Truth-bearing worldviews become instruments of organized barbarism once wielded as power.

Evidence

The Enlightenment’s treatment of nature, and by extension of men, as objects was fundamentally in accord with the extreme formalism of the categorical imperative, despite Kant’s injunction to consider men as ends rather than means. Carried to its logical extreme, calculating, instrumental, formal rationality led to the horrors of twentieth-century barbarism. De Sade was one of the way-stations along the route. His Histoire de Juliette was the model of functional rationality - no organ left idle, no orifice unplugged. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 797 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Truth is produced socially through power-sanctioned mechanisms of validation. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 590; States recruited outside experts to legitimize their power as objective truth.; Matter-of-factness itself has become an ideology of treating people as things. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 36 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Instrumental rationality carried to its extreme leads to totalitarian barbarism. #qualifies (0.88) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 797
• States recruited outside experts to legitimize their power as objective truth. #exemplifies (0.85)
• States continuously recraft mythologies to legitimize their power #exemplifies (0.85)
• Truth is produced socially through power-sanctioned mechanisms of validation. #expands (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 590
• Objectivist truth served as philosophy’s safeguard against the intoxication of power #contradicts (0.82) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2943
• Law and truth disguise the historical violence that produced them #complicates (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 73
• Each society has a regime of truth that determines what counts as true #expands (0.80)
• Matter-of-factness itself has become an ideology of treating people as things. #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 36
• Violently interrupting the institutional repetition of a worldview can destroy it #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1222