Herbert Marcuse, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The concept begins with a structural observation: not all needs are equal, and the inequality is not a matter of individual preference but of the social conditions under which needs are produced. What I call false needs are those superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression — needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.1
Their satisfaction may be genuinely gratifying; the individual feels pleasure, relaxation, release. But this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing it.2 The result is what I name euphoria in unhappiness — the administered contentment of a population that has ceased to feel the weight of what it is missing.
The concrete examples are not abstract. The need to buy a new automobile every other year, to relax before television, to eat enriched and soggy bread, to keep up with the neighbors — these are false needs in the precise sense that they serve to perpetuate the powers that be rather than the genuine development of the individual.3 What Hegel saw in the Philosophy of Right as the system of needs established by civil society — a system that operates through particular needs while requiring an apparatus of domination for its functioning — becomes, under advanced capitalism, something far more total: the needs generated by the system retain its repression and aggressiveness even after they have been effectively introjected and become the satisfying expression of the individual's own impulses.4
This is where the analysis cuts deepest. Domination is comprehensive when the individual's goals, purposes, and the means of striving for them are prescribed to him and performed by him as something prescribed.5 False needs are the psychological mechanism of that prescription: through what I call repressive desublimation, the system forecloses dissatisfaction by routing libidinal energy into administered pleasures, so that the individual actively identifies with and strives to maintain the very conditions of his unfreedom.6
The obvious objection is: who decides? And I take it seriously. In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves — but only in the last analysis, that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer.7 As long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated down to their very instincts, their answer cannot be taken as their own.8
Yet no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied.9 The paradox is real. It is also, under conditions of total administration, unavoidable: the more rational and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means by which the administered individuals might break their servitude.10
What the concept of false needs does, sociologically, is refuse the liberal premise that revealed preference is sovereign. The individual who chooses the advertised need, the competitive consumption, the stupefying relaxation — that individual is not expressing autonomous desire but living out a pre-conditioned response to a system that has made its own population into objects of total administration.11
Economic freedom, properly understood, would mean freedom from the economy — from being controlled by economic forces and relationships, from the daily struggle for existence.12 That the proposition sounds utopian is not evidence of its impossibility; it is evidence of the strength of the forces which prevent its realization.
False are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 15–16
Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 15–16
the need to buy a new automobile every other or third year, the need to relax before television, to work in an armament factory, to eat enriched and soggy bread, the need to 'keep up with the neighbors'.The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society, p. 52
The needs which it generates, and satisfies, are permeated with these qualities and retain them when the social requirements are effectively introjected and become the satisfying expression of the individual's own needs and impulses.Cultural Revolution, p. 136
domination is 'whenever the individual's goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him as something prescribed.'Introduction: Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, p. 58
repressive desublimation through which the system forecloses dissatisfaction with society through various libidinal compensations.Introduction: Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, p. 58
In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 17–18
As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 17–18
no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 17–18
The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 17–18
Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 15–16
economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy - from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living.One-Dimensional Man, pp. 15–16