Technical administration makes the possibility of liberation progressively more unimaginable
Evidence
The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation. To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea—although one might dispute the righteousness of a society which ridicules this idea while making its own population into objects of total administration. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual’s own. The process always replaces one system of preconditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 119
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The trap clarified: the more efficient the administration, the less conceivable its overthrow — a genuinely dense paradox central to the whole book.
- XREF: connects to: Liberation fails when the new regime hardens into a dominating bureaucracy — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 138; Advanced society suffocates the very needs that demand liberation while sustaining repressive ones; Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 161 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Liberation fails when the new regime hardens into a dominating bureaucracy
#expands(0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 138 - Advanced society suffocates the very needs that demand liberation while sustaining repressive ones
#corroborates(0.82) - Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action
#expands(0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 161 - Renouncing thought under institutional pressure becomes an incapacity for it
#expands(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 151 - States lacking technological autonomy cannot sustain genuine revolutionary politics.
#expands(0.75) - Technical progress may become incompatible with industrialization’s own institutions.
#qualifies(0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 183