Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.