Planned chance serves as an alibi for rationalized society

Evidence

Chance and planning become one and the same thing, because, given men’s equality, individual success and failure—right up to the top—lose any economic meaning. Chance itself is planned, not because it affects any particular individual but precisely because it is believed to play a vital part. It serves the planners as an alibi, and makes it seem that the complex of transactions and measures into which life has been transformed leaves scope for spontaneous and direct relations between man. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that in a fully rationalized society success becomes genuinely irrational, and ‘chance’ is manufactured to mask the planners — the dialectic of enlightenment operating on individual fate.
• XREF: connects to: Speculation now means endorsing uncertainty as a tactic for social survival — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 20; Rationality becomes irrational once its success opens new possibilities; Radicalized uncertainty pushes societies to adopt finance as a model for imagining the future — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 18 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Technical rationality makes irrational social control appear reasonable and rational #corroborates (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 124
• A rearticulated rationality functions as ammunition within power’s mechanics #corroborates (0.85)
• Speculation now means endorsing uncertainty as a tactic for social survival #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 20
• Radicalized uncertainty pushes societies to adopt finance as a model for imagining the future #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 18
• People rationalize outcomes even when they know the outcomes were arbitrary #complicates (0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2913
• Speculation now pervades economic, social, and political life as an imagined collective enactment #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 85
• The speculative subject accepts rather than averts the future’s radical uncertainty #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 25
• Rationality becomes irrational once its success opens new possibilities #qualifies (0.75)
• Speculative imagination generates collective futures under incalculable uncertainty #expands (0.75)
• Rational choices today can make rational choices tomorrow impossible. #complicates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 385