39

p In a world in which everything is concentrated around consumption, the predominant morals (and these are always the morals of the governing class) writhe in agony.

p This is closely linked with moral alienation under capitalism, with anarchic and uncontrollable relations between 40 peopie, with contradictions between the objective and subjective aspects of morals, between social and private morals, between utility and enthusiasm, expediency and freedom, duty and happiness. Under these conditions the individual does not have the feeling that he is the maker of morals, for the latter are wrested from the context of realisable historical action. As a result of the capitalist division of labour, the individual’s ejection from social being, the isolation of production from consumption, of material from spiritual activity, of theory from practice, and the division of rights and duties, the individual loses the link between the development of society and his own self-development. The social functions prescribed for him (to work, to serve in the army, to obey, and so forth) are regarded by him as external dictates that disregard his inclinations and requirements, that ignore everything comprising the individual inimitability of the executor. He regards the development of society as a process taking place exclusively at the expense of the exhaustion of his own strength. For that reason moral prescriptions, perhaps with the exception of duty to the people closest to him, are most distinctly seen by him as the means by which strength is squeezed out of him. For access to its bosom capitalist society exacts an exorbitant tribute, demanding the acceptance of standards and dogmas, of whose origin the individual has not the faintest idea, which he has not created and which are not even coherently explained to him. By complying with them he helps this society to expropriate his own strength, spirit and energy. “I owe" has the appearance of a promissory note to a money-lender with onerous terms: the harder I try to repay it the larger my debt grows. This goes on throughout the individual’s life. The hour never comes when he can say with relief: I owe nobody nothing. By way of reciprocity, capitalist society offers culture which, as a matter of fact, the individual is unable to assimilate, security and legal guarantees which are likewise suspect, for they signify that the individual either perishes ingloriously on the field of battle or gradually shrivels from exhausting exploitation.

p The rank-and-file agent of the capitalist system regards the inescapable dependence on society, on social groups, on other people usually in an illusory light as the 41 despotism of social over asocial, private life, as a sacrifice of “his” interests for the sake of “its” (society’s) benefit.

p In this situation the idea about happiness and duty, about their interrelation, is inevitably distorted. Imposed duty, separated from happiness, from the self-development of the individual, comes forward in official garb as a canonised and merciless demand. It refuses to reckon with the’ circumstances, requirements and desires of the individual. By means of social suggestion it penetrates his mind, subordinates his will, orients his thinking and dictates manifestations of his emotions.

p Still, the individual does his best to tear away from the tenacious embrace of duty, looks for ways if not to break it then at least to relax, to weaken it, depending on circumstances. Even if it is formalised and its demands are quite obvious, he nevertheless in secret looks for a loophole. “ Decent" ways are found for evading duties, for instance, by counterposing individual duty to social duty. It is impossible to list the entire multitude of ways of evasion. But their essence is conveyed by the motto of Balzac’s Vautrain: “There are no principles, there are circumstances.”

p In its turn, happiness, alienated from morals, comes forward as “continuall successe in obtaining these things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continuall prospering”.  [41•*  It lies, above all, in the possession of the attributes of happiness—things, power, prestige. What is not acquired by the individual, what is out of his reach becomes the object of bitter envy. The individual becomes a dipsod, a man permanently experiencing the torment of thirst which he cannot quench. Any achieved level of satisfaction proves to be spectral, transient and constantly substandard. Where pursuit of consumption reigns, aspiration is never satisfied, because new aspirations are awakened before their former level is achieved.  [41•**  The individual is doomed to an interminable struggle between what he actually needs and what he desires. He is not attracted by showwindow morals, for he sees that to oblige an abstract “higher 42 blessing" it constantly calls upon him to sacrifice _his happiness for the sake of alienated duty. Wherever possible he tries to circumvent the boundaries limiting his aspiration for happiness, being guided by the rule that “he is worthy of success who has achieved it”. Amorality and cynicism become the fellow-travellers of bourgeois society’s moral life.

p Such, in brief, is the picture of the moral relations, guidelines and attitudes connected with vital activity of the ruling classes and the strata associated with them. We shall return to the question of the powerful forces opposing moral alienation and hypocrisy, of the growth of hatred for oppressors and of the duty of resistance to the outworn social system.

p Having become a mass phenomenon in the epoch of capitalism’s general crisis, the sense of contentedness has found itself in the epicentre of history’s most devastating moral crisis that is deforming and undermining all morality.

p There is today not the least doubt that such a crisis exists. Bourgeois ideologists write of “the reality of the moral crisis”,  [42•*  noting that “we are in the midst of a moral crisis”.  [42•**  Sociologists, journalists, psychologists, teachers, priests and lawyers write of its suffocating atmosphere and of the decline of morals. It has long been noted that there is an epidemic of crime and violence. Their incidence is outstripping the population growth rate. A growing proportion of the lawlessness consists of unmotivated crime and juvenile delinquency. Violence is inseparable from the growth of cruelty, indifference to the sufferings of others and loss of human warmth. Fear and suspicion are mounting alongside violence. Loneliness and a keen sense that the links with other people are unreliable are their inevitable consequences. There appear ugly, pathological forms of individualism, under which attention is concentrated on one’s own isolated existence, considerations of convenience. Loneliness is accompanied by the increasing pressure on the inviolability of private life. The American sociologist Vance Packard 43 gave his study of this invasion of the intimate sphere of the life of his compatriots the title The Naked Society. A decline is to be observed in the respect people have for what is created by the hands of men and in the quality of goods. There is a similarly clear-cut decline of the prestige of the family, of the authority exercised by parents, of the institution of friendship, of the various “buffer” collectives that had formerly been centres of human association, support and services. The so-called conflict of generations has grown acute. The influence of cultural standards and ethical norms is weakening. All sorts of social disorganisation (drug-addiction, alcoholism, licentiousness, and so on) are mounting at a dizzy rate. Toleration of many vices and susceptibility to irrational inclinations have reached a menacing magnitude. Gaping breaches of morality are to be observed in socio-political life. “White-collar crime”, corruption, indifference to official duty and political indifference are proliferating. It is also obvious that all these crisis symptoms are evidence of by no means a .slight indisposition or a transient decline of bourgeois morality.

p Faith in the “sacrosanct principles" of official morality is swiftly fading in consumer, mass society. The hypocrisy of this morality grows more pronounced as trust in the bourgeois social organisation becomes historically less and less justified and more and more dangerous to the destinies of mankind. Moral alienation, the deep division between inducements and limiting standards, the rupture of social links and the dehumanisation of relations are reaching a level hitherto unknown.

p Despite the epidemic of cynicism aim sham piety afflicting the consumer-oriented individual of capitalist society, this individual strives for some sort of moral equilibrium. He feels impelled to believe in the correctness and reasonableness of his aims in life, of his behaviour and way of thinking orientated on success and consumption. The principal element of the sense of contentedness—satisfaction with one’s activity, prestige status, way of thinking and the entire order of things—becomes elusive in the absence of such faith. Can one be happy if one is aware of the criminality and asociality of one’s behaviour?

p For the sense of contentedness it is thus vital to find a 44 modus vivendi, to reconcile and harmonise two mutually excluding guidelines—consumer psychology with its egoism, on the one hand, and the awareness of the moral importance and value of one’s activity, on the other. In principle, there is no solution for this antinomy. One of these guidelines must be dropped. However, this way out is totally unacceptable to the sense of contentedness, but the stress of the conflict is likewise unendurable. A solution must be found, and they are looking for it by trying to achieve the desired equilibrium with the aid of artificial contentedness. With capitalism in the grip of a severe moral crisis, with morality dulled by polished moral slogans, with relations between people distorted and entangled and with moral requirements split, the impossible is being achieved.

p The sense of contentedness usually gets the results it wants by a number of overlapping methods. First, by diminishing bourgeois society’s moral demands of the individual possessing the sense of contentedness and by making that individual less demanding of himself. The ideas about what must be and what is possible are devaluated and brought into line with actual behaviour. The sense of contentedness is brought round to the conclusion—which it reaches also by itself—that one can do less and less for society. In an age of great revolutionary changes, an age of unparalleled social dynamism, the sense of contentedness, stuck in the bureaucratic labyrinth of careerism, preoccupied with consumer cares and deprived of a realistic view of the world, at la>t finds blind fate sweeping the continent where it can accomplish something and feel a positive responsibility for what it has or failed to accomplish. In this rapidly dwindling territory it is enough for the sense of contentedness to do something trivial to extricate itself from a ticklish situation and feel it is exhaustively discharging its-duty. In oversatiated self-contentedness it achieves equilibrium in ways that are by no means immaculate.

p Second, by limiting the sphere of the application of moral assessments. The consumer-oriented individual is strict only in community relations (family, friends, neighbours), but is indulgent in the sphere where personal and social duty adjoin. Bourgeois society tacitly sanctions his self-limitation 45 and raises it to the status of a norm. The Biblical “he who is not against us is with us" becomes the guiding principle. By fencing morality off from the attitude to modern social movements, the individual acquires a sense of respectability with no particular effort. Further there extends a world in which any assertion about morality is suspect. Consequently, one can act in that world as though there are no morals generally, on the alleged grounds that in a major event people’s morals are of no significance whatever: they are no more than a statistical whim.

p True, even in this narrow sphere not everything is simple and clear. Here, too, the sense of contentedness does not comport itself in the best possible manner, saturating even community relations not so much with solicitude as with consumer considerations. Nonetheless, it is only in these relations that it is prepared to discuss the question of ideals and responsibility, and it is only here that it counts on acquiring the self-satisfaction it needs so much, even in coexistence with concentration camps, persecution of democrats, unemployment and poverty.

p Third, by emasculating moral requirements, by reducing them to an uncritical acceptance of stereotype conformist public opinion. “Man for himself”, as the sense of contentedness is sometimes called, finds equilibrium in the scrupulous fulfilment of accepted rituals and requirements, convincing himself that he has thereby removed the moral non-liquids.

p Where “man for himself”, playing at give-away, is in a moral “equilibrium” we find distorted moral feeling, a false and manipulated conscience, an artificially created “ conscience of the privileged”. This is not a sick conscience in the sense in which Maxim Gorky characterised the creative quests of Dostoyevsky, but the normal conscience of a sick society. Submerged in lethargy, it deliberately sustains this state of mind with the aid of tranquillisers, whose meaning may be reduced to the following brief and simple assessment: “We work, consume, love and quarrel, rejoice and grieve, bring up children and complain of illness. That is how it was, is and will be. Everything is in order.”

p Sham conscience does not ask tiresome questions: How and for whom we work? What is the purpose of consumption? Whom we love and who we quarrel with? What we 46 rejoice over and what grieves us? Whom are we bringing up in our children? Who benefits by having nothing changed? By hastily harmonising inducements with guidelines, the sham conscience justifies the pursuit of personal success, gives people a free hand and enables them to act with a “clear conscience" and with growing chances of achieving that success. Petty and grave misdemeanours committed for the sake of a career, frequently purely out of habit or cowardice, renunciation of reasonable compromises in favour of unprincipled ones, recognition of solely ad hoc prescriptions as moral—all this is approved by the “clear conscience" at best at the price of certain wavering. Without tormenting thought it absolves these misdemeanours with tight-fisted philanthropy.

p In turn, prevailing capitalist public opinion goes to all lengths to enable the “clear conscience”, functioning instead of quashed living moral feeling, to operate uninterruptedly, without self-diagnosis, without striving for an independent identification of responsibility and guilt. Its message is that the bourgeois social organisation merits trust on the grounds that it links up individualistic expectations with consumer behaviour, allegedly according to each person equal possibilities or chances for success. If for some reason the individual has not availed himself of that chance, the organisation washes its hands, as much as to say that you have only yourself to blame. You have been either inadequate in your morals (in the event of a flagrant and recorded violation of the standard) or, on the contrary, your morals have been much too high, i.e., you have been unable to accommodate your morals to the consumer standard and unwisely believed in the tenets of sham morality.

p The manufacture of myths and consumer ideology lead to moral degradation. The sense of contentedness is confined, in basic spheres of vital activity, solely to a decor of morality, which is then used as a commodity that is much in demand. All its prescriptions boil down to recipes for the auto-suggestion of content.

p Moral degradation is not simply the outcome of consumer ideology, but also a cause of its development, because it demolishes social links and ideals, clearing the way for cynical consumer behaviour. The sense of contentedness is 47 fundamentally a means of deideologisation. Limited to demonstrations of loyalty to capitalism, its morals have no convictions to rest upon, representing nothing more than adaptation to the bourgeois organisation.

p What has the moral of consumption and pleasure-seeking, whose motto is “better a boil on the body of society than a scratch on my own neck”, in common with morals embodying the interests of society’s progress? The sense of contentedness regards itself as the mainstay of social morals and is always ready with an emphatic denunciation of amorality and nihilism, against which it has the basest maxims about the sanctity of accepted standards and about moderation. But this is precisely what accentuates the paradoxicality of the fact that while engaging in grandiloquent moralisation and being blinded by its own good intentions the sense of contentedness goes hand in hand with amorality. Is this not proved by the growing respectability of legal and semi-legal gangsterism running criminal operations: gambling dens, the sale of drugs, bookmaking and moneylending, operations whose annual revenue in the USA, for example, amounts from 25 to 50 billion dollars? While pharisaically stigmatising social disorganisation (so-called hypersociality), the sense of contenteclness cannot understand that amorality and cynicism are the inevitable products of its own morality, of its legalised amorality. Besides, as we have already noted, it abides by “its own" moral of accommodation and career-seeking only conventionally, relatively.

p Banal precepts are much too weak a weapon against nihilism. When morality is reduced solely to bringing actions into line with the prevailing standards, even the formal impeccability of these actions gives no indication whatever of their actual morals, which not only regulate and watch over behaviour but also induce people to fight for advanced forms of social life. This struggle gives shape to higher models of behaviour, man being not only the object of external regulation but also the maker of moral standards. Therefore, when the sense of contentedness waxes indignant over the nihilistic imperative of permissibility, it implies mainly the impermissibility of actions against the bourgeois social organisation, the impermissibility of deviations from the standards established in it, a demand for a return to 48 submissiveness, and only superficially presupposes the observance of elementary rules of human association.

p The sense of contentedness does not distinguish nihilism from participation in the struggle for society’s revolutionary transformation. Both come under the heading of social offences, disorganisation and pathology, inasmuch as they go beyond the framework of the prescribed status positions, planned reactions, of the list of expectations, violating the integrity and smooth operation of the bourgeois social organisation. With the sense of contentedness, morality means nothing more nor less than the harmony of behaviour with prevailing bourgeois standards and models. Behaviour that cannot be properly prognosticated is regarded as almost asocial and immoral. Participation in progressive social movements is qualified entirely in accordance with the letter and spirit of this morality, in the same way as, say, crime. The individual who surrenders his sense of responsibility to conformist public opinion inevitably limits morality to waiting for approval from this opinion, to fitting his behaviour to the required pattern. Its conventional fidelity to the formula of permissibility only signifies that neither the individual nor the collective is allowed to ascertain the social meaning of his or its thoughts and actions, that prevailing bourgeois standards are not subject to assessment, that resistance to the dogmas of the capitalist system is tantamount to a renunciation of moral freedom and of actions conforming to the undistorted dictates of conscience and mind.

The moral equilibrium wanted so badly by the sense of contentedness demonstrates the entire depth of its selfdeception, for it leads to impasses that only aggravate the degradation of the individual under capitalism. In the final analysis, the sense of contentedness, which thirsts for cloudless equilibrium, finds an exacerbated crisis in its inner world. The remedy proves to be more dangerous than the disease. Symbolic fidelity to values internally negated and the actual approach to values nominally censured lead to constant wavering, reassessments and a feeling of guilt. The problem can only be settled by renouncing the morality of deideologised consumption. But this is obstructed by the myths of the sense of contentedness, which stand eternal guard over the old order.