ABSTRACT
Everyday life must shortly become the one perfect system obscured by the other systems that aim at systematizing thought and structuralizing action, and as such it would be the main product of the so-called 'organized' society of controlled consumption and of its setting, modernity. This chapter demonstrates the fallacy of judging a society according to its own standards, because its categories are part of its publicity – pawns in a game of strategy and neither unbiased nor disinterested; they serve a dual practical and ideological purpose. And publicity, of course, describes objects intended for a specific use and possessing a trade value, in a manner such as to induce the consumer to buy. 'Values' that preserve an apparent substantiality are intended to forbid what they conceal; thus the ideal of every state bureaucracy is moral rectitude, and the more corrupt and corrupting it is, the more it will stress this ideal.
