Vibe Goes Down
Between measuring the economy and desire
Simon Torracinta
In the years since the pandemic shutdown and recovery, a new coinage became pervasive amongst policy wonks across the United States: “vibecession.” In survey after survey, Americans evinced serious pessimism about the country’s economic prospects, even as many experts loudly proclaimed that, as one economist put it, “We now have the greatest economy ever.” For mainstream analysts, the phenomenon to be explained was not the source of this pessimism, but rather a purported divergence between “objective” and “subjective” measures of economic reality. As the author of the vibecession term put it, “basically, the economy is doing fine, but people are absolutely not feeling fine.” A torrent of fundamentally patronizing explanations proliferated, offering variations on this basic premise. Perhaps, some suggested, mediadriven narratives had become so powerful that they had simply become more “real” than the hard data. Or perhaps, as one influential analysis put it, a volatile “emotional alchemy” of “insecurity, isolation, anxiety, and fear” was now capable of trumping “facts and material reality.” There was, on this account, simply a disjuncture between reality and perception, between facts and feelings. In the 2024 election, however, American voters made it clear that those out of touch with reality were the economists.
How might we approach this tidal wave of discontent symptomatically—as the surface of a much deeper phenomenon, rather than the foam which can be dissolved away? It is after all a distinctly modern conceit that the real state of the unrepresentable totality we have named “the economy” can be objectified into a handful of simple measures, like so many dials on an instrument dashboard. And as the centrality of “sentiments” and “expectations” to the core of modern macroeconomic theory attests, the subjective can never be truly divorced from the objective. If we abandon the premise of a divergence between the two, the vibecession instead appears as the distal tremor of a more fundamental shift in the bedrock of contemporary life. The deep anxiety within mainstream commentary, indeed, reveals a gnawing uncertainty concerning what was once conventional wisdom: is “economic security”—a telling hedge—still the bedrock of basic satisfaction? Is there still an objective measure of people’s needs? Or is it vibes all the way down?
How might we approach this tidal wave of discontent symptomatically—as the surface of a much deeper phenomenon, rather than the foam which can be dissolved away?
While the framing is new, the questions this debate raises are far older. Is there an order to our desires? Which of our needs comes first, and which are only secondary? What do we really need, and what do we merely want? Are some appetites fixed in our nature and others rooted in more ephemeral psychology? The most familiar reference point for these questions is Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” first sketched out in 1943. But while the pyramid that came to bear his name might be the single most famous image of modern psychological science, it’s only one moment in a much longer history of efforts to rank human desires. A closer look at past attempts to bring order to the sequence of desires reveals the successive eras of consumer capitalism, naturalized into scientific just-so stories about human nature. The arrangement of desires into a relation of hierarchy—one in which some desires are higher or lower than others, foundational or inessential, satiable or insatiable, real or artificial—was a product of market society itself. Yet theoretical attempts to make sense of this dispensation were naturalized into objective facts of human psychology, disguising their normative claims about the kind of human beings we ought to be. For a genuine politics to address our collective desires, however, we will have to get beyond hierarchy altogether.
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It’s likely there has always been a commonsense distinction between more and less immediate requirements. The nature of fasting, for example—a ritual ascetic practice that appears to be as old as religion itself— implies a conceptual distinction between the basic appetites of the body and the higher will which the wise, righteous, or penitent individual can employ to overcome them. Within the human sciences, the effort to dissect the precise nature of our passions has been a perennial one, as least as old as Spinoza’s stark intention to “consider human actions and appetites as if the subject were lines, surfaces, or solids.” Yet until the nineteenth century, such efforts rarely went beyond the laundry-list enumeration of human appetites within the “faculty of desire” typical of texts like Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
The consumer society ignited by industrial capitalism, however, made the ranking of desire newly interesting in the nineteenth century. The basic coordinates of consumer desire were being remade by marketplaces of the European metropole now thoroughly populated by the exotic luxuries of imperial trade. “In place of the old wants,” Marx and Engels observed in 1848, “we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” The mechanism of the market, moreover, also made both the extent and exclusivity of particular goods abundantly visible. Wherever you found yourself on the ladder of wealth, you might aspire to the lifestyle of your betters, and disdain the rough existence of those below. Something like a scale of desires, in other words, was becoming an immanent fact of the market itself.
This phenomenon was of particular interest to the emergent science of political economy. Did consumers behave in a lawlike fashion? The political economists sought to commensurate the variety of human needs and appetites into a universal scale—and began to narrate its gradations as steps on an ascending ladder. Often, this came in the form of a kind of anthropological just-so story that became a common refrain in the Victorian textbooks of the period.
As the political economist Thomas Charles Banfield declared in 1844, “the satisfaction of every lower want in the scale creates a desire of a higher character.” Those whose “lower” wants were satisfied would find themselves lacking in something else: someone with “a full supply of food” might develop a penchant for “delicacy in eating,” or shift their attention to nicer clothing. Like the universal chain of being, ascendancy up this ladder of desire was thought to involve greater richness and complexity.
On higher rungs of the ladder, economist John Bates Clark claimed in 1886, “men’s wants are not merely multiplied; they are spiritualized,” as “desires extend themselves into scientific, æsthetic and ethical regions.” Yet such rarefied heights were reserved for the fortunate few. For Banfield, “the highest grade in the scale of wants, that of pleasure derived from the beauties of nature or of art, is usually confined to men who are exempted from all the lower privations.” The rich could enjoy the finer things in life—the things that make us truly human; by contrast, the poor remained confined to mere animal need.
Crucially, what distinguished the higher wants from mere animal needs was not only that they were more complex, but that they were limitless. Satisfaction of one merely awakened another, and yet another after that. “Simple animal requirements” of “food, water, air” might be satisfied, William Stanley Jevons argued in 1871, but “the more refined and intellectual our needs become, the less they are capable of satiety.” For “articles of taste, science, or curiosity, when once excited, there is hardly a limit.” Human desires, on this account, were insatiable—and this insatiability was a mark of civilization.
Whereas “primitive tribes, the mollusks and radiates of the social classification, have few wants in the aggregate,” Clark observed, “nomads require more varied appliances, and the civilized man demands an indefinite number and variety.” Both primitive men and animals had only few rudimentary needs—while their superiors had a panoply of sophisticated desires. The natural conclusion was that a “multiplicity of wants marks the grade of the society and of the individual.” Wants were an enticement to productive work, but the refined consumer—who could make careful choices among the proliferating variety of goods and experiences in modern commercial life—was set apart from the indolence of racial inferiors who could not be motivated without coercion to work beyond simpleminded animal contentment. The West Indies were so naturally bountiful in food, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle concluded in 1849, that its freed Black inhabitants still required the “beneficent whip” to motivate them to work beyond the basic satiation of hunger.
Before long, this hierarchical principle was employed to make sense of the avalanche of official economic data being generated in this period. By the 1850s, the German statistical bureau chief Ernst Engel claimed that household expenditure across regions of varying wealth objectively demonstrated what he called the “rank order of needs.” As households shifted their spending in response to disposable income, he insisted, “food is the first need, followed by clothing, then housing, and then heating and lighting.” Only after such necessities were met was it possible to acquire “education, instruction, science, art, intellectual pleasure.” The proportion of household expenditure on food was therefore “an infallible measure of the material well-being of a population as a whole,” which would fall with the national accumulation of wealth. Human emancipation from animal existence, in other words, was an objectively measurable phenomenon. The progress of civilization would be marked by its inexorable triumph over biology.
Hierarchies of human nature lent themselves to hierarchies between human beings. By definition, only those with the full range of experiences could claim to know what lay at the apex of the pyramid; only they could claim to have lived fully human lives, organized around truly human wants. Even the ability to elaborate a chosen order—typically stipulated with little to no empirical verification—implied membership in this knowing elite. Unsurprisingly, the pleasures of the mind were placed above those of the body. The subjugated, in turn, were doubly stigmatized by their failure of emancipation from base physiology.
“Hierarchies of human nature lent themselves to hierarchies between human beings.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that the ordering of desire was at the foundation of modern economics. It was one thing to imagine that people bought and sold items in the marketplace in order to meet their immediate needs. It was quite another to take seriously the idea that most exchanges lay in service of a vast, uncharted continent of desire which lay beyond basic survival—or even that new wants might be conjured up sui generis by the availability of new goods. The prices of goods, in other words, were ultimately rooted in consumer desire. It was only a short step from this realization to the revolutionary idea that economic value must rest on psychological, and not objective, foundations. Even more importantly was that “it is the constancy of a relative value in objects of desire, and the fixed order of succession in which this value arises,” as Banfield put it, “that makes the satisfaction of our wants a matter of scientific calculation.” A fixed hierarchy of desire implied a general psychic law that governed our choices in the marketplace—a law that invited mathematical theorization.
A new theory of prices would therefore be constructed from this premise, the kernel of the marginal “revolution” in economic theory which overthrew labor theories of value and remains embedded in neoclassical methods today. Though modern economists have long since jettisoned the moral hierarchies of its Victorian forebears in favor of an abstracted vision of self-interested, utility-maximizing agents, their assumption that utility can be infinitely generated through the acquisition of wealth still contains within it the kernel of its origins in the hierarchy and insatiability of wants.
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For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was economists who were focused on the hierarchy of desires. While psychologists and philosophers who endeavored to plumb the depths of motivation were fascinated with the fundamental drives and instincts that were thought to structure human behavior, the immediate biological appetites were the most obvious site of investigation. Nebulous and mercurial “wants,” by contrast, received little attention. Hunger, in particular, served as the paradigmatic drive on which all others were modeled and understood. When Freud explicitly analogized the sexual force he called “libido” to hunger in his Three Essays on Sexuality in 1905, he was only following a long-standing tradition.
As such, a chief instrument of the psychological laboratory of the early twentieth century was the rat. Imprisoned in its cage, its daily psychic life was ruled by the deep-seated physiological drives of hunger and thirst—precisely the parameters that could be straightforwardly (if often cruelly) manipulated by the experimenter by limiting access to food or water. Hunger could be used to motivate all kinds of behaviors— maze running, lever pulling—but it was also an object of study in itself. For behaviorist psychologists, animal experiments structured around the manipulation of physiological drives could provide the essential building blocks out of which a sophisticated human psychology might be constructed, since the more complex drives that produce human behavior were thought to work in essentially the same way.
By the middle of the century, however, psychologists looking for a more human-centered psychology began to chafe against such strictures. How much did the complex shadings of human motivation really resemble those of the rat? Though he was schooled in the dominant behaviorist catechism of the day, the psychologist Abraham Maslow became a particularly radical apostate in the 1940s. Was it really “scientific,” he mused, to “judge human beings by animal standards”? The problem seemed particularly acute when it came to desire. Could hunger really be used to model our “desires for clothes, automobiles, friendliness, company, praise, prestige, and the like”? A century after its early formulations, it turned out, the turn to the scale of desire would once again be narrated as a turn away from mere animal psychology.
Like the behaviorists, Maslow agreed that the shifting desires of our quotidian life were not so important in and of themselves but rather as “surface indicators of more basic needs” that were common across all human beings. But unlike them, he insisted that beyond the physiological drives there are distinctly “human” needs that are nevertheless just as fundamental. The trick, for Maslow, was that these human needs manifested gradually with the satisfaction of “lower” needs. “Man is a perpetually wanting animal,” he wrote in a total (albeit unwitting) echo of the Victorian economists, “and rarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time. As one desire is satisfied, another one pops up to take its place. When this is satisfied, still another comes into the foreground.”
Maslow’s famous claim was that “basic human needs” must be organized in “a hierarchy of relative prepotency”—or what he would eventually call the hierarchy of needs. Maslow insisted, without any experimental evidence, that this was a universally ordered hierarchy: classic physiological needs like hunger, thirst, and sleep came first, followed by “safety needs,” “love needs,” “esteem needs,” and finally the need for “self-actualization.” Only the higher stages were conductive to “more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life”—and escalating need gratification was correlated with “a series of increasing degrees of psychological health.” As for the Victorian economists, moreover, the hierarchy was closely associated with civilizational progress. “The merely surviving man will not worry much about the higher things in life, the study of geometry, the right to vote, the good name of his city, respect; he is primarily concerned with more basic goods.” It took a “certain amount of gratification of lower needs” for man to be “civilized enough to feel frustrated about the larger personal, social, and intellectual issues.” Unsurprisingly, Maslow also associated higher levels of gratification with greater levels of “political, economic, religious, educational liberalism” and less authoritarianism.
Though it came a century after the early Victorian formulations, the Maslovian project could not but replicate their civilizational trappings. Even without overt references to hierarchies of class or race, the implication remained that only select individuals had access to the full range of human feeling—one confirmed by his fascination with studying the lives of uniquely “self-actualizing people.” Why, he mused in a lecture, were the frustrated masses at the bottom rungs of his hierarchy not more unhappy? Perhaps “living at the lower level seems to dull people, like decortication, so they don’t feel as much pain.” The rank order of needs had culminated once again in a rank order of human beings.
“Though it came a century after the early Victorian formulations, the Maslovian project could not but replicate their civilizational trappings.”
Maslow’s theory did not win over the hard-nosed experimentalists of his own discipline. The empirical basis of his theory was decidedly thin, and from the outset he hedged his claims, writing that the “fixed order” of his hierarchy was “not nearly as rigid as we have implied.” But his success in articulating in elementary terms what now appeared as a basic feature of the human condition ensured that he would be taken up by far more consequential fields. His true domain of influence would come in the vast world of applied psychology, particularly in human relations and personnel management, where the theory offered a reassuringly simple guide to the needs and motives of one’s own subordinates. The decidedly mixed record of psychometricians who sought to demonstrate Maslow’s stipulated rank order mattered little. Neatly illustrated in a pyramid—a visual aid he had not employed or endorsed—“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” would be replicated across endless treatises of industrial psychology, HR manuals, pedagogical primers, and military handbooks in ensuing decades. Sensing the way the wind was blowing, even Maslow himself embraced a late-career reinvention as a business guru. The rank order was naturalized into an underlying fact of human psychology, and repeated in so many contexts that it has practically become common sense.
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For all the family resemblances of the Maslovian model to its Victorian ancestors, however, the differences are also important. Strikingly, Maslow posed the question of material satiety far more squarely than his predecessors did. Unlike the higher wants of the Victorian imaginary, the upper echelons of Maslow’s hierarchy were more psychological, more intimate. It was not at all clear that they could be satisfied through material things. Maslovian man climbed up the hierarchy via gradual satisfaction of prepotent needs, focusing increasingly inwards until the Zen-like peak of “self-actualization.” It was a vision of psychological self-care that seemed far more appropriate to the admixtures of affluence and anxiety that defined midcentury America than to the class-bound visions of an earlier age.
Not coincidentally, human scientists of the period were also beginning to ask if there was a ceiling on human appetites. The political economists of the nineteenth century had imagined that the highest pleasures would be reserved for the cultural elite, but what would it mean for a society as a whole to move through the successive stages of satisfaction? What economists called the question of “elasticity” and what psychologists called “satiation” had by this time thrust itself into scientific consciousness.
One of the earliest articulations of this problem came in the work of John Maynard Keynes. Overlooked by many readers but central to the General Theory (1936) was his thesis that the “propensity to consume” would be gradually satiated at greater levels of wealth: “when our income increases, our consumption increases also, but not by so much.” It was this widening gap between income and spending that produced the ever-larger shortfalls of aggregate demand that were so deleterious to macroeconomic stability. But although this “psychological law” of relative satiation implied the need for greater public oversight over the powers of investment to manage the shortfall, for Keynes it was no bad thing in itself. While second-order needs related to social status may be “insatiable,” he argued, “absolute needs” were not; indeed, “a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.” For Keynes this implied that the “economic problem” would eventually be solved, and people could finally move on the real business of living. This was why it was possible for him to imagine his grandchildren’s generation working fifteen hours a week, as he so famously and erroneously prophesied in 1930.
What seemed to Keynes like a utopian prospect of gradual satiation was a dawning nightmare for business. What if consumers began to stop desiring the new goods rolling off the assembly line? It was indeed precisely at the dawn of the age of Fordist mass production that business, particularly in the United States, began to shoulder the responsibility of generating its own demand on a mass scale. It was no accident that this was also the pioneering age of the marketing and advertising industries. “Once the persuasive pressure of advertising grew effective,” the Lehman Brothers investment banker Paul Mazur happily reported in 1928, “the demand for elementary needs became but a mere islet in an ocean of domain that had been created for luxuries and conveniences.” As the society of mass consumption kicked into high gear, both hopes and fears of satiation began to fade. In the United States, a Presidential Committee on the economy in 1929 remarked that corporate ingenuity had demonstrated “on a grand scale the expansibility of human wants and desires,” concluding that “we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In the subsequent years of the postwar trente glorieuses, the prediction of this endless frontier appeared to have been borne out. Rather than opt for greater leisure, as Keynes had predicted, workers across most of the industrial world often chose to plow the wage gains from productivity into higher levels of private consumption.
The hierarchy of needs was such a powerful heuristic in this period that many critics of midcentury abundance merely sought to invert its logic by appealing to a distinction between what Herbert Marcuse called “true” and “false” needs; as a result, its power was only reinforced. During WWII, for example, Marcuse worried aloud about the political meanings of postwar plenty, in which an increasingly planned economy would administer, and even reengineer, the needs of all citizens, while leaving the class domination of capitalism entirely intact. “This is the horror of the situation: where is the lack of freedom, if everyone has as much as they could wish for? Human needs will be satisfied. It will be irrelevant to object that all this has been engineered artificially from above.” On the left, such pronouncements were the starting gun for decades of handwringing about the evanescence of class politics with the generalization of economic security. Even in the more liberal-minded social theorists of the 1950s, allusions to the industry of “modern want creation” in works like The Affluent Society relied on an underlying substrate of putatively genuine needs that, the authors claimed, had been eclipsed by the distortions of the culture industry.
By the 1960s, indeed—as a new generation began to politically reject what the Port Huron statement called “contentment amidst prosperity”—even mainstream social science further embraced the hierarchy of desires in its Maslovian version. Following the European tumult of 1968, the American political scientist Ronald Inglehart drew on a large array of social surveys and opinion polls to advance a theory directly inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “My basic hypothesis,” he averred, “is that given individuals pursue various goals in hierarchical order—giving maximum attention to the things they sense to be the most important unsatisfied needs at a given time.” Younger generations, Inglehart proposed in 1971, had been “socialized during an unprecedently long period of unprecedently high affluence.” As a result, they were acting toward political goals that “no longer have a direct relationship to the imperatives of economic security.”
If earlier generations, whose political horizons were set by war and scarcity, had been defined by “acquisitive” values, the children of the postwar economic miracle instead cultivated “‘post-bourgeois values,’ relating to the need for belonging and to aesthetic and intellectual needs.” The politics of the New Left and the new social movements, in Inglehart’s reading, therefore reflected this broad shift from “economic” to “life-style issues.” The political values of the future, he surmised in The Silent Revolution (1977), would therefore be increasingly “Post-Materialist.” It is difficult to overstate the significance of this thesis within political science, given the gargantuan literature it has spawned: a few years ago, Inglehart was reported to be the most cited political scientist in the English language. Postmaterialism now remains a catch-all explanation for everything from the declining salience of class to the centrality of immigration, sexuality, and the culture war to modern polities.
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Rank orders of desire were elaborated and circulated so frequently because their shape dovetailed neatly with a linear horizon of progress. They conjured up a distant future in which all humanity might reach the summit of human satisfaction. This was, in principle, a vision of progressive emancipation—one that accorded with stagist accounts of universal history. Yet what is striking in retrospect is how easily they lent themselves to the naturalization of class and racial hierarchies, affirming the pleasures of the few while denigrating the needs of the many. All too often, then, the science of desire simply naturalized the status quo. As Adorno had put in his “Theses on Need,” “the appeal to nature in relation to need of any kind is always a mere mask for denial and domination.”
But desire is too unstable to be so easily fixed in place. The vibecession is only one symptom of the profound unease that pervades a tumultuous world marked by intense and sudden contrasts of security and paranoia, riches and destitution, placidity and violence, plenty and scarcity. Citizens of the affluent poles of the world system have never been richer, statistically speaking; their (our) lifestyles have never required more sheer material and energetic input—yet every sign points to a deep-seated dissatisfaction that is manifesting in increasingly morbid political symptoms. Our present juncture of crisis and stagnation appears to have thoroughly scrambled any neat rank order of desires—if there ever was one to begin with. Any politics which relies on the kaleidoscopic and ever-shifting distinctions between “deep” or “authentic” and “false” or “superficial” human needs will therefore be on increasingly shaky ground.
“Such a politics would take seriously the reality of our desires as they are, while holding onto a hope—and perhaps even a duty—for their collective transfiguration.”
Yet if we cannot make objective claims about what we “really” want, what emancipatory vision can guide a new politics of desire? As the subject of consumer needs has made a comeback, these questions have become all the more urgent. The threat of climate change and imperative to decarbonize modern life have made American consumers’ predilections for gigantic trucks, beef hamburgers, gas stoves, and even incandescent lightbulbs into objects of vociferous public debate. At a more academic level, economic theories of degrowth have condemned the biophysically unsustainable throughput that undergirds the modern Western lifestyle. Whether a program that demands fewer material goods is politically viable is one of the central questions of modern environmental politics—and hence one of the most important questions we face.
The problem, however, is that these debates remain locked within a predictable and sterile framework. One side trumpets the hegemonic position of our political and economic institutions: the liberal defense of the sovereign consumer, which defends individual choice in the marketplace as its central principle and accepts market choices as the purely autonomous outcome of authentic desire informed by fully rational calculation. The guiding principle of this ethos, which echoes the canons of modern neoclassical economics, is that individual choices are both private and inviolable. On the contemporary American right, this sovereign right has metastasized into perverse and parodic excess, with status goods like oversize trucks valued precisely because they so loudly assert the prerogatives of the self in the world in defiance of all real or imagined disapproval.
On the other side is the position of environmentalists and degrowthers, implicitly endorsed across much of the left, which taps into more than a century of consumer critique. This account holds that our real needs, those that truly constitute the good life, have been thoroughly obscured by the false satisfaction produced by the market. Absent the forces of advertising and social emulation, which put us on an endless treadmill of consumption, the story goes, we would live with fewer material goods but greater social and spiritual satisfaction. The apparent freedom in the sphere of private consumption so celebrated in the liberal account, in other words, actually obscures the fundamental unfreedom of our collective alienation from our truly “human” desires.
Neither of these is adequate. The liberal position is manifestly unable to confront the realities of climate catastrophe—all the more so because it implicitly relies on a story of collective ascendance up the ladder that is increasingly hard to square with reality. Yet its critical alternative is just as reliant on a naturalized model of the human being as the one it seeks to supplant. It simply reproduces—in inverted form—the same logic of hierarchy, rooting “real needs” in a putative substrate of human nature. The agnostic position gives free rein to even the most destructive of appetites—but the prescriptive position grounds its claims in a spurious universality overlaid with a thick current of moralized asceticism. Can we affirm the political force of desire without taking it as given?
The philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s speculation on “desire-critique” in the rather different context of sexual desire is instructive. “As a matter of good politics,” she writes in The Right to Sex, “we treat the preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want.” Yet despite the immense deference accorded to stated preferences, the observable fact is that “our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills—not automatically, but not impossibly either.” Given what we might call vastly unequal interpersonal distribution of sexual desire today, “who is desired and who isn’t is a political question,” even if any remedy would have to sit ambiguously alongside the acknowledgement that “no one is obliged to desire anyone else.” Such a politics would take seriously the reality of our desires as they are, while holding onto a hope—and perhaps even a duty—for their collective transfiguration.
What I want to posit is a desire critique that extends beyond the domain of sexuality. There are, as Srinivasan suggests, good reasons to be wary of a politics that chastises people for the things they enjoy— and yet to abdicate this terrain altogether is also untenable. The philosopher Kate Soper’s idea of “alternative hedonism” seeks to thread this needle. Like Srinivasan, Soper cautions against grounding claims about “human satisfaction” in “universal truths of human nature.” Rather than engaging in a prescriptive account of authentic desires, or repeating the dour critiques of frivolous consumerism, Soper’s alternative hedonism seeks to cultivate a different desire, kindle pleasure, and set free the rich and strange varieties of human appetites, which so vastly exceed those that consumer society makes available. The stunted, atomized, but all-too-real pleasures afforded by the privatized freedom of the automobile—literally translated, the free movement of the self—might be met not with finger-wagging but by genuinely alternative infrastructures of pleasurably collective mobility.
The point is not that materially intensive and privatized forms of pleasure are “bad” or “artificial,” but that are so many other pleasures to be had—many of which are foreclosed by our contemporary form of life. Individual preferences are notoriously resistant to rational or moral suasion: de gustibus non est disputandum. Yet the politics I am proposing need not appeal to anyone’s better angels. Rather, it would seek to build the social and material infrastructures to produce a different ordering of human motivations. Unlocking the pleasures of another kind of good life, in turn, might help to construct a collective demand for more radical forms of transformation. Crucially, if there is no order of needs buried in human nature, a politics of hedonism need not bend itself to needs and wants in their present form, but on what they could be.
Ultimately, it’s not possible to reason backwards from what our desires in a utopian future would be. “The wants of liberated men and the enjoyment of their satisfaction will have a different form from wants and satisfaction in a state of unfreedom,” Marcuse once wrote, “even if they are physiologically the same.” But we can still want to want differently, and begin to imagine: what would we want if we did?