Quote by Herbert Marcuse: “The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom.”

Being given lots of options to choose between does not mean you are truly free. If all the choices are shaped by the same system — the same consumer culture, the same ideology — then choosing between them is a form of conformity dressed up as freedom.

Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man in 1964, as consumerism was rapidly expanding in postwar America and Western Europe. The book argued that the affluent society was producing conformity and domesticated desire rather than the freedom its abundance promised, and it became a bible of the 1960s New Left.

German-American philosopher and sociologist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose 1964 work One-Dimensional Man became a foundational text of the New Left. He argued that advanced industrial society neutralises opposition by absorbing dissent into consumer culture.