Civilization cannot be separated from the terror that sustains it

Evidence

It seems illusory to suppose that in the future the degree of severity could be accurately adjusted, and that the bloody penalties which have been inflicted on tame men over the centuries could be replaced by sanatoria. Simulated force is powerless. Culture has developed with the protection of the executioner. Here the book of Genesis, which tells of the fall from Paradise, coincides with the Soirees de Petersbourg. All work and pleasure are protected by the hangman. To contradict this fact is to deny all science and logic. It is impossible to abolish the terror and retain civilization. Even a lessening of terror implies a beginning of the process of dissolution. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 188

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a lessening of terror begins civilization’s dissolution — that punishment is constitutive of culture, not its corruption — is a dense, paradigm-reversing thesis worth sitting with.
• SEED: An essay angle: the modern ‘sanatoria’ substitute for punishment (therapy, rehabilitation, managed care) and whether simulated force can hold a civilization together.
• XREF: connects to: Civilization is built on the suppression of mimesis. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139; Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284; Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 106 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish #expands (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106
• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284
• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694
• Civilization can manufacture internal barbarians by mass rightlessness #expands (0.82)
• Terror is the essence of totalitarian government, not a means to an end #expands (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 808