The Great Beast

Mass man, the great conformist,..where did he emerge from? Between the unmoored, rootless individual on the one hand and the person formed by a set of inter-dependencies, the historical communal traditions of association and sociality on the other, is the average man, the man without any qualities. This statistical man is ripe for manipulation and submission because what he wants, above all else, is security and the comforts of his or her private world: the little Englander with his small-mindedness, the all-American loser who never quite made it; they can, at the stroke of a pen, be whipped up into a mindless kind of patriotism, fired by a whole host of concocted grievances and frustrations and the illusion of if not greatness then at least personal significance. A voice in the wilderness that is finally heard.

Of course, this misses the point: it is precisely the rootless cosmopolitan that gets incorporated by various techniques of power into the system. There are no real individuals once you realize that it is the very process of 'subjectivization,' individualizing, that becomes the central mechanism of exerting control. This is not a general statement of how power always operates but, rather, a description of power at a particular stage of capitalistic development.

Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? 

C.W.M...