Half-education becomes objective spirit enabling totalitarian delusion

Evidence

Finally, under the conditions of modern capitalism, half-education has become objective spirit. In the totalitarian phase of domination, it calls upon the provincial charlatans of politics, and with them the system of delusion as the ultima ratio: forcing it upon the majority of the ruled, who are already deadened by the culture industry. The contradictions of rule can be seen through by the healthy consciousness so easily today that it takes a diseased mind to keep them alive. Only those who suffer from a delusion of persecution accept the persecution to which domination must necessarily lead, inasmuch as they are allowed to persecute others. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion at the end — that healthy consciousness sees through rule’s contradictions while only the paranoid can keep them alive, and the persecutor and persecuted merge in the delusion — is a dense, genuinely paradajm-shifting knot.
• XREF: connects to: When education declines, pseudo-scientific cults proliferate as paranoia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156; Half-education reduces thought to commodity facts, defeating self-examination against paranoia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157; Totalitarian ideology coerces through the fear of abandoning a first premise (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian ideology coerces through the fear of abandoning a first premise #expands (0.80)
• An ideology becomes totalitarian only when its total validity is taken seriously #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1028
• Totalitarian ideology is transmitted through practice, not teaching #corroborates (0.70) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2650