Unintended consequences

I recently finished reading John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a book recommended to me by a friend who suggested that it would "blow my mind". The book is a short, accessible combination of Horkheimer and Adorno's The Culture Industry and Bourdieu's Distinction, arguing that art plays a key role in the legitimation of social differences. There was one particular quote in the book that struck me.

Publicity (product advertising) has another important social function. The fact that those who use publicity are unaware of this use in no way diminishes its importance. Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic in society.

-- John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

This quote has so much meaning packed into it, combining doxa with capitalism, domination, social reproduction, and democracy. But the italicized part is what I am concerned with. The incorporation of unintended consequences in social theory has helped me make sense of incredibly irrational way that people conduct their lives, subjecting themselves to conditions and begging for economic systems that enslave them. There is simply no support for the rational subject at the center of economic theory, and no reason to think that individuals know the costs or benefits of essentially any action that they take. Instead, the experience of social reality (regardless of an "objective" underlying reality) is masked by the manners in which we are socialized and the messages that constantly bombard us. We are unwitting agents in the reproduction of the conditions that oppress us (and those that enable us, to be fair) because we have come to internalize those values as what we desire.