[...] The bourgeois have made of satiety, which might be akin to bliss, a term of abuse. Because others go hungry, ideology requires that the absence of hunger be thought vulgar. So the bourgeois indict the bourgeois. Their own exemption from work proscribes the praise of idleness: the latter is called boring. The hectic bustle to which Schopenhaeuer alludes springs less from the unbearableness of a privileged condition than from its ostentatious, which, according to the historical situation, is designed either to increase social distance or, by purportedly important displays, apparently to reduce it, to emphasize the usefulness of the masters. If people at the top are really bored, it is not because they suffer from too much happiness, but because they are marked by the general misery; by the commodity character that consigns amusements to idiocy, by the brutality of the command which echoes terribly in the rulers' gaiety, finally by the fear of their own superfluity. None who profit by the profit system may exist within it without shame, and this deforms even the undeformed joys [...]
incidentally, i would love to see a left cultural critique of a show like Gossip Girl, ideally from a place of something sympathy instead of merely scorn
[...] The bourgeois have made of satiety, which might be akin to bliss, a term of abuse. Because others go hungry, ideology requires that the absence of hunger be thought vulgar. So the bourgeois indict the bourgeois. Their own exemption from work proscribes the praise of idleness: the latter is called boring. The hectic bustle to which Schopenhaeuer alludes springs less from the unbearableness of a privileged condition than from its ostentatious, which, according to the historical situation, is designed either to increase social distance or, by purportedly important displays, apparently to reduce it, to emphasize the usefulness of the masters. If people at the top are really bored, it is not because they suffer from too much happiness, but because they are marked by the general misery; by the commodity character that consigns amusements to idiocy, by the brutality of the command which echoes terribly in the rulers' gaiety, finally by the fear of their own superfluity. None who profit by the profit system may exist within it without shame, and this deforms even the undeformed joys [...]
incidentally, i would love to see a left cultural critique of a show like Gossip Girl, ideally from a place of something sympathy instead of merely scorn