Technologically educated masses paradoxically exhibit readiness to accept despotism

Evidence

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)

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)

Horkheimer’s distaste for the technological rationalization of advanced capitalism led him to express grave doubts about a socialist movement that saw itself as its inevitable successor. Engels and others like him, Horkheimer argued, who equated the socialization of the means of production with the end of domination, were the true utopians. In fact, the naive expectation of freedom as the result of such a socialization anticipated the authoritarian state of the present. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 493 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Technological rationality neutralizes guilt and conscience under reification — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 346; Authoritarianism is the worldview of the uneducated in Western industrial societies — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 641; Socializing production without breaking technological domination yields authoritarianism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 493 (+7 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 (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 346
• Socializing production without breaking technological domination yields authoritarianism #expands (0.82) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 493
• Authoritarianism is the worldview of the uneducated in Western industrial societies #contradicts (0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 641
• Technological rationality has grown stronger while society grows more irrational #qualifies (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 47