Thought has internalized society’s performance checks and become its own watchdog

Evidence

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. Thought, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake. … While thought has forgotten how to think itself, it has at the same time become its own watchdog. Thinking no longer means anything more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. Hence the impression of suffocation conveyed even by all apparently independent intellectual productions, theoretical no less than artistic. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 218

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that thinking reduced to self-verification produces suffocation in even ‘independent’ intellectual work is dense enough to sit with — the mechanism (internalized watchdog) is precise yet totalizing.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier critique of information overload and instrumentalism from the reader’s silence-and-thinking threads, and to Foucault’s self-disciplining subject.