Excerpt from video above:
By reasonable, Marcuse is referring to technological rationality, a core component of the ideology of advanced industrial society, and one of Marcuse's core concepts.
Technological Rationality
By technology, Marcuse refers to a social process in which techniques, which is the term that he uses for what we typically mean by technology, are conceived, administered, and come to shape social life. For Marcuse, technology is not a neutral thing. It contains an ideological function that is inexorably tied to the prevailing mode of production that it exists in, being capitalism.
This is quite relevant when it comes to contemporary discourse surrounding AI. Enthusiasts of artificial intelligence nowadays talk about it as if it's a neutral thing. Who is programming the code of the AI? Well, humans, who operate according to a code of their own. And what structures that code? Ideology. So technology is always ideological.
Marcuse's theory of technology and technological rationality could be summed up in this lengthy passage from his lecture/ article titled "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology":
"As the laws and mechanisms of technological rationality spread over the whole society, they develop a set of truth values of their own which hold good for the functioning of the apparatus. And for that alone, propositions concerning competitive or collusive behavior, business methods, principles of effective organization and control, fair play, and the use of science and techniques are true or false in terms of this value system. That is to say, in terms of instrumentalities that dictate their own ends. These truth values are tested and perpetuated by experience and must guide the thoughts and actions of all who wish to survive. Rationality, here, calls for unconditional compliance and coordination. And consequentially, the truth values related to this rationality imply the subordination of thought to pre given external standards. We may call this set of truth values the technological truth."
Technological rationality is characterized by what Marcuse calls operational thinking, when, "words are solely associated with the functions that the system deems appropriate". A common example of this sort of thinking is when what are highly contestable ideas and terms, such as democracy and freedom, become reduced to one dimensional buzzwords that are synonymous with the corresponding set of approved operations that they serve in the existing system, with their meanings being rigidly confined and de historicized.
A perfect example of operational thinking can be seen in the implicitly ideological rationality of many academics in the American social sciences, when they try to empirically judge something within the status quo using criteria offered by that status quo. Perfect example are the democracy studies, such as those democracy indexes, which give a freedom score to various countries. Totally not ideological. When what are highly qualitative, contestable concepts become operational and quantifiable, they become ideological, even as they present themselves to be empirically objective or neutral.
Most importantly, for Marcuse, being a true Hegelian, the scientific reduction of inherently qualitative concepts cannot encompass their real meaning in their multidimensional contradictory totality, nor do they consider what they can become, their potentiality. For example, you'll often see what appear to be empirically objective studies on freedom and democracy, which assume that freedom and democracy mean, and must mean, the exact definitions that they're given in the current status quo. As if that's all they mean. There are many different kinds of democracy, and there are many different kinds of freedom, yet economic freedom is completely left out of the picture.
Technological rationality and operational thinking are part of the broader phenomenon that Marcuse calls one dimensional thought...
One-Dimensional Thought
...Which is the opposite of dialectical and multidimensional forms of thought. Dialectical thought acknowledges that social reality has more dimensions and layers than simply the immediacy of the factual state of affairs. Dialectical thinking recognizes that truth, concepts, things, and identities are all contradictory. And this mode of thinking seeks to know reality through its contradictions. By grappling with these contradictions. Not pretending that they don't exist.
Ideology is what obfuscates contradiction. Man's institutions are split, expressing contradictions that must be worked through. History is science. This is the essence of the dialectic.
This kind of dialectical thinking that Marcuse uses is obviously inspired by Hegel, and explaining Hegel would be a Herculean task. I encourage you to listen to my podcast on One Day Radio about it, where I interviewed Cadell Last from the channel Philosophy Portal, who is a philosopher who specializes in the work of Hegel, Lacan, and Zizek.
For Hegel, as for Marcuse, thinking dialectically is a crucial component in the evolution of human reason. One dimensional thought is the opposite of dialectical thinking, and sadly, it is how most people are wired to think. More broadly, all of this cultivated one dimensionality, a term which Marcuse broadly uses to refer to the practice of conforming to pre-established structures, norms, language, and behavioral expectations, and the closing of multi dimensional discourse. Which manifests on the political level through the exclusion of alternative possibilities that go beyond the established state of affairs.
For Marcuse, the continued normalization of one dimensional thought cultivates one dimensional individuals, making for a one dimensional society, which in turn reproduces one dimensional people with one dimensional thinking.
Today, people are in awe that AI has increasingly been able to automate human creativity. But I think this actually reveals less about the advancement of artificial intelligence and more about the regression of human intelligence. Or as Marcuse would say, the one dimensionalization of humans. While the techno skeptics of today are worried about the prospect of robots automating human labor, Marcuse was worried about the roboticization of humans. For Marcuse, the real technological singularity to be afraid of was not robots suppressing human intelligence, but the automation of human consciousness. See, Marcuse believed that advanced industrial societies like the United States were becoming totalitarian in an ontological sense as well as a political sense.
Advanced industrial society was becoming totalitarian at the level of thought itself. As people were becoming increasingly limited to even think radical alternatives, much less actualize them. So as you can see, Marcuse's concept of one dimensional thought sort of prefigured what more recent theorists like Mark Fisher have called capitalist realism, the pervasive mind prison that forecloses the imagination of any viable alternatives to capitalism.
Furthermore, according to Marcuse, the scope of human thought and what ideas can emerge in societal discourse are restricted by what he calls the language of total administration, which made conceptions of alternative societies beyond the existing ones seem inconceivable. In this section of One Dimensional Man, titled "The Language of Total Administration", Marcuse shows how the, "blocking of effective dissent already occurs at the level of language through the fixation of words and their meanings, before radical alternative political ideas can even manifest into an organized movement capable of confronting the establishment".
In some ways, Marcuse's conception of one dimensional thought is similar to Orwell's notion of Newspeak, being that kind of restricted language which limited people's ability to think critically and articulate subversive ideas. The idea of Newspeak was that by controlling language, you control thought, and by controlling thoughts, you control people. Except in the real world, language isn't exactly controlled from the top down, as most of the system's rulers are subject to it themselves. One dimensional thought was as ubiquitous as breathing air. The absolute wasteland that is the contemporary political landscape suggests that this is still the case. And it may be why so few political figures, even on the so called left, can think beyond the existing capitalist system and tend to limit their policies to only slightly ameliorating the existing system, or rolling back the wheel of history to revert back to older traditions. It's not just that politicians are backed by corporate donors and are cynically propagating ideology that they don't actually believe. but rather they are also subject to one dimensional thought themselves, which prevents them from even thinking beyond the narrow scope of political discourse.
Democratic Unfreedom, Repressive Tolerance
Marcuse uses the term democratic unfreedom to describe the double character of this new form of totalitarianism. It is democratic on paper, but in reality the people are only free to work or starve and choose beyond different consumer products. Formal freedoms and pluralism mask the one dimensional reality of politics and conceal the mute compulsions of the capitalist economy. Which are the primary forms of expression that go invisible in what we call civil society.
In an interview, Marcuse responded to Karl Popper and the widely accepted notion that America was an open society. In the USA, you can say and print practically anything you want. First, punishment won't be long in coming. Loss of job, no promotion, surveillance. If necessary, the police and the law court. Secondly, the pressure of the monopolized mass media and general integration are so effective that freedom of speech and propaganda can still be tolerated. Which speaks for the closure of the system, not for its openness.
Americans are exposed to a plurality of homogenous viewpoints on TV while being allowed niche spaces to channel their transgressive political urges, though only so long as they are relegated to the fringes of society and are limited to powerless pseudo radical political gatherings or the established political parties. What passed for political debate was confined to an extremely narrow universe of established discourses. Like competitions over which party can spend more on the military, or who is tougher on crime.
Looking at political discourse today, this is still largely true, especially in the United States, when the most viewed political debates are that between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, or between Ben Shapiro and Destiny. Like consumer products, the lack of meaningful differences between politicians are masked by the art of marketing. Inviting people to have an opinion on everything without having the ability to actually change anything fosters the illusion of pluralism and democratic choice.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or X, only reinforce this illusion in the modern day. Marcuse makes the point that, "If pluralism would strengthen the potential for the containment of qualitative change, then democracy would appear to be the most efficient system of domination".
Okay, now we gotta address the elephant in the room. Marcuse's essay called "Repressive Tolerance", which right wingers who don't read the essay often cite as evidence that Marcuse was an early supporter of cancel culture. Marcuse did call for the suppression of far right voices, but you have to understand the context he was in. He was a Jewish man who escaped Nazi Germany, and after becoming famous, Markuza would frequently receive death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. And in America, which is one of the few countries with a full freedom of speech, the KKK were allowed to do this as long as they don't actually act on their threats. And Marcuse was baffled that this was tolerated. At least that's his perspective.
For Marcuse, this new soft form of totalitarianism could only occur within a society that has achieved a certain level of technological advancement.
The Technological Society
This is why, according to Marcuse, it is not a coincidence that the most advanced technological industrial societies also happen to be the ones with the least radical opposition. Unlike the more clear cut class distinctions of the past, the booming consumer society since the post war era obfuscated class conflict. Marcuse says, "If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the black man owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the establishment are shared by the underlying population."
Marcuse saw that we are witnessing a collapse in the classical distinctions between bourgeois art and popular entertainment and high culture and mass culture, with everything becoming mass produced into cultural commodities to appeal to the lowest common denominator, as many consumers as possible. I mean, just think about it today. The working class, petite bourgeoisie, professional managerial class, and bourgeoisie are watching the Kardashians in reality TV. In today's world of so called fast fashion and Amazon Prime, people of different social classes can even indulge in similar fashion and consumer trends enabled by the cheap labor outsourced to the third world. Although real social mobility has diminished significantly since the 80s, His analysis of consumerism is still extremely relevant. Thanks to 21st century developments in mass entertainment, data analysis, addictive algorithms, mass surveillance, and technologies of war, advanced industrial society has, if anything, only become more totalitarian since Marcuse's time. Rakuza did not believe that the masses were merely brainwashed ideologically to act against their interests.
Desublimation and The Paradox of Sexual Liberation
Their conformity also had a material basis. Given the rising standard of living at the time and the complete absence of more favorable political alternatives on the political scene, at least in most of the Western world, especially the U.S., it was technically rational for people to obey the system. Pun intended. The new totalitarianism does not solely condition people ideologically. It also pacifies them by actually satisfying their needs.
Repressive desublimation is one of Marcuse's more contentious concepts, due to its Freudian element. While sublimation involves a process whereby a repressed and or unsatisfied need is channeled into another action, desublimation involves temporarily satisfying that need. Meaning that it does not need to be sublimated, at least temporarily. It truncates explosive potentials of desire by capturing their desire in consumer feedback loops, creating the individual of libidinal energies that could inspire them to explore themselves intellectually or engage in social protest.
But those of you who have seen my Controlled Opposition video will see the problem with this. Maybe go watch that video after you watch this one. There is a lot of confusion and misrepresentation of Marcuse's work that arises due to his use of the term repressive. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Marcuse did not put sexual repression at the center of domination. Nor did he think that sexual liberation was the key to emancipation. He was heavily critical of people such as Wilhelm Reich. Marcuse calls this desublimation repressive not because it repressed people's true desires, but rather because this desublimation works for rather than against the status quo, thereby having a repressive effect.
Marcuse acknowledged that people had every reason to want to escape their alienation, yet he was critical of hedonism and the notion that pleasure was the highest human good. Marcuse could already foresee how the acceptance of hedonism meshed all too well with the ideology of advanced industrial society and the consumer entertainment industry's placation of desires. Addiction to instant gratification reduces human life to a vegetative existence and hinders people's ability to sublimate desires in ways that enhance human potentialities and their most human faculties, such as reason, freedom, and creation. From Marcuse, the technological apparatuses of advanced industrial society, like the education system, the media, and the marketing industries, did not only repress individuals true nature, but constructed their very subjectivities. For instance, Marcuse notes how capitalism expands through the reproduction of its subjects and the cultivation of false needs, such as desires for useless commodities, gadgets, and lifestyle practices.
The advertising industry and its marriage with behavioral psychology allowed marketing to become very sophisticated at manipulating people's subconscious needs. Just watch the documentary titled Century of the Self, or the TV series Mad Men. Advertisements and marketing heuristics, some of which were ironically inspired by some of Freud's own theories, used by his nephew, Edward Bernays, cultivated subconscious associations in the minds of consumers between the consumer products and real human needs. Put another way, the process of repressive desublimation is achieved by taking advantage of human psychology in order to keep people in a habitual cycle of desiring new commodities followed by the feeling of lack upon indulgence, leading to more desire being directed towards similar things. These repetitive consumption habits mirror the robotic schedules of people's work lives. Check out my video on the culture industry and the theories of Theodora Adorno and Max Horkheimer applied to hip hop music and mass entertainment if you're interested in this subject.
Although workers have lost much of their job security since the neoliberal turn, Marcuse's thesis is anything but irrelevant. It's more relevant than ever considering the rise of video games, social media platforms, targeted ads, and advanced algorithms capable of anticipating and manipulating desires. This video was Marcuse did not consider the liberation of desire to be the precursor of emancipation. If liberation of desire was to ever be a thing, emancipation would have to occur first. Because advanced industrial society not only manipulated but produced the desires of individuals, it would be unlikely for people to discover what exactly their true needs really were until they achieved autonomy.
The final chapter of One Dimensional Man contains a passage that is quite existentially unsettling. The mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself, or rather the negative of himself and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABCs again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.
However, at the time that One Dimensional Man was written, the civil rights movement was very big. And after the assassination of Martin Luther King, you saw the rise Counter-Revolution and Revolt of groups like the Black Panthers. Marcuse thought that since African Americans were largely left out of the New Deal, he thought that they were less likely to comply with the system, but he also simultaneously predicted that maybe they could be co-opted by the system in the future. And in his book Counter Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse observed how the Black Power movement was violently crushed, and how the United States launched a premeditated counter revolution against the New Left and against socialist movements in the Third World, such as in Indonesia, And, of course, most famously, Vietnam.
In the early 1970s, Marcuse noted that the U. S. displayed neo fascist tendencies. However, he also stated that the U.S. was by no means a fascist regime, and that it already, "possesses economic and technological resources for a totalitarian organization immeasurably greater than Hitler's Germany ever had". If one reads Marcuse only to come out with the belief that there is a new fascist dystopia coming and that people need to rally behind the Democrats, one would be missing the whole point of his book, which is that the dystopia has already arrived.
The radical implication of Marcuse's theory, best outlined in One Dimensional Man, is that a real fascist regime is not necessary for countries like the United States. Marcuse says this more explicitly in a 1971 speech:
"We are far from a fascist form of government, but some of the possible preconditions are emerging. They are well known, and I will just give you a list. The courts used more and more as political tribunals. The reduction of education and welfare in the richest country in the world. Anti democratic legislation, such as preventative detention and the no knock laws. Economic sanctions if you are politically and otherwise suspect. You cannot say history repeats itself. The fact that we cannot point to any charismatic leader, the fact we cannot point to any SS or SA here, simply means they are not necessary in this country. If necessary, other organizations can perform the same job. Possibly even more efficiently. I do not have to tell you which ones I have in mind. Perhaps the reason that the United States has not resorted to fascism is because there is no need for it, as the existing system already represents a far more efficient form of hegemony. It is a regime that is more resilient and durable. With institutional structures that preclude popular change from within, and a diverse array of social controls that neutralize resistance from without. But as radical socialist and communist movements grow, this may potentially change".
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