"Given these effects of the ascendant trends of rationalization, the individual does ‘the best he can’. He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out. In due course, he does not seek a way out: he adapts. That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, to “have fun”, yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized (and conditioned).
Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure. This adaptation of the individual and the effects upon his milieu and self results not only in the loss of his chance and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason, it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man. Indeed, neither the value of freedom, nor of reason are known to him…
The guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality…there is then rationality without reason…But we must now raise the question in an ultimate form: Among contemporary men will there come to prevail, or even flourish, what may be called the Cheerful Robot?"
-The Sociological Imagination 1959, 170-171, Oxford University Press