Overview

He called jazz fascist. He lived in Hollywood. He charged you to read about it. Theodor Adorno spent his career building an airtight philosophical case that consumer capitalism destroys authentic human experience, manufactures false contentment, and turns everything you enjoy into a mechanism of your own oppression. Then he went back to his nice house in California and listened to Beethoven. This book is about what he actually thought, why he thought it, and why the most infuriating thing about him is that he was mostly right. Everything Is Terrible and You Are Why takes you through the complete Adorno experience -- the Frankfurt School's magnificently bleak diagnosis of Western civilization, the culture industry argument that explains your phone better than your phone company does, the jazz opinions that history has not been kind to, the thousand-page questionnaire about fascism, the book specifically designed to prevent you from understanding it, and the moment in 1969 when his own students occupied his lecture hall and he called the police. Adorno was the philosopher who looked at modern life and saw a sophisticated machine for producing obedient consumers who thought they were free. He was right often enough to be genuinely uncomfortable. He was wrong about jazz often enough to be genuinely funny. He was both things at the same time, which is either the most honest position available or the most convenient one, and the answer is probably both. If you have ever felt vaguely hollow after an evening of consuming entertainment you cannot quite justify but cannot quite stop, Adorno has a theory about that. You are not going to enjoy the theory. He would consider that appropriate.

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