When education declines, pseudo-scientific cults proliferate as paranoia

Evidence

Today the obscurantist systems do just what the satanic myth of official religion did for men in the Middle Ages: they provide an arbitrary meaning for the external world interpreted by the solitary paranoiac in a private manner, which is shared by no one and therefore appears totally mad. Hence the fatal conventicles and panaceas which claim to be scientific and at the same time are remote from thought: theosophy, numerology, natural healing, eurhythmics, vegetarianism, yoga, and innumerable other sects, competing and interchangeable, all with their own academies, hierarchies, and special jargons, the fetishized forms of science and religion. Once education held them to be apocryphal and unrespectable. But today, when education is dying out for economic reasons, there are innumerable new conditions for mass paranoia. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s 1940s catalogue of cults (numerology, yoga, natural healing) maps eerily onto today’s wellness and conspiracy industries - worth connecting to later critical theory of ‘post-truth’. — connects to: Half-education reduces thought to commodity facts, defeating self-examination against paranoia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157; Half-education becomes objective spirit enabling totalitarian delusion — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157; Pseudoscientific beliefs persist and re-emerge across media generations — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 601 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Adorno’s specific list of sects reflects 1940s Weimar/American contexts; which contemporary equivalents (astrology apps, biohacking, sovereign-citizen law) fit his exact definition of ‘fetishized forms of science and religion’?

Broader Connections

• Half-education reduces thought to commodity facts, defeating self-examination against paranoia #corroborates (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157
• Half-education becomes objective spirit enabling totalitarian delusion #corroborates (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157
• Technologically educated masses paradoxically exhibit readiness to accept despotism #qualifies (0.82)
• Cultural equilibria can lock in maladaptive paranoia and mutual suspicion #expands (0.80) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 447
• Group membership socializes paranoia by collectivizing shared delusion #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156
• Immediacy theory compounds academic deskilling caused by plutocratic destruction of education #expands (0.78) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 251
• Pseudoscientific beliefs persist and re-emerge across media generations #corroborates (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 601
• Teleological intuitions persist even in scientists and resist science education #qualifies (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 73