity's capitalist system, in which repression and dominance are lived by the people, shows up the power relationship between modern society and individual desire!
Subjects and their pleasures are defined and controlled by the institutions of the modern state (unless or except if you're still individualists!). Capitalism has infiltrated all of existence. It has taken away from people -- except and excluding all those who are still individualists -- the possibility of experiencing genuine freedom, expression and satisfasction. All desires under capitalism are "fake", "mediated" desires. (For those who are still NOT yet SUBJECTS in the system, this is not necessarily true!)
Modernity has expanded communication technologies and consumerism into our lives--which are central to an insidious kind of totalitarianism. Thus totalitarianism produces "false needs" and seeks to penetrate consciousness itself--neutralizing all voices of dissent, and turning us all into interchangeable components of the capitalist machine -- except yours truly, whose voice of conscience and dissent remains clear, strong, vibrant, loud and still uncompromised -- after all these years -- by the Capitalist system!
Even in democratic societies, mass culture acts as an authoritarian force which reduces people to passive social conformity. It injects the capitalist status quo into people's unconscious--making its victims lose their individuality, and persuades them (its victims) to willingly accept mass culture's values!
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