The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the . . . sanatorium director and the . . . propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a direct line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. 

Theodor W. Adorno

About Theodor W. Adorno

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Theodor W. Adorno ( ə-DOR-noh, German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ ʔaˈdɔʁno] ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist.

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