The unreflective, rigid self overruns refined positions by refusing engagement

Evidence

The more complex personality, unwilling to be pulled down, has to observe the strictest consideration for the inconsiderate. The latter need no longer be plagued by the disquiet of consciousness. Intellectual debility, affirmed as a universal principle, appears as vital force. A formalistic, administrative way of settling problems, a compartmentalized separation of everything that is, by its meaning, inseparable, hidebound insistence on arbitrary opinion in the absence of any proof, in short the practice of reifying every feature of an aborted, unformed self, withdrawing it from the process of experience and asserting it as the ultimate That’s-the-way-I-am, suffices to overrun impregnable positions. Such people can be as sure of the assent of others, similarly deformed, as of their own advantage. The cynical trumpeting of their own defect betrays an awareness that at the present stage the objective spirit liquidates the subjective. They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 191

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘That’s-the-way-I-am’ reification of self connects to Adorno’s critique of identity-thinking and to the administered self; ‘objective spirit liquidates the subjective’ is the precise shorthand for the whole of Minima Moralia’s thesis. — connects to: Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 289; The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 727
• CANDY: The closing image — the blockhead ‘down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs’ — is a biting, tweetable Adorno one-liner.

Broader Connections

• Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 289
• The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness #exemplifies (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727