Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Capitalism, Sontag suggests, doesn’t merely sell products; it sells a posture. Calling us "connoisseurs of liberty" is a sly reversal: the connoisseur is not a free spirit roaming the open range, but a trained consumer, someone whose tastes have been shaped by systems of price, status, and access. Liberty becomes something you appraise, collect, and curate. Not a political condition so much as a lifestyle competency.

The phrase "ideology of capitalism" does heavy lifting. Sontag isn’t attacking markets as mechanics; she’s naming the story capitalism tells about itself: that it enlarges the menu of life. "Indefinite expansion of possibility" captures the narcotic promise of modern consumer society - that desire can be endlessly refreshed, that the future is an upgrade path, that limits are bugs to be engineered away. It’s utopian language with a sales pitch embedded in it.

Subtext: this liberty is real enough to feel intoxicating, but it’s also disciplined. Possibility expands in certain directions (choice among brands, identities, experiences) while other forms of freedom - time, security, collective power, ecological stability - quietly contract. The quote is also a warning about aestheticizing freedom: once liberty is experienced primarily as the sensation of options, it becomes easy to confuse motion with autonomy.

In Sontag’s late-20th-century context - a moment when consumer culture was increasingly fused to personal identity - the line reads like cultural criticism in one clean cut: capitalism’s most persuasive product is the feeling that you are choosing, endlessly, and therefore free.