False Needs

Marcuse's most politically charged and philosophically precarious concept. False needs are needs people experience as their own — arising from authentic selfhood, expressions of genuine desire — that are in fact implanted by the social system for the system's purposes. The factory worker of 1964 who needed the newest automobile did not experience the need as external; he experienced it as desire. The desire was real; the phenomenology was authentic; and the desire was, analytically, an instrument of his integration into a system requiring continuous productive participation to sustain itself. The charge of paternalism arrives immediately: who decides which needs are true? Marcuse's answer — the distinction can only be made by individuals themselves, and only when they are free to make it — does not resolve the charge but relocates it. Under conditions of domination, the distinction cannot be made from the inside, because the inside has been shaped by the system whose products the needs are. The