Politics & Power Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan turns “appetite” into the West’s hidden operating system: not hunger as biology, but desire as a cultural logic that never gets satisfied, only rerouted. The bite of the line is in how calmly it treats a bleak proposition as historical common sense. If appetite becomes the yardstick for both what we do and what we enjoy, then “freedom” starts to look less like moral choice and more like a feedback loop: wanting generates action, action generates new wanting.

His parenthetical jab - “everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century” - isn’t casual chronology. It points to the long takeoff of modernity: capitalism’s expansion, colonial extraction, Protestant discipline and its paradoxical partner, consumer temptation; the emergence of print culture, markets, and the early machinery of mass persuasion. McLuhan’s signature move is to treat media and institutions as extensions of human faculties. Here, “congenial agencies” are the prosthetics appetite invents for itself: mechanical systems that scale desire (from the printing press to industrial production to broadcast) and political systems that manage it (from liberal consent to bureaucratic administration to spectacle).

The subtext is colder than it first appears. He’s not arguing that technology and politics “corrupt” us; he’s saying they are selected by us, because they fit the reigning criterion. Appetite doesn’t merely consume products; it recruits infrastructures. In McLuhan’s view, modern power isn’t only coercive. It’s collaborative: desire finds the tools that will amplify it, and then calls that amplification progress.