Technological and social progress produces psychological regression and instinctual fixation.

Evidence

In this general necessity, guilt has no place. One man can give the signal that liquidates hundreds and thousands of people, then declare himself free from all pangs of conscience, and live happily ever after. The antifascist powers who beat fascism on the battlefields reap the benefits of the Nazi scientists, generals, and engineers; they have the historical advantage of the late-comer. What begins as the horror of the concentration camps turns into the practice of training people for abnormal conditions—a subterranean human existence and the daily intake of radioactive nourishment. A Christian minister declares that it does not contradict Christian principles to prevent with all available means your neighbor from entering your bomb shelter. Another Christian minister contradicts his colleague and says it does. Who is right? Again, the neutrality of technological rationality shows forth over and above politics, and again it shows forth as spurious, for in both cases, it serves the politics of domination. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 346 (#expands, via linked claim)

Individual rationality, he claims, was won in the struggle against regnant superstitions, irrationality, and domination, and posed the individual in a critical stance against society. Critical reason was thus a creative principle which was the source of both the individual’s liberation and society’s advancement. The development of modern industry and technological rationality, however, undermined the basis of individual rationality. As capitalism and technology developed, advanced industrial society demanded increasing accommodation to the economic and social apparatus and submission to increasing domination and administration. Hence, a “mechanics of conformity” spread throughout the society. The efficiency and power of administration overwhelmed the individual, who gradually lost the earlier traits of critical rationality (i.e., autonomy, dissent, the power of negation), thus producing a “one-dimensional society” and “one-dimensional man.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 23 (#expands, via linked claim)

The scientific and technological rationalities that Marcuse describes are even more powerful today with the emergence of computerization, the proliferation of media and information, and the development of new techniques and forms of social control. And yet the society is more irrational than previously. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 47 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern fears and execrated traits encode prior violent stages of social progress.; Technological rationality erodes individual critical reason and produces mechanical conformity — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 23; Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Technological rationality erodes individual critical reason and produces mechanical conformity #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 23
• Technological rationality neutralizes guilt and conscience under reification #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 346
• Technological rationality has grown stronger while society grows more irrational #expands (0.84) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 47
• Modern fears and execrated traits encode prior violent stages of social progress. #expands (0.82)
• Technology can increase human weakness even as it increases power #qualifies (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 822
• Brown-era social science converted assimilation from progress into psychological regression #exemplifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 934
• Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability #expands (0.78)
• Power processes grow social resources and detach action from natural motives #expands (0.78) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 634
• Social pressure converts a people into a set of shared psychological traits #expands (0.76) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 219
• The effects of AI on emotional well-being can reflect broader societal trends. #exemplifies (0.75) — Joanna Stern, I Am Not a Robot- My Year Using AI to…, 1160
• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically #qualifies (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410