Progress turns reason into submission to existing facts rather than critique

Evidence

The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals’ recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 129

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The entire one-dimensionality thesis compressed here: why efficiency and facts themselves become instruments of domination, and what is lost when reason stops negating. Dense enough that readers will sit with it.
• XREF: Powerful echo of Marcuse’s later essay on ‘repressive tolerance’ (rationality validating the status quo); also foreshadows the reader’s bridge to attention economy, where ‘what works’ and engagement metrics reify the existing order. — connects to: Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 487; Losing the fact-potential distinction makes thought submit to existing society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 40; Being past turns subjective states into thing-like objective facts

Broader Connections

• Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth #contradicts (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 487
• Losing the fact-potential distinction makes thought submit to existing society #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 40
• Being past turns subjective states into thing-like objective facts #expands (0.73)