Hegel describes this [utilitarianism] as the relentless consumerism that appropriates, manipulates, and exploits the last shred of objectivity, including that of the social world. The human community will be reduced to a collective survival mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle dedicated to the rule of maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or “troop” (Trupp) rampaging like animals in the garden of Eden - Hegel’s startling anticipation of Nietzsche’s description of utilitarianism as a herd morality. “One hand washes the other” (PhG §560). Hegel darkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is a thinly veiled defense against what lies beyond the pleasure principle. This is why utilitarianism is a slave ideology: I learn to wait. I pace my pleasure, I dilute it, I diversify it, I experiment with it, I count it, I parcel it into bite-sized units, I want it to last forever, I make use of the world so as to curb my own unappeasable desire to consume it, to destroy it, to use it up. The utilitarian social contract is therefore designed to produce a maximum of happiness: it tries to give a term or measure to desire, to prolong pleasure within “natural” limits, which amounts to reducing it to the thinnest terms of self-preservation: pleasure can be enhanced only by stretching it out into the empty bad infinite self-reproduction - sheer animal survival. “’Measure’ or proportion has the function of preventing pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short; i.e., the function of ‘measure’ is immoderation” (PhG §560).
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