Dominating nature forces us to serve our own devices to survive.

Evidence

The process of adjustment has now become deliberate and therefore total … The individual’s self-preservation presupposes his adjustment to the requirements for the preservation of the system … The more devices we invent for dominating nature, the more must we serve them if we are to survive … The individual, purified of all remnants of mythologies, including the mythology of objective reason, reacts automatically, according to general patterns of adaptation … It is as if the innumerable laws, regulations, and directions with which we must comply were driving the car, not we … Our spontaneity has been replaced by a frame of mind which compels us to discard every emotion or idea that might impair our alertness to the impersonal demands assailing us . — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1471

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact statement of the dialectic of enlightenment: technical mastery of nature becomes total self-adaptation to the system of rules, a perverse inversion of autonomy.
• SHARE: Horkheimer’s driving metaphor — ‘the laws were driving the car, not we’ — captures substitution of external rules for agency in one image.
• XREF: connects to: The drive to dominate external nature extends inward to the human self; Dominating nature chiefly becomes power over other humans — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 703; Controlling nature and controlling humans advance together within science — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 614 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Self-domination destroys the very subject self-preservation aims to save #expands (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 62
• The drive to dominate external nature extends inward to the human self #expands (0.85)
• Human mastery over nature dialectically increases human dependency on matter. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 495
• Dominating nature chiefly becomes power over other humans #expands (0.82) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 703
• Controlling nature and controlling humans advance together within science #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 614
• Ending deprivation requires increased domination of nature and self-repression #corroborates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1572
• Security regimes prioritize survival at the cost of becoming ourselves #exemplifies (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 487