Enlightenment serves domination even while attacking priestly falsehood.

Evidence

Nietzsche was one of the few after Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. And it was Nietzsche who expressed its antipathy to domination: “The Enlightenment” should be “taken into the people, so that the priests all become priests with a bad conscience—and the same must be done with regard to the State. That is the task of the Enlightenment: to make princes and statesmen unmistakably aware that everything they do is sheer falsehood …” On the other hand, Enlightenment had always been a tool for the “great manipulators of government (Confucius in China, the Imperium Romanum, Napoleon, the Papacy when it had turned to power and not only to the world) … The way in which the masses are fooled in this respect, for instance in all democracies, is very useful: the reduction and malleability of men are worked for as ‘progress’!” — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 55

Categorization

• XREF: Nietzsche’s double-edged Enlightenment directly prefigures the culture-industry’s ‘reduction and malleability of men’—the pacification-through-manufacture thesis that Burns later invokes. — connects to: Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46; Enlightenment is kind only by confronting reason’s link to domination.; Enlightenment can be redeemed from blind domination by self-critique (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that the very tool that undoes priestly domination is simultaneously the instrument of mass manipulation is a genuinely sit-with-it observation, one of the densest moves in the book.

Broader Connections

• The Enlightenment liberated man only to enslave him more effectively #expands (0.92) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 833
• Enlightened thought itself contains the seed of its own reversal into domination #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21
• Enlightenment is kind only by confronting reason’s link to domination. #qualifies (0.82)
• Enlightenment can be redeemed from blind domination by self-critique #corroborates (0.82)