Politics & Power Quote by David Riesman

Riesman’s question lands like a polite bomb: not an anti-ad rant, but an indictment of a whole cultural agreement to keep pretending. The line “fantastic fraud” is doing double duty. “Fraud” names the moral charge, but “fantastic” hints at spectacle - advertising as a national genre of make-believe so flamboyant it almost advertises its own falsity. He’s not just saying ads lie; he’s asking why we tolerate a system that may be understood as unserious even by its priests.

The sharpest blade is aimed inward: “least of all by the advertising men who create it.” That clause exposes the real mechanism of mass persuasion as institutionalized cynicism. The producers don’t have to believe the image to profit from it; they only need a public trained to treat disbelief as irrelevant. The subtext is less about gullible consumers than about a society that can compartmentalize: we roll our eyes at the pitch while still letting it organize our desires, status games, and sense of what “America” is supposed to look like.

Context matters. Riesman, writing in the mid-century shadow of The Lonely Crowd, is diagnosing a shift toward other-directed life: identity built through signals, taste, and peer calibration. Advertising becomes both mirror and engine of that drift, manufacturing a consensus image of abundance, cheer, and self-improvement that no one fully inhabits. The question form is strategic: it invites the reader to admit complicity. If everyone knows the image is fake, the scandal isn’t the deception - it’s the shared decision to keep living as if it weren’t.