Allocating happiness

In psychology, in the bottomless fraud of mere inwardness, which is not by accident concerned with the 'properties' of men, is reflected what bourgeois society has practised for all time with outward property. The latyer, as a result of social exchange, has been increased, but with a proviso dimly present to every bourgeois. The individual has been, as it were, merely invested with property by the class, and those in control are ready to take it back as soon as universalization of property seems to endanger its principle, which is precisely that of with-holding. Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, #39