The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people's desire is already present but concealed from them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. It is another irony that capitalism's 'society of risk' is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural instability, the 'cancellation of the long term', is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. This is not a paradox. As Adam Curtis's remarks above make clear, the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.

• capitalist realism
• desire
• art
• media
• limitation
• other
• capitalism
• society
• culture
• public
• innovation
• fear
• emotion
• conformity
• power
• risk
• conservatism
• inspiration

We seem to be ashamed to talk about shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by shame in the past, so confined to a narrow band of socially acceptable behavior, that it is rarely occasioned. But when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throbbing trauma of being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of inappropriately crossing over from the private domain into the public countenance, the agony when we do, particularly in relation to sexual and excretory functions, toilet accidents of others or ourselves, but also in a milder form, in wanting to be dressed the same as other children, to receive as many valentines, and to be promoted with the rest, or have parents equal in wealth, health, or promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten up or teased by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when one is really superior — anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk deeply into one’s cohort — these are some of the most powerful and profound influences on our development. We should remember here that as we grow older, our cohort is less and less our immediate peer group and more and more our family tradition, race, religion, union, or profession, et cetera.

• shame
• early childhood development
• rejection
• fear
• conformity
• relationship
• religion
• parents
• family
• behavior
• functions
• influences
• children
• past
• public
• tradition
• agony
• other
• conditioning

Another complexity of the dynamics of depression that we overlooked was the one that Rank taught us: the urge to immortalization and self-perpetuation by pleasing the other, by conforming to the code of behavior that he represents. People hunger for immortality and get it where they can: in the small family circle or in the single love object. The transference object is the locus of our conscience, of our whole cosmology of good and evil. It is not something we can simply break away from, as it embodies our whole hero-system.

• depression
• psychology
• rank
• assimilation
• conformity
• transference
• immortality ideology
• religion
• the fourth way
• aim
• love
• good and evil
• self
• family
• conscience
• evil
• behavior
• immortality
• other

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of the pleasure routine.  Man becomes a 'nine to fiver,' he is part of the labor force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers.  He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organization of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom.  They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organization, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner.  Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction.  Fun is routinized in similar, although not quite as drastic ways.  Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties.  From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinized, and prefabricated.  How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

• conformity
• nine-to-five
• routine
• society
• love
• death
• life
• pleasure
• work
• force
• structure
• ambition
• labor
• anxiety
• fear
• tolerance
• television
• birth

Most people are not even aware of their need to conform.  They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individuals, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.  The consensus of all serves as a proof for the correctness of 'their' ideas.  Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences: the initials on the handbag or the sweater, the name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic as against the Republican party, to the Elks instead of to the Shriners become the expression of individual differences.  The advertising slogan of 'it is different' shows up this pathetic need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left.

• capitalism
• conformity
• society
• reality
• ideas
• expression