defined as a person acting completely in his or her own moral character – the individual can only be regarded as subhuman and inhumane. He is but what his physiology defines him to be:
he is an animal and feels himself to be human only insofar as he remains an animal, tied to the conditions of the world, dispossessed of free will and choice. As opposed to the physical alienation of the thing, man is now alienated from himself because he has become an object. He stands against himself and his actions, against meaningful activity.
Psychologically, this means man has turned the mind’s operation upon the world into a theoretical formulation of the subject-object dichotomy; and then turned the abstract theoretical formulation into an actual structure for existence. Man has, if you will, taken the world given through sensations into himself, imposed meaning on those sensations to produce – through differentiation and naming – a new and different world reflective of his own internal mental organization. This makes any further appropriation, any further phenomenological experience, into thought-things that are again but abstract concepts. And this includes the objects which he created that have now been turned into subjects, which once again look upon him and his creations as other objects who become subjects unto themselves. It is the subject-object dichotomy turning upon itself in an endless series of reflections.
Living in this alien world, generated in sheer replication of mental operations, there is literally no distinction between those things possessing a physical nature and those things possessing an abstract nature. They simply are bundles of reorganized energy, phenomenon that come to be labeled as products or commodities, undifferentiated except by perspective and definition, generated through labor, the means of production, being exercised upon the material of the world (things and thought things) through the act of appropriation (differentiating and naming). This is, in short, the capitalist paradigm. It is an external expression of an alienated mind manifesting itself. And the unique facet of this manifestation is it can only occur when the mind distorts time and space to generate a false consciousness.
In other words, false consciousness arises when the mind re-imposes the façade of one dimensionality, when it tricks itself into believing that there is no differentiation between itself and the object, or the reality of the mind and the reality of the external world. False consciousness effectively tricks the mind into believing that the world is as it once was when the individual first encountered it in a symbiotic relationship, even though the world and man’s existence within it has since radically changed and they now stand in all actuality as opposites opposed to one another. The mind does this by imposing what it perceives to be a common link between the two realms: that all is but a creation of human labor. So, all must be good. But it is not.
Guy Debord, the Marxist founder of the Situationist Movement, provided a contemporary example of this process when he argued “the obsession with commodities and manufactured products [that] take aim at our self-image rather than our actual material needs has taken on such a central role in the life of consumers that it has displaced any other cultural, intellectual, or political reality.” As Michael Greenberg notes when interpreting Debord, “we are all of us, de-individualized actors – objects, really – in an ongoing spectacle staged by advertisers and corporate molders of desire.”
Debord further noted: “The spectacle is the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society.” Greenberg explained:
The dictatorship works so well because we participate in it while believing we are free, coaxed by a barrage of pop songs, magazines and newspaper articles, movies, advertisements, and television shows that flatter our uniqueness, our illusory will to choose. We have surrendered ourselves to the spectacle, the theory goes, striking poses, playing roles,
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