Scientific management whittles away the inner dimension where dissent takes root

Evidence

This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. 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

• DEFINE: Introduces the chapter’s key concept: the ‘inner dimension’ of the mind as the home of negative thinking and critical Reason — the thing being flattened.
• XREF: This ‘inner dimension being whittled down’ is the direct ancestor of modern discourse on attention erosion, distraction, and the collapse of interiority in the age of the feed.