Biography
Herbert Marcuse rose to fame in the US during the tumultuous time period of the late 1960’s when civil rights were being contested and the counter-cultural movement was ascendant. A German philosophy professor by trade, he emigrated to the US in 1934 in order to the flee the Nazis in Germany. Originally born in Berlin in 1898, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. In the late 1920’s, after reading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, Marcuse returned to Freiburg University, a school where he at one time attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, to study under Heidegger.
Marcuse’s first book appeared in 1932 with the title Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity. Upon reading and reviewing Marcuse’s book, Theodore Adorno convinced Max Horkheimer of Marcuse’s potential as a critical theorist. Later, in 1933, Marcuse was recruited to work for the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). Unfortunately for Marcuse and other members of the Institute, this was right around the time that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
After offering his services to United States government during World War II, Marcuse eventually went to teach at different American universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis before finally settling down to teach at the University of California, San Diego.
His “philosophy” – both then and now – was considered radical. His books and essays called for social transformation. He argued that human potential and emancipation were being prevented by capitalism and that even as liberal capitalist societies told themselves they were free and democratic, they had, in reality, become authoritarian. Perhaps most important, the imperialistic tendencies of the U.S. had, in his view, evolved alongside the ever-expanding market economy. The “good war” and the “good life” were inextricably bound in the American psyche and it has remained that way ever since.
Intellectual Tradition
Marcuse’s intellectual forebears were not the dreamers and visionaries who populated the heritage of the American left and gave it moral authority (he was born, after all, into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Berlin). Marcuse’s mentors were the towering figures of philosophy – Hegel, Marx, and Freud.
Why Do We Read Marcuse?
Should we even care about Marcuse today? The 60’s and 70’s are long gone, so why does it matter that we read Marcuse? Why bore us with the outdated ideas of another dead European male?
To be sure, Marcuse’s stature and interest in his work have diminished even as scholarly interest in other Frankfurt School figures has intensified. Consider Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom dealt directly, explicitly, and frequently with cultural questions, and far less with political ones. Marcuse, more than others, is associated with the crisis of Marxism. The “crisis” can be defined as Marxism’s historical entanglement with the tyrannies of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as its failure to explain capitalism’s assumed imminent demise, given how we see that capitalism retains a capacity to generate mass acceptance, even allegiance, despite evidence to the contrary; it continues to generate crises and promulgates human suffering as it stands in the way of systematic change.
Marcuse was viewed as the philosopher of sexual liberation. He embodied the zeitgeist of the era in his argument that, despite material affluence, there were deep patterns of class, gender and racial inequality and exploitation. These were held in place via the repression of sexual desire, and of emotional and creative expression. Marcuse was once asked to do an interview for Playboy magazine, though he turned down the magazine for reasons that are consistent with his philosophy. Sexual desire is structured by social norms. Marcuse saw the magazine as tending to objectify and commodify it participants – its readers and the women featured within it (the “bunnies”). In Marcuse’s view, this undermined the possibility of fully connecting our sexuality to our humanity.
Marcuse remains relevant as a social theorist for many reasons. One is his strong critique of consumerism, which he argues represents a form of social control. He famously argued that consumerism and the expansion of market economies led to a new kind of social pattern in which our deep drive for freedom and humanistic development was traded off for material comfort in an affluent society. Further, it is as a result of this as well as efforts to repress sexual desire, emotional expression and creative potential we had learned to “find [our] soul” in our “automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment”. And I might add here that many Americans find consumer comfort in guns. This authoritarian pattern led people to become increasingly alienated, some might even say they are in “pain” – physically and psychically, as they feel disconnected from themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, co-workers, and fellow Americans.
Marcuse suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian, as “the masses” are continually dictated to by powerful individuals, whose social positions permit them to shape our general perceptions of freedom. As a result, we are presented with choices – “false choices” – that encourage us to “buy” our happiness.
Freedom to choose does not produce the state of “freedom” desired by the masses; rather, it induces a profound state of “unfreedom,” as consumers act irrationally, working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs. Within this destructive system, fostered by capitalism, they ignore the psychologically destructive effects of wasteful consumption, environmental damage and the damage to human health, as they strive to find a social connection through the acquisition of material goods.
Limitations
One limitation of Marcuse’s work should be obvious to students of history. Considering how One-Dimensional Man was written on the eve of what would become a wave of radical struggles and protests in the 1960’s – a movement that aimed to shake the foundations of the dominant system – it is apparent that Marcuse failed to foresee this rupture. Critics of Marcuse assert that he made this mistake because he gave insufficient attention to marginalized groups, both within America and worldwide; an oversight due to the fact that as a Marxist, his focus was on the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Alternatively, had he given more attention to issues of race and/or decolonization struggles, protest movements throughout the world (i.e. Africa), the theoretical contradictions of a theory based on systemic closure would have perhaps been clearer. Marcuse, it is fair to say, exaggerates to some extent the degree to which the system closure prevents imaginative escape and/or radical movements.
Another limitation is that like the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci before him, Marcuse risks being a Marxist who explains that others don’t become Marxists with the insulting answer that they’ve been indoctrinated and therefore cannot make their own decision to become Marxist. Nonetheless, he might not be entirely wrong, given how effectively he argues that modern technological society provides many pleasant benefits and entertainment diversions for those willing to forego the revolution and live lives of contentment within the status quo. Think about our present time period and how it appears that our contemporary media have lulled an entire nation into a mental torpor, where many are no longer capable of exercising critical consciousness. Students, in particular, are derided as “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces.”
Despite these shortcomings, if we value having a healthy democracy, we must read One-Dimensional Man. As Douglas Kellner notes, Marcuse “rarely discussed the theme of democracy or the democratization of society.” So why then insist on reading Marcuse if we value a healthy democracy? What Marcuse provides is not a ‘how to’ manual for establishing a flourishing democratic process; rather, he offers “comprehensive philosophical perspectives on domination and liberation [and] a powerful method and framework for analyzing contemporary society.” Marcuse, now as much as ever, is important because he offers a new way of looking at our contemporary world.
Technology and the Individual
Stanley Aronowitz offers a short summary of Herbert Marcuse’s thinking on this subject, where he explains Marcuse’s thesis is that “technological rationality has been transformed into a kind of domination.” Ironically, as Aronowitz points out, critique of such a system was to some degree foreclosed by the very successes of the repressive system; so much so, that critique presented itself as an absurdity to the general population.
In his essay “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse examines technology in a broad sense. He defines technology as more than just “the technical apparatus,” which he calls “technics.” For Marcuse, technology is “a social process” in which men are inseparably involved. The most significant implication of the technological process is the creation of dominative “technological rationality,” similar to but distinct from Horkheimer’s idea of subjective reason.
In this essay, Marcuse studies the impact of technology, which he traces to changes in the individual and his rationality. He constructs the rationality of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contrasts this “individualistic rationality” with the modern “technological rationality.” Individualism was based on autonomous self-interest, whereas technology makes self-interest completely heteronomous, achieved only by “adjustment and compliance.” Individualistic, rational self-interest was motivated towards finding “forms of life”; therefore, in the service of the realization of this interest, reason was critical of the world as it is (Marcuse 139-40). Technological rationality is instrumental; it is motivated towards efficiency, and technology makes any critical protest irrational. Marcuse uses Lewis Mumford’s phrase, “matter-of-factness” to describe an attitude of empirical rationality that in the age of technology becomes a dominating force over man. Through these social dominations of technology over the individual, man’s autonomy is erased—not by force, but rather by his identification with the apparatus, by a fetish of technique.
Marcuse is primarily concerned with the fate of the individual. One of the methods by which technology removes the dignity of the individual is by sublimating him into a crowd. Marcuse is critical of the crowd, which reduces the individual to a “standardized subject of brute self-preservation.” That is, he is an atomic and standardized force whose only expression is self-interest. The specialization of professions does not contradict this standardization, because a man merely becomes one of several replaceable tools in the toolbox. Thus, specialization is simultaneously a force for standardization as well as division.
Truth, which as individualistic truth was once whole, is split into technological and critical truth. Technological truth is that set of values that “hold good for the functioning of the apparatus—and for that alone.” It is a truth concerned only with the goals of technological rationality, namely efficiency. Critical truth is antagonistic to the apparatus; it is autonomous and objective. However, Marcuse points out, the two truths are not completely contradictory, as technological truth often transforms critical truths for its own purposes. Critical truths are adopted by their opposition and thereby made impotent. This adoption is symptomatic of the way critical forces have been “incorporated into the apparatus itself—without losing the title of opposition.” Marcuse cites the example of the labor movement, which has changed from a truly critical force into a “business organization with a vested interest of its own” in the system.
But technological rationality does affirm critical rationality in two cases. First, technology “implies a democratization of functions.” Democratization is subverted, however, by hierarchical private bureaucracies that enforce division. Second, technics’ potential triumph over scarcity could allow for a “free human realization,” in which man can realize his true self in the freedom from “the hard struggle for life, business, and power.” Marcuse closes with an image of this state, in which humans “are nothing but human” and allowed to live on their own terms. This autonomy of man is Marcuse’s Utopia, characterized not by “perennial happiness” but by the affirmation of man’s “natural individuality.” Technology, though it constricts individuality in the many ways Marcuse describes, is also necessary for its full realization.
One Dimensional Man
One Dimensional Man was written in 1962, but much of it reads as if it could have been written about the state of the world’s problems today: the flattening of discourse, the pervasive repression behind a veil of ‘consensus’, the lack of recognition for perspectives and alternatives beyond dominant frames of thinking, the closure of the dominant universe of meaning, the corrosion of established liberties and lines of escape, total mobilization against a permanent Enemy built into the system as a basis for conformity and effort.
The largest difference from the present situation is that, contrary to thirty years of neoliberalism and the latest wave of cuts, Marcuse was writing at a time when the welfare state was growing and ordinary people were becoming more affluent. This gives a different sense to the repressive aspects of the context. Marcuse gives an impression of people lulled into conformity, rather than bludgeoned or tricked.
The ‘one dimension’ of the title refers to the flattening of discourse, imagination, culture, and politics into the field of understanding, the perspective, of the dominant order. Marcuse contrasts the affluent consumer society of organized capitalism with a previous situation of ‘two-dimensional’ existence. The two dimensions exist on a number of levels, but for Marcuse express a single aspect: the coexistence of the present system with its negation.
Put another way, Marcuse’s analysis introduces us to two ideal types that characterize advanced industrial society: the one-dimensional type and the dialectical type. Each of these two types corresponds to two dimensions of the advanced industrial society: civilization and culture.
The tone of One-Dimensional Man is doubtless pessimistic. History, in Marcuse’s view, seemed to be moving on the side of the “omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives,” leaving us in a state of domination and perpetual “unfreedom.”
In a letter to the New York Review of Books, George H. Fromm and William Leiss et al. outlined the major themes of the book as follows:
1)The concept of “one-dimensional man” asserts that there are other dimensions of human existence in addition to the present one and that these have been eliminated. It maintains that the spheres of existence formerly considered as private (e.g. sexuality) have now become part of the entire system of social domination of man by man, and it suggests that totalitarianism can be imposed without terror.
(2)Technological rationality, which impoverishes all aspects of contemporary life, has developed the material bases of human freedom, though it continues to serve the interests of suppression.There is a logic of domination in technological progress under present conditions: not quantitative accumulation, but a qualitative “leap” is necessary to transform this apparatus of destruction into an apparatus of life.
(3)The analysis proceeds on the basis of “negative” or dialectical thinking, which sees existing things as “other than they are” and as denying the possibilities inherent in themselves. It demands “freedom from the oppressive and ideological power of given facts.”
(4) The book is generally pessimistic about the possibilities for overcoming the increasing domination and unfreedom of technological society; it concentrates on the power of the present establishment to contain and repulse all alternatives to the status quo.
The Two Dimensions
For Marcuse, human societies are made up of two dimensions that are in constant tension with each other. These two dimensions are civilization and culture. In our everyday language, we generally think of civilization and culture as synonymous. Marcuse asks us to consider them as two distinct concepts.
- Civilization is the current material structure of life in the society, the real existing society, the current political, economic, and social arrangements. It is the material state of affairs, the status quo.
- Culture is “the complex of distinctive beliefs, attainments, traditions, etc., constituting the ‘background’ of a society…[which] appears as the complex of moral, intellectual, [and] aesthetic goals (values)…a society considers the purpose of [its] organization.”
In the advanced industrial society, this tension between civilization and culture is systematically reduced. The tension is reduced by a type of colonization of the actual content of the culture. This difference between the two dimensions – the gap between them – is for Marcuse crucial to the possibility of social change. According to Marcuse, the gap separates the possible from the present, making it possible to imagine situations radically different from the current system. The elimination of the gap makes it impossible to think beyond the system’s frame, thus making it impossible to think of alternatives except as repeating current social relations. The two dimensions produce a gap or distance between what can be thought and what exists, a gap in which critical thought can flourish. They rely on an ‘unhappy consciousness’, discontented with the present and aware on some level of its problems.
Marcuse believes the gap has been closed by a process of almost totalitarian social integration through the coordination of social functions and the rise of consumerism and administrative thought. Marcuse portrays this process as happening in a number of ways. One of these is that consumer culture infiltrates lifeworlds and public opinion comes into the private sphere: the system’s perspective comes into the home through television, radio and consumed goods with particular messages; it comes into communities through the inescapable news headlines outside newsagents, the dominance of ‘public opinion’ and the interventions of state officials.
As Marcuse states, “the result is the familiar Orwellian language (‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace’, etc.), which is by no means that of terroristic totalitarianism only”. Not only could such a reduction of the conceptual content of cultural values effectively restrain their humanizing potential, but these same concepts now having their inner content rewired can help to further support the civilization (i.e. the status quo) or work regressively.
The reason this absorption of the two dimensions into the one dimension (i.e. civilization/established order) is different in the advanced industrial civilization is because of their technological capabilities. Marcuse states:
This liquidation of two-dimensional [reality] takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values’, but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.
By looking at Marcuse’s framework for understanding the two general ways of thinking, we can see how inhabitants of advanced industrial society become subject to social forces that lead people to acquire one way of thinking about the other, we will see how his ideas are revelatory in such a way that they generate crucial insights into problems we face today.
With the more technologically advanced societies, the reduction of culture to civilization risks becoming totalized. With technology aiding an unprecedented ability for mass communication “the advancing one-dimensional society” threatens to sweep away all remnants of the historically meaningful content of cultural values.
Marcuse’s framework, where he sets up two poles that represent different ways of thinking – one-dimensional and dialectical – has in our current time fallen out of favor, because it reduces conflict to a binary social dynamic. His types, nonetheless, can still be useful if we think of them as ends of a spectrum. As social beings, we do not engage either one-dimensional or dialectical thought as a pure ideal type, but instead may drift from one to the other way of thinking, depending on the social context.
Characteristics of the Different Ways of Thinking
What are the characteristics of these types of thinking? Again, it is important to remember that Marcuse is not referring to the actual content of the thought here (i.e. what you think). Rather, he is concerned with the manner in which you think (i.e. how you think, the way you think). Thus, even though Marcuse’s political stance is Marxism, you need not believe these tenets to be a dialectical thinker. Marcuse cites conservatives and liberals, including Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, as possessing dialectical ways of thinking. Dialectical thinking proceeds from the conflict and resolution of opposites, which comprise the person’s consciousness in these modes.
Dialectical thinking possesses historical consciousness, whereas one-dimensional thought lacks this habit of mind. Marcuse states that historical consciousness “discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the way of life.” The one-dimensional type, however, cannot get beyond the ‘given’. The current status quo of the civilization reflects the prevailing economic, political, and social ordering of things. Thus, we see that the one-dimensional type lives in the dimension of civilization and not of both civilization and culture. One-dimensional thought can’t get beyond the given facts of the established status quo (i.e. civilization).
True Needs & False Needs
Marcuse argues that “advanced industrial society” created “false needs,” which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. These are different from “true needs” that individuals need to maintain satisfaction.
Slaves With White Collars – The Philosophy of Fight Club
We can look at a film like Fight Club and read it as a Marxist/Marcusian critique of late capitalist society. The film’s narrator/protagonist starts out as a corporate functionary – someone not particularly important, who is working in the bureaucracy of techn0-rationality that Marcuse calls attention to in his work. The character defines himself through his consumer choices that reflect false needs. Subsequently, we meet his alter-ego, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who emerges on the scene to show by example how he might live a more authentic life and thereby escape a life of conformity and endless unsatisfying consumerism. Durden warns in the first clip – “the things you own end up owning you.” The second clip more succinctly expresses the same message; it calls attention to the dangers of advertising that create false needs.
While “Project Mayhem” in the movie aims to destroy conformity and mindless consumerism; the way it proposes to do so is not through a benign politics of rejection – it suggests a combination of anarchy, terrorism, and fascism as the preferred path of resistance.
Slaves Who Are Not People – Bladerunner
Although we do not often think of it this way, Harrison Ford’s character in the movie Bladerunner is a futuristic policeman who is essentially a “slave catcher.” In the words of writer Sarah Galiley:
“There are cops, and there are little people.
There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.
Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things.
In Blade Runner, an absurdly young Harrison Ford is a hard-boiled, world-weary kind of man named Deckard, and he is given a choice. He can be exactly as small as everyone is, or he can catch some escaped slaves for the police. He decides to catch the escaped slaves.
Except that ‘catch’ means ‘retire,’ and ‘retire’ means ‘murder.’
Deckard feels that he has no choice in this matter. He says it himself, and the person giving him the choice confirms that he is correct: no choice. But of course, there is always a choice. Certainly, the escaped slaves who he is chasing see that there is a choice. He can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder”
Ford’s character murders an escaped slave in one scene. Soon after a police vehicle is heard hovering overhead. and the police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.
The police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.
So the crowd moves on. The story moves on. And Deckard moves on.
He still has work to do. One down. The rest to go.
He murders other escaped slaves before the end of the film. He finds where they are hiding, and he murders them.
It is important, in the world of the film, to remember that the things he is murdering are not people. That it is their own fault for seeking free lives. That the cops are just doing their jobs.
It is important to remember to have empathy for the right things.
Gailey goes on to explain that there is one escaped slave who Deckard does not murder. She asks him if he thinks she could escape to the North, and he says no. Whether that is true or not, we as the audience do not get to find out, because she does not escape. She does not escape because he decides to keep her. He is asked to murder her, and instead, he decides to keep her for his own.”
By the end of the movie, you find that if “you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.
It’s a cop shooting a fleeing woman in the middle of the street, and a world where the city is subject to repeated klaxon call: move on, move on, move on.”
The Welfare State & The Warfare State
The form of political integration that takes place in advanced capitalist societies, according to Marcuse, is the Welfare-Warfare state. The Welfare-Warfare state, he says, creates in administered life for the individual, which makes it pointless for them to insist on self-determination. Freedom (as well as revolution) become superfluous.
Bear in mind now that Marcuse is questioning the Marxist doctrine that historical crisis/the crisis of capitalism is inevitable. He uses this particular construct to explain why individuals in mass capitalist societies have no interest in overthrowing those societies. Sadly, he implies that many people are no longer able to think for themselves. This is because man in mass society has no inner life. He is distracted. He thinks that he is happy. Or he may simply have become ambivalent. Either way, this type of person is a product of what Marx originally referred to as false consciousness. Individuals who suffer from false consciousness find it subsequently difficult to develop a revolutionary consciousness. No longer slaves bound by literal chains; the mind makes its own chains. People find ways to become content in their misery.
How Do We Achieve Freedom and Emancipation From Domination?
Marcuse was less committed to the status quo and far more willing to foresee that the eclipse of the liberal state might be positive – a way to discover and explore the instinctual life of freedom. Power to the people would enable them to snap open the notorious “mind-forg’d manacles” that had so horrified William Blake. Once the domination of technocracy was overcome, Marcuse believed, the people would be free to discover their authentic needs. What the people really wanted could not be reduced to the balloting in the Electoral College, or to other civic institutions that presumably recorded and validated public opinion. Yet there is something rather unsavory about Marcuse telling his readers (and their fellow citizens) that they are trapped in the coils of ersatz satisfactions and values, a condition that the author is smart enough to realize.
Systemic integration and/or social control is now based on satisfying rather than frustrating needs, the trick being that the social system satisfies needs that it itself creates. Marcuse could also have mentioned the ways in which work, family and consumption tend to eat up all the available hours in the day, so people no longer have time for introspection, creative pursuits, diversification of lifeways, or ‘functionless’ socializing – so that, as Hakim Bey puts it, simply finding the time for a group to be together without a basis in work, consumption or family is already a difficult task, and an act of resistance.
More theoretically, Marcuse also argues that prevailing needs can never provide a supreme basis for legitimacy, since the critique of a system also critiques its socially-produced needs. This system has various ways of managing dissent so as to maintain authoritarian closure. ‘Repressive tolerance’, for instance, is a practice whereby dissident perspectives are permitted only by being reduced to ‘opinions’ held as if as private property by individuals, ‘opinions’ the person is entitled to, but which have no pull on others, which nobody is obliged to take seriously as claims to truth, and which the dissident is not entitled to act on.
In 1964, Marcuse looked for the agents of change among those without stakes in an “advanced industrial society.” Three decades after the German proletariat had failed to stop Nazism, Marcuse’s revolutionary faith was limited. It was invested in “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted,” and even in “the unemployed and the unemployable.” To this list, he might add oppositionists who were marked neither by homogeneity nor unity: the middle-class white youth who formed the New Left in Europe as well as the United States; the black underclass in the ghettoes; the National Liberation Front in Vietnam; and the Cuban revolutionaries. Marcuse praised them all for subscribing to what he called “the Great Refusal.”
Scarcely a decade after the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had topped the non-fiction best-seller list with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), Marcuse invoked the virtues of negative thinking, as a counterweight to “the most efficient system of domination,” which was how he described democracy.
Most devastating for his reputation as a social prognosticator was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from. Two years after Marcuse’s death, Ronald Reagan would take his first oath of office. But just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee, of the New Right in Europe. He had certainly grasped the significance of the failure of the working class to follow the Marxist script. But he may not have anticipated how effectively politicians like Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Jörg Haider of Austria’s Freedom Party would appeal to voters in that class.
Sources
Excerpts from this post appear in Stephen Whitfield’s article Dissent Magazine. Find the article here. March 2016.
“This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017,” by Sarah Gailey
Additionally, content is provided by Michael Hartley’s article, “Marcuse on The Two Dimensions of Advanced Industrial Society and The Significance of His Thought Today.” Last accessed March 2016.
“In Theory – Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man?” by Andrew Robinson. Last accessed March 2016.
Discussion Questions
Reflect on our present moment in time and as you think about politics and culture – what analogies can you make using Marcuse’s work to shed light on current events?
How might we see a vision of Marcuse’s man of mass society summoned by the former President Bush, when he exhorted everyone in th U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to go shopping?
How might you use Marcuse’s work to make sense of the presidential election? What about the rise of social media and computing technology?
How do you find the politics of conformity exert the most pressure on you?
How might we compare Marcuse’s argument to the arguments advanced by Communication Theorists like Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman?
While reading this article, Marcuse talks about how people now ideas do not have the ability to think for themselves and that they just conform to whatever the general population is doing. We see this type of mentality a lot nowadays, especially within politics. I feel as if people nowadays don’t do any research or fact check anything that they are told. They see something on the news that lines to their political party and they just believe what they are told. This applies to both parties. As much as this way of thinking is prominent in politics, it almost applies to virtually anything now. We see this in social media a lot. People look up at all the influencers and they almost worship them as if they were gods and they try to imitate them as much as possible whether it be the things they do or how they dress and act. They would rather try to imitate someone who is doing or wearing the latest trend rather than be themselves and be creative.
When reading about Marcuse and his ideas, he mentions and believes that people are conformers, and can not think for themselves. This could easily relate to the most recent 2020 election. When people are taking political sides, they tend to just pick a side that they are told to pick, and that leads them to just conform to that one side of the political spectrum, and they form their opinions based off of what they are told to choose from. This doesn’t just stop at politics, it goes for everything in life. When people have their close groups of people, they tend to conform to the ideas and things that they do. Many people now a days do not form their own thoughts and ideas, just out of fear of being different. Most people do not like to have their own thoughts, and making them an outlier in the world, because that could cause judgment from others and people like to just conform and stick to being “normal”, and not having any outside thoughts and opinions.
Overall Marcuse breaks down that people in today’s day and age cannot think for themselves or be themselves in general. In regard to the most recent election his thoughts and ideas reflected greatly on the fact that people are creating their own demise. It shows which in most states or counties the vote was majority the same side it really never got close. This explains that even though all these people wanted change or a difference it really didn’t change. In my own life I have been pressured into doing things that I have regret in my life. Personally I like to do things on a schedule which at time through high school I felt most comfortable because there was a routine every day. Therefore whenever I went to college I had to be just as developed into my schedule so I don’t fall behind.
Herbert Marcuse seems like an interesting man. Growing up Jewish, in Berlin Germany, during the rise of Hilter, must have had a massive impact in his life and the way he saw the world. His theories on capitalism and how we see ourselves in America as free and democratic are very relevant in today’s crazy political world. Marcuse’s idea that capitalist societies, in reality, are authoritarian in nature and subject to social controls caused by our own consumerism, really hits home in our current climate. It is almost like our American dream drives us to want more material comforts and is the engine of our country and not a destination were we can have true freedom and meaningful human development. His ideas make me think of the many people in America that decide to live off the grid, and on a homestead across the county. These types of Americans, what real freedom, independence, and less government involvement in their lives. They want to be less wasteful, live in and be one with the environment, and stop the rat race of chasing material goods. Marcuse’s suggestion that our system is actually authoritarian, and our masses are controlled by powerful individuals who shape our general perceptions of freedom, seems pretty spot on. If you turn on any twenty four hour news station today, you will see the most powerful man in the United States say that our election system is rigged. He will say things like, every knows this is true, and continue to say misleading claims of fraud that undermine the validity of the vote and weaken our country. Just because a powerful man says something is true, does not make it a fact without real proof, but sadly many Americans blindly still believe because of his authority. Maybe these current times will spark a new class of critical theorists like the reign of Nazis did in Germany, many years ago.
Talking about todays culture and politics can be a bit interesting. Todays presidential candidates are complete opposites and you can kind of make sense of this election by interpreting Marcuses work. In todays politics people are on extreme or the other. One could say that trump supporters are “one dimensional”. As for our current culture, people are absorbed in technology. Teenagers especially, I have a little brother and he’s always “glued” to his phone. Like legit is on it the majority of the day, I never not see him on his phone, even at the dinner table. Technology plays a huge part in politics. A lot of people get their information from social media even though its not the most reliable source. Politicians are able to influence the way people think along with the media through technology. There is a lot of biased information regarding politics displayed on the internet with can sway the way people think. Social media is used for far more than politics. Its had effects on people in many different ways. Its used to show what is “trendy”, all in all, social media influences the way people think about a lot of things. Which can be dangerous honestly. I know there have been studies that show how negatively social media affects teens. Everyone always wants to post their “best” life so that’s all we ever see. People try to live up to the impossible standards of social media which can be dangerous to our mental health. The use of technology and social media only affirms Marcuses theory about society being one dimensional.
Marcuse’s work can be related to the presidential election whenever he explains one of his most famous works; the two dimensions. Marcuse believed that human societies were made up of two dimensions. These dimensions are in constant tension with each other debating on civilization and culture. In our presidential elections, citizens of America have to vote for a side; Republican or Democrat. In our life’s, the tension between these two beliefs can be linked to these concepts that Marcuse describes. Marcuse refers to civilization as the current material structure of life in our society, political, economic and social arrangements. While culture refers to distinctive beliefs, traditions, morals and aesthetic goals of our society. When selecting a new president, there is a gap between the two for possible change. Marcuse describes this gap between the possible from the present. To imagine different situations radically different from our current system.
Technology and the rise of social media has made it possible to communicate or find/see any information. Our advanced technology has become useful, especially for things such as a presidential election. Millions of posts, ads, pictures or videos are posted daily. These posts can influence your thinking or help you better understand a topic. However Marcuse states that he is concerned with the fate of the individual. In ‘One Dimension Man’, Marcuse explains how our technology can be used as a tool for totalitarian today. This can be a way of control as to what people follow/do and how their fate with follow.
Marcuse implies that people are no longer able to think for themselves. He believes that peoples minds are creating their own “chains”. In regard to the recent election, this idea is very relevant. A lot of the same counties and cities were shown to have voted for the same political party. This means that even though tons of people were calling for change, people resisted it. In regard to myself, conformity has rarely put pressure upon me to do something. I am very comfortable doing things the way I like to do them. However, this is not to say conformity has never affected me. In high school I was worried about passing my driver’s test because I did not want to be the only kid who was not driving to school. Furthermore, my generation is particular has created this image of Android phones. Those without iPhone are seen as lesser on social media. So, to conform I purchased an iPhone, even though tech companies rate Android phones higher.
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man can be used to help explain the most current presidential election. He developed two ways of thinking; the first was dimensional and the second was dialectical. Both of these types can correspond to the two dimensions of the advanced industrial society. The two dimensions are civilization and culture. According to Marcuse, civilization is the current material structure of life in the society, the real existing society, the current political, economic, and social arrangements. Culture is “the complex of distinctive beliefs, attainments, and traditions, constituting the ‘background’ of a society which appears as the complex of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic goals.” Within today’s society, technology can be used to reach out too many different people. Technology does come in handy with situations like presidential elections. Technology can be used to sway the way people think or feel about situations. Marcuse’s main concern regarding society is the fate of individuals. He stated that technology can remove the dignity of some individuals which then causes that individual to become part of the crowd. Social media also plays a role in this. Social media often causes people to compare themselves to others (mainly women). Social media gives women the idea that they must look a certain way and that men are only attracted to skinny girls who wear a ton of makeup. You can see this within women in today’s generations, they care so much about what other people think of them rather than being happy with who they are and how they look.
Marcuse’s work can be used to make sense of the presidential election. If you look at his framework for understanding the two general ways of thinking, one-dimensional and dialectical, you can see how the people of advanced industrial society can become subject to social forces that can lead them to think one way or the other. Today, technology can be used to reach mass amounts of people. This technology has a great impact on the presidential election. If you turn on your TV or go on Facebook all you see are ads for the runners in the presidential election. These ads can be used to sway the way people think. Even though they may really want to vote for Biden, Trump’s ads may convince them to do otherwise. The internet can be looked at as a social force that influences the way people think. This can influence the way they think about everything, not just the presidential election. Marcuse is concerned mostly with the fate of the individual. He says that technology removes the dignity of the individual by sublimating the individual into a crowd. This idea can be related to the rise of social media and technology. Social media is more popular than ever. In fact, there is a documentary called, “The Social Dilemma” that goes into great detail on how social media is ruining our society. A person using social media becomes part of a crowd because they see everything that other people posting on social media. This then causes an individual to compare themselves to everyone else on social media and gives them unrealistic expectations on how they should look, dress, live, and what they should do with their life. This can cause an individual to become depressed and not communicate with others in real life because they are so involved in social media instead of real life.
These are excellent observations! There are also interesting links to crime. “Loners” with criminal as well as racist/sexist desires to bully/harm others are finding community on the Internet; their new-found community makes them feel good, because they are connected to something bigger than themselves. They seek and are able to achieve validation and approval from group members, who share their ideas, which in turn help to mobilize that person and give them the courage to commit hate crimes.
In Marcuse’s the concept of social control that involved the internalization of behavioral norms and values that one is born with or adapts from the interaction with a group people.
Marcuse’s one dimensional man provides a digital diagnosis of the present age, especially the contemporary western societies, communist, and capitalist. His theory reflects the stifling conformity of this era and provides a powerful critique to the new modes of social control and domination. The theory also expresses that there is hope that human freedom and happiness could still be developed beyond the one-dimensional thought and behavior even in the existing scenario depicted in the established society. For Marcuse, he developed a critical and philosophical perspective from which he can criticize some of the forms of thoughts, behavior and social organization.
Marcuse focused on existing forms of oppression and domination which have been the major hindrance of a free and happier mode of human existence. He demonstrated that humans lead a very busy lifestyles and do have time for the most important things that matter most hence end up full of frustrations. His critical social theory has become increasingly relevant because of increasing forces of domination that continues today and showing even stronger and more prevalent in the coming years. The forces and the urge to be great and be recognized are some of the factors Marcuse regarded as the cause of human depression.
People are almost unconsciously affected by not only the real, but also the imagined pressure of others, to such an extent that we act as individuals, yet are simply imitating each other without thought. Marcuse illuminates this idea mainly with his theory of the Welfare- Warfare state. This state of political assimilation exerts immense control over us as individuals of the American Society in particular, whether we realize it or not. The simple fact that we work full time jobs and attend college speaks to this sort of political conformity, as it seems as though we are working towards some greater individual determination or success when in actuality we are obliviously living the lives that are administered for us. From a young age we are asked what we want to be when we grow up, or what college we want to attend and things to that extent which speaks volumes into the way that our society fixates on this idea of success as an individual accomplishment when in actuality it’s a mere imitation of life. Marcuse talks about the unwillingness or the lack of interest for man to overthrow such a capitalist society, to the extent that we are distracted, almost tricked even, into believing that hard work and success is a means to happiness. Another way that the politics of conformity exerts dominating pressure on society is through the idea of deviance. In hopes of not betraying social norms and being considered as deviant we are incoherently obedient to almost any form of power as long as that authority figure is seen as successful (i.e the way we are infatuated with celebrities). Ultimately, Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man” speaks to the idea that we seemingly conform in hopes of maintain some sort of individuality or independence as a mean to success, but in the end our identical drive towards independence inevitable conforms us into “one dimensional” beings.
Marcuse stated, “This liquidation of two-dimensional takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values’, but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.
The two dimensions are civilization and culture. By liquidizing people into being a one-dimensional man, losing the “culture” and focusing on the cvilization that has now placed huge emphasis on technology, the one dimension is now eliminating “cultural values”. In trying to understand how an American citizen can possibly side with a presidential candidate like Donad Trump, I believe the whole “Make America Great Again” slogan plays on the lost dimension. Trump sides with holding on to the dark segregated past of the United States. But he continues to hold onto the technological advantages of social media for his platform. He longs for the days for racial segregation and banning minorities. But what is the real reason? Is he longing to hold on to racist cultural values because it would supposedly mean a more prosperous civilization? Or is it that Donald Trump is creating a fault, creating a revolutionary cause in order to create a battle to overcome? Since “people recognize themselves in their commodities”, is Trump against the fact that we as a nation cannot say that we are a part of the commodity? That we physically do not make all our products. The ultimate struggle of not seeing America in a product and having an unemployment issue? Is he fighting against the fact that we don’t dominate the technology/commodity world?
Marcuse’s view, that people are not critical independent thinkers. Marcuse wants people to practice critical theory which gives us the tools to create our own thought processes, and to think beyond what is presented to us. People are in this constant state of social repression in an advanced industrial society which creates false needs within the realm of contemporaneous capitalism and consumerism. The need for false thought is overpowering individuals to consume unwanted ideas, goods and services, mass media, real estate, cars, advertising, and clothing.
Critical thinking is no longer active and individuals are being led in a specific direction by the government or large corporations in doing what they desire of people with veils over their think process. Marcuse wishes for people to develop critical individualistic think skills….so that individuals doesn’t just go along with a set system of manipulation; more so that people develop thought process to critically oppose the misleading system that is constructed to suppress humans for corporations selfish gain for more profits.
Marcuse viewed consumerism as a form of control, and that individuals think they are in a democratic society; but it is more geared towards an authoritative style over dominions. People does not have “freedom” as they think, instead individuals choices, thought processes are being directed to purchase, and consume things they don’t need to make them happy. As consumers, people buy more than they truly need, and individuals become irrational in their purchase choices. People work longer hours to fulfill these desires, and that leads to waste on the individual part in that they are programmed to get the newer version or the latest updated commodities; because they are so one track minded in their focus span.
Herbert Marcuse critiques capitalism and consumerism. He believes that consumerism is a form of social control. With consumerism comes technology therefore; Herbert believes that technology takes away peoples freedom. Thus his work, one-dimensional man is quite pessimistic. Parts of Herbert’s argument are compelling while the others seem to be too extreme and not practical. It is true that there is something inherently wrong with establishing a “normal” and making people conform to that normality. This is done through advertisement. It is common to see a very attractive man or woman on billboards that then causes people to think they should look the same. Those who own capitalism benefit from this because people strive to look like the people on advertisements and this increases their profit. Herbert is right when he says this is a form of social control however, the second part of Herbert’s argument is less convincing and alludes to the problems of technology people currently face today.
Although Herbert does not specifically say that technology is taking away everyone’s freedom, he does say that private life has become part public because of technology. He says that this occurs when people associate themselves with material products. Herbert is right about this too, however he is referencing issues that were relevant to his time period. If his theory is expanded to the modern day problems of technology and privacy, his theory no longer hold subsidence. In modern society, technology holds a vital role and outright opposition to technology is not the answer. Many people believe that the time period of no technology was better because it was more private and the government was seen to be outside of that realm. Now, with technology, people are seeing the government interfering in their private life and it is scary, to them. This argument is parallel to the popular political slogan “let’s make American great again”. This is because people refer to a previous time period that had privacy from the government as the better part of society. However, they fail to regard all the benefits that come from technology. The issue of technology and privacy will always be a give and take. It is impossible to have more privacy and further technological advancement. Yes, there is less privacy, but the benefits from technology, especially medical technology is a worthwhile tradeoff. The area of law enforcement and privacy has also had much controversy. Should there be limits to how that technology is used? Of course. But to say that technology is bad because the past has no privacy with disregard for its benefits, seems to be more about discontent and fear of the government.
As long as “we” (the system) continue to “encourage” the people’s needs for material possessions and make them believe that those possessions are a pre-requisite for happiness, then we will continue to have dominion and control over everything in civilization.
The events that followed 9/11 and the The former president Bush’s move to play on the emotional vulnerability of the people and their desire to help an ailing city, state, and nation was brilliant (for fans of the system’s control). He moved a massive amount of people to spend money they didn’t have with a single speech. People saw consumerism as a virtue or a form of charity to make amends for the great loss of life and economy during the 9/11 attacks. The system needs money to recover and go to war so they moved the masses to help fund that endeavor. It’s a sad thought but unfortunately, one that seems very true. With regards to our current presidential election, I am at a loss for words with the clown show that has been going on. Marcuse spoke of the system eliminating culture in order to strengthen the idea of civilization by putting culture right out into the open. With the advent of Facebook, twitter, instagram, tumblr, youtube, etc we have a rise in mediocrity and desensitization of our society. People are entertained by foolishness, debauchery, sex, immorality, and get off on the humiliation of others. Things that in times past were considered completely inappropriate to share in public spaces are now being welcomed and encouraged. A position that was held in such a high regard and shown the utmost respect like the presidency which was won in a battle of prestige, intelligence, and a substantial political resume is now a nickelodeon gladiator match between the best of two clowns. This is due in part because of the dumbing of the masses and the over saturation of social media. It’s too easy to gain access into the intimate thoughts and lives of anyone through social media. Something that in the past was a coveted exclusive privilege, is now a right of passage for some.
Culture according to Marcuse is “the complex distinctive beliefs, attainments, traditions, etc, constituting the ‘background’… [which] appears as the complex of moral, intellectual, [and] aesthetic goals (values)…a society considers the purpose of [its] organization…” Today in our culture, we have focused more on the aesthetic goals than the moral and intellectual ones. In our society we tend to create “false needs” like the need for newer cars, a newer version of cell phone or even something as simple as needing to have the latest name brand clothing and footwear. Marcuse discusses how we need to create “true needs” that help the individual maintain satisfaction and individual fulfillment. Technology in the eyes of Marcuse is a blessing and a curse. With technology, it motivates innovation but then pulls mankind away from being individualistic and more warped into the crowd. For example, with the help of social media and technology, one can be aware of what is going on in society and in our politics but can also be a way to distract the people from what is really going on and vice versa. The consumer culture that Marcuse portrays in the “one dimensional man”, discusses how technology can be used as a tool for totalitarian society. It can be viewed as a form of control and a way to have everyone in order and under surveillance.
One Dimensional man is a reading that I feel will remain relevant in modern society as long as there are forms of systematic oppression. Marcuse in explaining his dual dimensions that exist simultaneously are similar if not related to the ideal of a plural society. The plural society is based on the dual existence of the oppressor and the oppressed living two distinctly separate lives with their own cultures while this existence each one is dependent on the other. The culture of civil repression is present in Amercia in various social structures. Recent events prove this such as SCOTUS recent decision to further imposed the police state. Now anyone with any form of outstanding warrant is susceptible to search and can be further incriminated after such search. This promotes the idea of inherently wrong individuals and use of material possessions to subjugate others.
Marcuse’s work fervently describes the necessity of the common man to fulfill his needs. Within his work he describes these needs as being one of two options; either a person follows the predetermined needs he has been given by a consumer society or he follows his authentic needs. Within the societal needs administered to him, man follows these desires. According to Marcuse, within a capitalistic society, the so called needs are distributed by the controller of monetary movement. So when society tells a man he must be secure and protect his family he strives to do so. When a television ad tells a woman she must be a size 0 she strives for this goal. Unfortunately, capitalism thrives off of a need for people to need things. When the need for profit is not sated well enough the next best option is to force people towards the idea that they do not have enough, in other words create a false need.
When Donald Trump began gaining momentum in his sector of the presidential race, most people were in disbelief. Attributing Trump’s success to a small and invisible population somewhere that isn’t here seemed to be the status quo write off. However, throughout all the ludicrous claims and outrageous reports, Trump has maintained his support throughout the race, even gaining a large margin of followers since the presidential race beginnings. Trump’s success has been carefully plotted, as with any politician. Not only Trump, but politicians in general have mastered the art of tugging on heart strings. The business of a politician is to be charismatic and that means pushing an agenda via tactics, despite ethics. Trump and Clinton both have business in catering to the needs of the public whether they be real or fabricated. Both candidates promote the American norm of paying into the guarantee of physical and financial security, and the promise of future security for the family. This is no coincidence. Registering what the needs of the people are is key to attaining political power and this journey is made all the more efficient by setting predetermined standards.
What both candidates are doing is practical, for they must combat one another in efforts to rule the future of this country. However, the needs they pull on may or may not be valid. For example, Trump proposes to put an end to illegal immigration. In fact, this is an integral factor in his candidacy. Many people agree with him that immigration is a leading component to the increasing decay of this nation. Yet, are people actually reading into the facts? How exactly is immigration effecting this country? When it comes down to it, most people do not actually know the extent to which illegal immigration effects the U.S. Yet through a false need, a large portion of America believes their problems will be solved via removal of seemingly foreign people. Many people believe that foreigners pose a major threat, quite specifically Muslims. Yet, for every act of terror committed there are numbers of citizens from the Muslim community disavowing the actions of the select few violent terrorists. Yet the media feeds an undying machine meant to separate and twist stories so that people are afraid of one another. Fear gives way to vulnerability and vulnerable people are willing to sacrifice their rights for safety. Trump and Clinton both know this and use it in their campaigns. Use the preset fears and desires of the people, be they legitimate or otherwise, and gain power from them.
People are supposed to critique and self-determine for power, freedom and individuality.
People in modern society, however, lost the ability to do that under the management system because they assimilated to the existing reality. These people are called “One-Dimensional Man.”
There are three major reasons for the emergence of the “One-Dimensional Man.” The first reason is faith in science and technology due to the efficiency it has afforded, caused by industrialism. The second reason is popular culture, which is promoted in advertisements. The third reason is the ideology of consumption supremacy, which is promoted through media.
For example, because of the development of the personal computer, people were supposed to enjoy their leisure time, by being released from simple labor to increase the efficiency of tasks.
Although personal computers made for infinite possibilities and made people’s lives more efficient by enabling such tasks as document creation, using the Internet, means of communication, online shopping, online learning, listening to music, watching movies, image editing, and the storage of data, it created a busier culture.
Because tasks can be completed more quickly, the amount of tasks people are responsible for has increased. Instead of having more leisure time to enjoy life, people have come to work more. People pursue the newest items that offer more convenience regardless of whether they need it or not. Marcuse pointed out that people have lost the ability to think critically about what will fulfill their life and what they need to be happy.
Marcuse believes that consumerism is used as a form of social control. That people are dictated by powerful individuals and are encouraged to buy things in order to achieve their own happiness. For example, every time a new Iphone is released consumers believe they must go out and purchase this immediately. People are conditioned to thinking they must have the newest computer, car, clothes, etc. Our society is the culprit that has lead us to believe we must work more in order to buy more which in turn will give us more satisfaction in life.
George Bush encouraged people to “go shopping more” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This comment portrays Marcuse’s belief that the distance between culture and present reality has been reduced. Important events are being portrayed as irrelevant to people’s lives. We are being told to help America achieve a different goal and to focus on other things such as shopping in order to be happy. Instructions to not worry about significantly important events that are happening in society can be related to that of an authoritarian system where powerful individuals dictate the people.
This presidential election would be the first I and many people my age will finally be able to vote in, with one of our options being Donald Trump. Keeping that in mind, I find it very important to learn what policies the candidates want to implement and what the next four years might actually look like being that the Republican candidate and the democratic candidates have distinct ideas in mind. Marcuse’s theory of society being one dimensional rings true when trying to talk to people in my age group about who they are favoring to vote for. When asking why they would vote for either Bernie, Donald, or Hillary you will hear one of three answers: “because he’s making college education free and has great plans for our health care system”; “because he is not afraid to speak his mind and that’s what you really want in a president” “because she will be the first woman president and she’s had experience being in the White House”. Time and time again I get one of those answers and I’m pretty sure without mentioning names you can tell which candidate is which by the responses. We take one thing said and circulate this through society and everyone is saying the same thing. We no longer do research on our own to figure out what the candidates really stand for or what sort of things they were involved with before the selling themselves for the election. We don’t take the time to question how exactly this free education will work or how any of their policies will work. We allowed the media to spoon feed us this information and we swallow it up without even chewing. Social media is also an area in which people follow what is put out there. Every week there’s a new trend out or a new challenge that people record themselves doing. There is very little dispute on social matter because we all agree and conform to what one person says and because they received a lot of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on their post it must be true right? Like Marcuse says “totalitarianism can be imposed without terror” because it is easier for society to walk around held up by puppet strings than stray from the path already paved.
How do you find the politics of conformity exert the most pressure on you?
The politics of conformity exert pressure on me in both social and political standpoints. There is a certain type of peer pressure that comes from societies that subliminally without directly saying t tries to put us in a box and have us think, dress and act a certain way. The functionality of conformity allows us to form groups and communities of people who are similar to us and behave the way we do. In my case, me not being able to fit into certain groups and share the same beliefs as them has led me to isolation in the past.
Marcuse’s work is a critique of modern society. Although he was writing this in the 1960’s, his work can be used to analyze our society today. Marcuse suggests that society is becoming one dimensional and there is an emptying in meaning occurring that results in mass conformity and loss of culture and imagination. This is a result of the advancement of technology and the rise of consumerism in capitalistic societies. Marcuse argues, that this rising system of production and technology created false needs through advertising and mass media.
Today, research demonstrates that the average person sees about 5,000 ads per day. We are constantly bombarded with advertisement billboards, advertisement on the radio, commercials on television. Not only are we being exposed to thousands of advertisements in our physical world, we are constantly targeted online. Companies use your search trends to tailor advertisements to you but you also get advertising from individuals you follow or interact with online. People become sponsors to promote products on their social media, and they do so in a way that makes you think it isn’t advertising.
We are constantly bombarded with advertising and commercials and we have come to a point where people are branding themselves online. They constantly share material possessions that makes you feel inferior because maybe you don’t have a 50,000 car. People realize themselves through their material possessions and their online identities. Marcuse would argue that this is the unfortunate outcome of technology and mass consumerism. These false needs perpetuate a culture of one dimensional thinking, and the only way to achieve something greater is to free ourselves from this domination technology, mass media, and consumerism.
How might you use Marcuse’s work to make sense of the presidential election? What about the rise of social media and computing technology?
Particularly during the campaigns for President with Hillary Clinton running as the democratic nominee, and Donald Trump as the somewhat not accepted Republican, these times are hard. There are many political messages being thrown out into the social world because of the presidential election. These messages have a way of reaching everyone through social media. Spheres that were private, like someone’s home, are now public. Political agendas like hatred for Muslims, run by many including President Trump, are now perpetuated through mass media. For instance, a recent example would be Mr. Mateen, the man that shot 50 people at the Gay club in Orlando. His private sphere, his home, was broadcasted on television so that people “can see that he lead a normal life like everyone else.” This is a problem because aside from emphasizing the fact that he was Muslim, through the mass media, there is no privacy anymore. It was interesting to see that although the FBI investigated him twice, the mere fact that he bought a gun with such heavy artillery, was not enough to be placed on a watch list but there was a need to publicly show his house, the most private sphere. In this case, we are able to see Marcuse’s idea of culture by analyzing what we value most in this country, and sometimes that is reflected in our protection of the second amendment right, and the continuing multi-billion dollar industry that is the NRA.
In his work, Marcuse discusses how technological culture diminishes critical thinking. He claims that technology perpetuates the idea that critical thinking is irrational. Marcuse says that technology removes individuality and individual thinking and subverts it. He argues that technology propels it uniform and homogenous thought. Marcuse emphasizes how technology overpowers individuals and therefore he becomes concerned with the fate of individuals. He is critical about the technological effects on the individual who is now becoming a standardized subject. Marcuse also posits that technology is used to maximize profits and to exploit people. The center of his claim is that technology is superstructure and thus dominates us. His argument is substantiated by the the increasing reliance on technology for almost all things nowadays.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon are themselves huge technological forces that without, much of our economy, communication, and information would be scarce. Marcuse argues that our reliance on these sites limits our ability to think critically. This kind of technology overpowers individuals. The constant use of cellphones, iPods, computers and surveillance are just some examples which characterize and dominate our lives. These technologies were created with the intent to make different aspects of human life easier but it has completely transformed our way of life to the point of subjegating us. Technology basically controls everything we do. All these technologies makes individuals vulnerable to manipulation which causes a big impact on individuals lives. Since everything is connected to technology it is hard to disconnect from technology. Individuals are constantly doing all their tasks on technology, so much so, that without it, individuals are incapable of doing these tasks themselves. Technology has the power to influence a specific systematized mode of thinking within individuals, and therefore, de-individualizing them.
In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse describes how individuals have lost their capability to think independently, critically and in opposition of the system. A major theme is how consumerism is a means of social control. Although written about 50 years ago, Marcuse’s theory pertains to many aspects of our current society.
Marcuse mentions in his book that technology has shaped society so that we are unable to live “out” or in opposition to it. Furthermore, technology has enable society to train us in desiring these “false needs” that are not necessarily imperative to our survival, but which can be seen as needed to survive within the system. For example, today, almost everyone is in possession of a cell phone. This is because a cell phone can connect you to family and friends. Technology has made communication with people more accessible and also in some cases mandatory. Everyone at least has one or two “needy” friends who demand constant or habitual contact of some kind to carry on the relationship. Furthermore, a cell phone enables jobs to contact you after an interview. Today, a cell phone can also function as a map, GPS, web browser, camera, credit card, calculator, organizer, planner, newspaper, etc. that everyone becomes overly dependent on them. Imagine living without one in this day and age?
From my experience of being an American born citizen, I have been taught the “American Dream” that if you work hard dreams/goals/success can be achieved. But what was my ideology of success? It was a big house, a car, the latest phone, able to care for my future family, eating lavishly, and travelling around the world. Therefore, as Marcuse described, my accumulation of material goods measured my success and I feel that this ideology is very apparent in the US.
However, I do have one critique about Marcuse’s thought of consumerism and social control. Recently, I have discovered this video that showed the Japanese practice of the Zen philosophy where people practice minimalism – the ownership of a few items and feeling content and satisfied. Therefore, how would Marcuse justify this practice into his theory? These people are still within the system – they use money to purchase those items like typical consumers and have similar needs – food, clothing, laptop, toothbrush. But what then motivates them to work without the drive of material success? Here’s the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCPBTQxsNkM
I find that the politics of conformity exert the most pressure on me when I am being presented with news material. This particularly applies to news about the presidential candidates and the presidential race, but extends to news on any topic. This is because in any given situation where I am watching or reading the news, I get sucked into the story and often forget that facts are being omitted from the story for journalistic purposes, for the purpose of me conforming with and taking a side on the matter. And my consumerist instincts come into play when I read the details of a story- what clothes was/is she wearing, what car was he driving, what new group of people did he grossly and unjustly insult. I find myself taking the position of the writer or newscaster rather than thinking for myself, just like a consumer would. And in news that isn’t political, I find myself being sucked in by products that may be casually mentioned, for example, “The perpetrator’s locked iPhone 5” or “Kim Kardashian’s Christian Dior handbag”. Phrases like these are almost like subliminal advertising, and they are catnip to me. I immediately start thinking that I now need an iPhone 5 or Kim’s spiffy Christian Dior handbag. I don’t feel that direct advertising exerts the politics of conformity to be a consumer like everyone else because I know I am either being lied to or the creators of the advertisement are trying to have me, or both. It’s easier to remember to think for myself. But with the news, I get almost enchanted or sucked in by the story, and forget that those words, too, are being used to try and control me and make me conform. I forget that our sources of news are inherently biased and buy in, just like everybody else. It’s not that advertising doesn’t have a pull on me towards conformity, because the clever ways certain producers advertise their products certainly penetrate my carefully guarded mind and compels me to go out and buy the latest product I don’t need or want but have been tricked into thinking that I both need and must have. It’s just that, as far as political ads go, I don’t find pictoral representations to have much substance, and I find most TV ads to be nothing more than frivolous attacks on the other competing candidate. Therefore, I don’t feel these types of ads exert a pull towards political compliance the same way a news story about the same politician would, because in that case, I am, quite frankly, taken along for the ride.
In terms of politics and culture in present time, Marcuse speaks about the fact that people are made to believe that they live in a democratic world but in reality it is seen as totalitarianism. When it comes to politics, people are made to believe certain things by politicians, such as them wanting to fix things to make social conditions better for the people, but in reality, it is the complete opposite because laws are made to restrain the people from doing certain things and acting in a certain manner. In terms of culture, we are now in a phase where social media has became a platform to speak our minds but at the same time it is a way to control people through the notion of false needs. Through advertisements, the notion of false needs comes to play because the purpose of ads is to make people believe that they need something. For example, when it comes to Apple products, which comes out every couple of months, people feel that they need to have the latest model and not thinking about the fact that they don’t really need it. Technology has become totalitarian in a sense that it makes people believe that they cannot go about their daily lives without using some sort of technology.
In the past, the purpose of social media outlets, such as Myspace and Facebook, were to stimulate communication between individuals that were once classmates or coworkers. It was seen as a leisure activity that not all people participated in, or at least were not expected to participate in. In present time, with the rise of technology and the creation of other media sites, such as Instagram and Twitter, more and more people are expected to participate. Marcuse poses the argument that technology has the power to be truly totalitarian. Although he is overwhelmingly negative with his critiques on a technological society, this argument is completely valid, particularly in terms of today’s society. Because social media is no longer a leisure activity, it is easy to see the dominating effects these major corporations have had on individuals around the world. Because so many individuals feel compelled to jump on the social media band wagon, Marcuse’s argument that technology is totalitarian is quite present. Gone are the days of face to face communication, now we are constantly compelled to be immersed in our personal handheld computers we call iPhones and Galaxies. Our constant disconnect from our surroundings has prohibited us to think for ourselves; we have essentially formed a general way of thinking in which we all have the same minimalistic values: how many followers/friends we have on Facebook, Twitter, etc., how many likes can one get on a picture of their food?, what’s the fastest way to obtain a Kardashian butt?, etc. etc. This has become our culture and it is not only a terrifying thing to acknowledge, but a hard thing to convince people to snap out of.
In this new era a lot of us are comfortable with mediocrity. Marcuse’s argument challenges us to think outside the box and not settle for such. We have now arrived at a point in society where instant gratification is the ideal thing and with this we find ourselves not critiquing, comparing, analyzing or even researching information, we just simply accept what we read and not offer a challenging thought or feedback. Looking at the current presidential race it is laced with mediocrity, the public is being sold short of a quality of policies that will impact in our lives and some very important policy implications that we are yearning for. For most of the debates the conversations are so empty, empty in the sense that there is no substance in response to the questions put before the candidates, empty in the sense that we pick and choose what questions we ask specific candidates. It appears that we are advancing but it is quite visible that we are also becoming paralyzed. We are sole bent on incorporating so much technological aspects into our everyday life that we have form this sense of dependency. For Marcuse himself he would find this dependency on technology as a cop-out or an excuse for not allowing ourselves to think outside the box. “Perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one’s own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior.” It is this self-determination” we as a society needs to establish and practices that would allow individuals to cause a shift in the ways we think and behave.
It is difficult to read Marcuse and not think of the “what ifs?” What if we encourage a society of critical thinkers? What if we slow down the pace at which we are advancing in technology? What if we place more emphasis on the helping professions and not on consumerism? I mean all is well when it’s all said and done but what quality of life have we left individuals to believe what life is? Our educational system is failing us because we are advertising and promoting more schools that are interesting in making money than actually educating their students. We are perpetuating this idea that we need all this advance technology for our protection and enhanced communication, when in fact this advancement is just another tool to funnel money into capitalist hands. We look down on those who make it their purpose to help others but glorify those who claim they can make us more money. Marcuse’s understanding of the role that consumerism plays in capitalism is profound “Marcuse thus perceived that the unparalleled affluence of the consumer society and the apparatus of planning and management in advanced capitalism had produce new forms of social administration and a “society without opposition” that threatened individuality and that closed off possibilities of radical social change.” And it is this opposition that is imperative that we encourage. It is this opposition that would set us apart from the others. If Marcuse were to be alive today in this era his level of critique would be so intense others would be highly offended.
Marcuse’s idea of the One-Dimensional Man are relative to the idea Thomas Friedman constructs of “The Golden Straightjacket” but on a far more individual scale. Friedman explains the straightjacket as a basis of conformity for every nation in the world to be forced into. Each nation needs to conform to the standards set by a select few of the key capitalist nations. Eventually forcing all nations to participate in the capitalism they all use to fund their own economies, forcing global economies to grow but also destroy any independent nations that could’ve been thriving without capitalism, or participation in the global sphere. Marcuse also sees that kind of assimilation for man through capitalism, essentially enslaving the people into capitalist society with their own agreements to use technology and participate in the growth of technology.
Although technology has become all encompassing and unavoidable as Marcuse identifies would be the eventual outcome of technological advances. Marcuse at his time didn’t have an opportunity to see the social networking and social ideals that can occur through technology and social media. Cultures of all different ways have an opportunity to thrive and connect via the internet, conforming only in the sense of its active use but not in the content shared.
This presidential election shows the mindset of others and how one person was able to bring it out. Before these people most likely felt the same way but now they have a leader whose basically telling them their thoughts are okay so you can come out of hiding. Society seeks approval and alot of people wait until they get that approval before they do any actions. Instead of thinking for themselves, alot of people feel they should belong to something. Alot of times I’ve noticed that some people won’t disagree with something unless someone else speaks up or vice versa. No one wants to be the odd man out, and sadly alot of people are taking on this thinking.
The rise of social media is allowing conformity to continue. I’ll take the train and something will happen and you hear someone say I’m putting this on snap chat or I’m putting this on Instagram. Is it really that important for everyone to know what you’re doing every second of the day. Social media had made it so that people live their lives on likes or views. People will delete a picture because it doesn’t have enough likes. Obviously you liked your picture that’s why you posted it but because only four people liked it you’re going to delete it. The evolution of social media has come a long and technology has helped it along. These phones are designed to keep people glued to them. The cameras are constantly changing so they can be better, my phone has a selfie mode. A better camera will mean that you will want to take a nice new picture or just scroll the internet or whichever social media site for hours at a time, couldn’t do that with a flip phone.
Even at events instead of people enjoying themselves they are too busy focusing on recording or take a bunch of pictures. I went to an event where they had rules where you couldn’t record or take pictures so that people could actually enjoy themselves instead of being concerned about what’s going on Instagram. Conformity exerts pressure on me because if you have a varying opinion peoole make it seem like it’s wrong. Just because you don’t feel the same as someone else or think the same ideas doesn’t take away from your intelligence or validity.
In current society, simplicity is desired in all aspects of life. People prefer easiness and some despise coming across complexities. Understanding an idea or concept in it’s simplest form is what the majority is use to. Simplicity feels good. Complexity does not. It requires a critically conscious mind which is developed through knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, most of our society lacks the knowledge and ability to critically think due to many factors. All of us have been told what to do throughout our lives. We have been conditioned to obey rules and regulations and answer to a person/s without questioning what we do and why we do it. As a person becomes more knowledgeable and experienced, some do begin to question the norms and others go with the flow because they’re conditioned to a point of acceptance of an authoritarian style of life. We can draw on Donald Trump and his authoritarian appeal to middle class white people who lack the knowledge and ability to think at a high level. When you lack the ability to think for yourself, what choice do you have other than someone telling you what to do?
They will believe what the majority believes; what the media portrays and not challenge the established frameworks that are available. Not limited to them either, but the inability to understand complex ideas has limited society’s potential growth of creativity. The technological apparatus can also be a distraction to exploring alternatives to established frameworks. Even uses of technology are foreign to some because of the thoughts of using something in a certain way have never occurred. For example the many uses of social media, or even an iPhone or any device. They’re many features to these devices, but some may only know of a few features due to not exploring what the device can fully do besides the basics of what it is advertised for. Unless someone tells you what the device can do, you won’t know or try to find out. People get creative with the uses of things.
Marcuse argued that consumerism is a form of social control, which I think the social control have made people became a victim of consumerism, which means people have the desire to buy products, especially new products, luxury products, that they even don’t know the reason behind it why they desire to buy such products. Many of my friends, they save their salaries of 2 to 3 month in order to buy the new season products, clothing, shoes and bags with fancy brands, such as Burberry, LV Channel and so on. In order to save the money, they didn’t quite money on other things, such on food, which I think it is ridiculous. And they only tell me, it’s important to follow the trend of fashion, or they feel extremely good to wear such products on. Even though I won’t spend all my money to buy such fancy products, but my mom always to complained me about buying so many clothing, pairs of shoes, and so on. On the other hands, I think its fine to buy as many as things as long I can’t afford it, because I always think the new products always better. After I read Marcuse, I found it both my friends and I are the victim of consumerism, which buying the things that we think we need to due to the “advanced industrial society” created the “false needs” on us. We are all affected by the mass media, advising, and the celebrities on TV and so on. New products have become our idols, which make us forget what our actually needs.
Maybe it’s normal that we are not realizing that we are all the victims of consumerism, because the system we live claim to be democratic, we believed that we have freedom, to buy whatever we want and to control of our money. However, Marcuse states that the “society system is actually authoritarian, given how the masses are continually dictated to by powerful individuals, whose social positions permit them to shape our general perceptions of freedom; we are presented with choices where we are essentially encouraged to “buy” our happiness. The mass media, the advertising give us the perceptions about what are good or what tare bad or tell us what to do, that encourage people to follow. In term of “victim of consumerism”, we can lose freedom by work more hours in order to buy products, which imply we are under the system of authoritarian. Indeed, we do live in the society, that who have the power or authority, whom shape our general perceptions of freedom or tell us what to do.
Technology is not used for beneficial purposes. The Increase dynamic advance in technology benefits the rich not the working class people. Technology is used to exploit us and its purpose is to maximize profits for the wealth. Marcuse sheds light on this idea, that technology dominates us. Cuny online classes are designed to save money, not because it’s helpful for us. Also some people who are hired for a company and work at home, they find themselves in a cycle where the job never ends. So technology does not benefit people, it’s not emancipation. It’s a source of ongoing cycle of exploitation. We work consistently to consume more and respond to these “false needs”.
Politics reinforces creates these needs and we have to satisfy them by consuming more. An example would be of President Bush gearing us to shop after 9/11. So in working so much we have no space for critical thought and we get absorbed into a system of ongoing consuming. President Bush enforces this notion of responding to false needs, he wants us to have no critical thought of our own and be absorbed into this constant consuming in order to increase profit for the economy. As Marcuse suggests because of technology is authoritarian and dominating, it does not allow us to find our self realization.
The presidential election is also the same thing, because people are content as long as they have a strong authoritarian system. They conform their behaviors to these disciplinary apparatuses (the president). We do not question anything, like we used to which was presumed to be rational thinking, especially during the enlightenment. That doesn’t exist anymore because we’re so instinct with our work and following the direction of authoritarian presidents, that we no longer can think for ourselves. So it doesn’t matter which president we have, either way will have that guy to tell us what to do and therefore we don’t question anything from it. That’s how we fall into this robotic unnatural system of obeying these rules of politicians.
To open up a business you no longer need to pay for marketing if you have a good fan base on social media, it’s easy and free to advertise. Were in an age where were instinct with technology and we are constantly being exposed with advertisements to buy the latest iphone or shoes. We get absorbed and convinced into buying things we don’t need, because media outlets have a platform to persuade us to do so. As Marcuse suggested we have to satisfy these needs that the system itself creates and technology has only accelerated this. Instead of benefiting us in any way technology exploits us.
Both Marcus and postman suggest that technology has a huge impact in our culture. Postman argues whether this form is through technology or other printed sources, either way not influence the ideas being expressed, ways of thinking and outlooks. Similarly Marcuse also think technology influences our thinking, he says that technology makes us think in a one dimensional form, without any critical thinking only in the ” technological rationalization ” form. We only take the ideas that are given and don’t question it So Technology dominates us. Mcluhan also thinks the influence of media shapes us and our ideas.
In One- Dimensional man Marcuse speaks of this concept of consumerism and false needs. This is where we think we need something that’s going to make us happy and in reality we really don’t need it. I find that society is so caught with things they don’t need that they fail to realize some of the more important things that could change their lives. I always wondered why you hear about something on the news that’s so life threatening then all of a sudden its gone and the news is back to normal again. Media rather have people watching unnecessary things on T.V. or buy unnecessary things. But this gives people the feeling of great satisfaction that they can just go out and buy something and make them feel okay just for a little while, rather then come to their senses about whats going on in the world around them. People really believe that money can buy your happiness. Meaning things can make you happy and yes this is true but only for a little while. Then what happens once everything is brought. Capitalism has a great way of marketing these false needs through ads, commercials etc. A great quote here was “advanced industrial society” created “false needs,” which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. These are different from “true needs” that individuals need to maintain satisfaction.” People need to understand that there are true needs and false ones. True needs are the things you really need. False needs are the needs that you give into just to make you happy for the time being. Don’t get me started with people and the things they buy like the news phone or car. People are selling their souls to things. I’m so happy, I may have been tricked before but I now know a lot better.
Marcuse really focuses on the idea of consumerism and how it negatively impacts society because it forces the mind into this state of oblivion in regards to anything that is even remotely important. By constantly having things be shown to you in a manner that creates a false need there is a never a chance for a person to actually develop their thoughts about deeper issues. Magazines, and commercials constantly target people with ways to “become a better you”, and society is so focused on this idea of perfecting their individual self to the standard that is shown to them that no one seems to focus on the big picture- on things that would truly change their way of life and therefore alter their individual perspectives as well. The false needs create this feeling of satisfaction that can only last so long because at the end of the day whatever was attained was never truly necessary. This becomes an endless loop in which a person continually focuses on things that are almost within their reach but not quite, thinking that this item will help them put together the missing pieces of their “self”. With advertising becoming such a prominent aspect of daily life in the 21st century it becomes nearly impossible not to identify one’s self through materialistic means. Constantly satisfying false needs but never quite finding the perfect item, simply because that item does not really exist.
When President Bush sent everyone to go shopping in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is a perfect example of how this works. By sending people to go shopping President Bush was attempting to mask a very real issue, and the pain and coping necessary (what in this case can be thought of as true need), by sending people to satisfy their false needs. Consumerism would help keep everything as financially stable as possible while simultaneously having the people focused on more simple and unimportant things than what just occurred. More so, it would help create this feeling of happiness and satisfaction that had come to be associated with false needs, instead of feeling devastated and terrified for what had just occurred.
Marcuse mentions how technology removes the dignity of the individuals, and one of the methods include sublimating him into a crowd. He was critical of the crowd, which reduces the individual to a “standardized subject of brute self preservation.” His criticism can be compared to Durkehim’s theory of “Collective Consciousness”, however in this case, the technology/media acts as the collective consciousness. Because technology is a “social process”, for Marcuse, in which men are inseparable involved, every individual is critical of one another and looking for individuals who act outside the “social norm”. And therefore comes the conflicting “individualistic rationality” and “technological rationality”.
As for the case of Bush encouraging the American audience to continue shopping, Marcuse’s argument can also be applied. Many perceive America as democratic, but in actuality it may seem more authoritarian. The mass audience is governed by powerful individuals, and because of their position, they easily manipulate our general perceptions of freedom. In cases where many think they have the power to buy anything in the market, they are in fact encouraged to buy and forget they have a stronger choice to reject. This creates an irrational thinking that consumerism is the path to happiness, however in order to be a consumer, one also has to be a worker. This narrow-minded thinking allows the individual to neglect all outside factors, current events, and environmental factors.
In one-dimensional man, Marcuse strongly critiques consumerism. He argues that consumerism is a means of social control, which produces conformity in what people desire and think. Marcuse explains that the structure we live in might have the title of a democracy but in truth authoritarian. He claims this because of how the people are always easily shaped by those in power. Capitalism uses advertising, mass media and the entertainment industry to create a society of one-dimensional people that have the false need to buy unnecessary things. Marcuse explains that we have been tricked by contemporary modes of thought to create more false needs rather than have true needs or needs that we need to sustain contentment.
Today we are driven by our need to consume. Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” People spend so much time and money on buying expensive bags, cars and watches as well as getting the newest version of all apple products. In reality, no one really needs the newest most expensive iPhone, when his or her old one works just as well. But it’s the effects of consumerism and big corporations trying to conform us. We are constantly being shown advertisements everywhere we turn. Consumerism encourages the idea that happiness can be bought, which is very dangerous.
When reading Marcuse’s work what crosses my mind is the aspiration to acquire a nine to five and for majority of the population to consider that an achievement. We are trapped in this systematic ideology that considers those with multiple task at hand successful and those who are less restricted as careless. We are no longer measured by our beliefs but by our commodities. We limit ourselves to those who we can provide something to us, even if its just cognitive. Consumerism is a form of social control because there is a belief that the more you work the more you can acquire, when in reality its the more you want to purchase. Why is it that we work to buy a home but spend most of the time at the job which pays for the home we are barely in. Being able to relax at an older age isn’t the goal but somehow those with a higher social status have managed to sell that dream of relaxation during old age as long as you bust your life working. Its true, capitalism is able to generate mass acceptance of idiocy. We are willing to work our whole lives to purchase items, with the ideology that we can buy our happiness. We even put up with the most irritating jobs because hey, 45 years from now your social security will kick in. We are blinded by these supposedly benefits and lose ourselves in the process of being successful. We measure ourselves and those around us by what they posses.
Why is an ignorant authoritarian guy in a taupe so popular amongst an individualistic society? Maybe because that whole idea of being an individual is a false perception of freedom fed to us to have us believe that we chose the life we live. Not taken into account the rigid education system, the disproportion of colored bodies in prisons and the limitations faced by millions because of their appearance. We are free because we can acquire whatever we want if we work long and good enough for it. Donald Trump is saying what many have thought for years. Blacks are criminals, Mexicans are Rapist, Muslims are terrorist, however if your neighbor happens to be a wealthy Mexican American who has the latest BMW, they are the exception. We are not measured by our believes but by what we acquire. Individuals identify themselves with their image. That same Mexican family might be at a Trump rally. Social positions shape our general perceptions. One of the many arguments used by Trump supporters is that he’s a business man, he knows economics, even if its only beneficial to whites. People are one-dimentional we are unable to think for ourselves, we need someone to dictate or make our decisions daily without even realizing it. We might not know what we want for lunch and happen to see a billboard of chipotle, later on that day you just have to have chipotle. These subliminal messages have helped us become one dimentional. A lot of decisions are being made for us, without us realizing and when it’s time for us to make our own decision we become fixated. So when someone viewed with authority claims something they posses a certain power that makes people want to follow their beliefs.
Taking a look at current times, no matter where we are technology is always in the palm of our hands and we are excluding people from our lives because technology is all we need. Marcuse explains how we should look at the two different dimensions, which are socialization and culture. In current times everyone is living by socialization and what is believed to be needed to live a worthy life compared to things that actually matter and how this view can make a change. Before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and lately even Amazon echo existed we sat down with our family and friends to share a meal, important news, discuss ones day, or even watch some television while still being involved in current events of not only the world but the closest people to us. Now we don’t even have to go to a supermarket to buy groceries because we can order them online and get them delivered. We don’t have to sit with friends and family because we know everything of everyone else’s life by social media. The worst part to this is that there is no privacy because people think that social media accounts define what their lives really are like. Do you spend more time filtering an image and then making sure it’s the best pose for your profile to show the world what you’re doing or are you actually enjoying that moment?
We are living in a society where consumerism is the biggest part of many people’s lives. Parents are giving toddlers their phones, their tablets as long as the child stays quite or better yet, they don’t stand in their way of going about their day. If this starts at such a young age, what can we really expect our world to become? Do you really need a new phone every time it comes out, let alone is it needed to start a waiting list just for a new item just for the need of feeling satisfied with yourself and make you feel better than the rest? These are things that no one wants to think about because we all know the answers I just don’t believe we actually want to acknowledge the mistake we are living in. This is all following a psychological process of trying to fit in and doing whatever is necessary in order for this to happen. But you end up losing your true person, while working all the hours of the day, everyday of the week just to be able to afford that new gadget that will set you part from everyone else which is just one more “false need” that we end up buying into.
Marcuse has a strong critique of consumerism, which he argues represents a form of social control. which I completely agree with, Marcuse suggest that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian. “We are presented with choices where we are essentially encouraged to “buy” our happiness. Consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs. Marcuse is completely right with this statement specially here in America where many people are working more then 40/hrs a week and something working double that time, many because they have no choice and need to support a family but others do it because they feel like they need to stay on top of the latest new Item because they do not want to feel “left out.” I believe America has become a society that is driven by material good. Many people have “true needs” while others create “false needs.” Technology has to do a lot with this because everyone wants the new iPhone that comes out almost every year. Everything work around technology it has taken over our society. You go to a market and people prefer to do self checkout and deal with a computer then have to “deal” with a person. Politics is run by the media and the elections of 2016 have become a reality tv show, where they prefer to see what new “Donal Trump” is going to say instead of focusing on the real matters. The elections have become a joke where you go on Facebook, Instagram or twitter and that is all they talk about, but we cannot get away from it. I could only imagine what is going to be like in the next 10 or 20 years.
Marcuse‘s One Dimensional Man emphasis on freedom and liberation of “one dimensionality” of massive consumption are still very prevalent today. Following the footsteps of Marx, Marcuse is also concerned about economic exploitation. Our mind, ideology and consciousness of human mind are the product of economic life. Previously, Marx attempted to explain that economic power creates tension. In fact, Marx was actively supporting the working class to carry out revolution to topple capitalism and to bring in socio-economic change. However, Marcuse argues that others do not become Marxists as he would add that “they’ve been indoctrinated and therefore cannot make their own decision”. Instead, Marcuse states that “[t]he products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood” (11). “If the individuals are satisfied to the point of happiness with the goods and services handed down to them by the administration, why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods and services?”(50). Moreover, Marcuse has strongly critiqued over the concept “consumerism” of which it is used as a social control. Accordingly, false needs are so pervasive that most people are unaware of the situation that they keep on wanting things that are not necessary. For example, many of us today would more likely to think about how to consume branded luxury goods such as Louis Vuitton, Rolls-Royce and so forth instead of finding ways to liberate ourselves from being exploited. Basically, Marcuse explains that the drastic societal transformation would be very hard to implement in today’s capitalistic and democratic society due to such false needs barriers.
In addition, Marcuse is very insightful about the impact of technology on our society. For instance, he points out that how the State, powerful elites, capitalist class are using “technological apparatus” to control people’s lives. As a result, such tactics has created a new form of “totalitarianism” where a modern man turns into one-dimensional. In effect, people are massively controlled and manipulated by technology. Even our inner freedom or privacy has been intruded and altered by technology reality. Tied back to today’s politics, even though US claimed to live in a democratic society, the system here is actually more authoritarian especially after the attacks of 9/11. There were histories where we had seen the use of military force against workers and civil right activists.
Overall, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man tells us that we live in a true limited society of which we do not have much chance for the possibility of any one person or group effecting constructive change. The idea is that Marcuse makes attempt to explain the loss of free enterprise and the consolidated control of the production “apparatus” that will possibly render individual autonomy. As the workers become integrated into the process of production, they have tendency to lessen their consciousness such as diminishing their ability to think and their sentiments to articulate alternatives means.
While reading this text I thought about the presidential election and how the media heavily influences it. In this present time, the media has been able to take over every part of our lives. Since everything is media connected, it is very hard for anyone to disconnect. This then becomes even harder when such important things, like the presidential election, is so media based. Even though it is great that we are constantly informed about what is going on because of how fast technology works, the downside is that it then turns the presidential election into a reality show. It makes it as if what is more important is what candidate is more “important” on social media as apposed to caring about what the candidates actually have to say. This reading helps me reflect on the toll that social media has taken on us being that when it comes to important issues, such as the election, things are very biased since a lot has to do with favoritism and who is more popular. The media can be very beneficial, but it can easily be used in negative ways.
Marcuse is making a very valid point about how much we all rely on technology nowadays. There is a huge rise in consumerism and social media has a huge impact on all of our lives today more than ever. Everyone is into getting the latest iPhones’, tablets, and computers. No one even watches TV anymore. Everyone uses they’re phones to get news about what is going on in the world. People go crazy to get new phones when they release in stores, they literally “camp” outside for hours to purchase these phones (which I find quite ridiculous). Its not only phones, this also goes for new sneakers that come out, clothing, and etc. I have read some crazy stories about how people beat each other up for these materialistic things, but for what? When I go on the train and look around, I see mostly everyone with their heads down looking at their cellphones. Everyone is into having all these materialistic things as if they are trying to prove a point to everyone in the world. I agree with what Marcuse states here, Marcuse argues that “advanced industrial society” created “false needs,” which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. These are different from “true needs” that individuals need to maintain satisfaction. I totally agree that today everyone is like programmed to believe that they need all these things, but in reality none of it is really important.
Herbert Marcuse is basically explaining the psychological destruction of humans because of how much we rely on technology. Which makes us vulnerable to manipulation, oppression and pretty much all sorts of misery one can ” “subliminally” impose on us. How does that happen? In philosophy there is a discussion about the extended mind and how we have become acquainted with non existing things this can be bad for many reasons such as the cases that Herbert Marcuse argues. Being too acquainted with no existing things confuses people about what’s really important which is what I’m going to also address. In some cases many people would literally lose they’re minds if they lost they’re cell phones because the phone is they’re mind. We have extended our minds to it by giving the device features in the same ways that the mind works and we depend on that gracefully as it takes away the important aspects of a person.
There is lots of room for this argument even down to the “Voluntary Motherhood” movement in the late nineteenth century. Moving forward an example of a brain like feature is memory ! We can store all the data that that we do not wish to receive immediately into our brains and just simply store it into our phones such as phone numbers, notes, calculations, private informtion ranging from personal identification to social and economical participations etc.. But how much of that does the person remember ? How many phones numbers ?. We can all agree that this is the same exact reason why techonology is useful and definitely serves a purpose but the problem lies in the acquaintance to the object and how that acquaintance is being used to subject us to conform and lose psychological connectivity with the world. We have all seen someone drop or lose they’re phone’s and fall into a depressive state that shapes they’re day and it’s because how much we depend on that technology. It’s to the point where that object is more valuable then the person standing next to you. In Dec 2012 a man was pushed into the subway and everyone just stood by “taking pictures” he tried to climb back up but no one helped, he was released from existence about 24 seconds after he fell into the tracks they called it “paralysis”. But if someone loses they’re phone they’d take a journey to the center of the world smh! . People have no clue that so much control over technology is subconsciously controlling us making us consistently consume, and manipulate it, use it till it doesn’t work anymore it never has time to it’s self an object, a commodity just as capitalist look at workers.
Continued.
We learn to let ourselves be controlled by practicing our control over things which teaches us the concepts of conformity , what ever we want our phones, computers, or what ever kind of technology to do, it does it! without abnegation and we conceptualize that subconsciously especially if that is practiced all the time. The brain still functions and adjust to information whether you are aware of it or not like an instinct some people fall victim to it.
Link to the story about the guy who fell in the tracks as everyone stood by and watched: https://youtu.be/MJnwP9jjgic
Marcuse goes on to talk about the rise of consumerism and the large influence the media has on our lives. As soon as we decide to turn on any source of media whether it be the television, radio or watching a video on youtube we are tossed with hundreds of ads and commercials that sell a product to us. A product that becomes a necessity in which social approval comes along with it. Once we attain that item or object we become part of the “crowd”. It’s in this “crowd” where our form of communication to the world is expressed through self-interest. Take for example the hundreds of people that wait so patiently outside of the apple store in hopes to own the latest iPhone. I’m shocked by the sacrifice these people make, the arrangements they set up to ensure a secure position on that line, without a 100% guarantee that they’ll walk out of that store with a new iPhone. The apple company gives it’s consumers just enough to keep them satisfied for a year, by the time that year is up they have already come up with a new feature that will keep the loyal apple customer returning for some more. Without being consciously aware of it we are enslaved beings in a never ending consuming world.
The way in which the media plays a significant role in our everyday lives is by exposing us to the “public opinion”. Every now and then I find articles on popular news/media websites that demonstrate a strong standpoint (opinion) on a specific topic. I feel that authors of articles that express strong opinions have the intention to get readers to agree with what they’re saying. All news and media outlets should be able to deliver information from a neutral point of view where readers are allowed to critically think, and make up their own opinions or biases.
The presidential election has gotten a lot of attention throughout the past few months. I think the media has made this election to be more of a popularity contest. The media doesn’t focus on the real issues that are affecting the American people. Marcuse work reflects on the presidential elections because os his idea of consumerism. Marcuse “Consumerism represents a form of social control”. Marcuse also mentions although “our system is viewed as democratic, it is often authoritarian, and how the masses are often dictated by powerful individuals. I agree with this concept because what Marcuse is talking about relates a lot to what Senator Bernie Sanders is about. The platform that Bernie Sanders is creating is being the voice of the 99% and go against the 1% (Big Banks, and the Elite). I think his platform is catching a lot of attention but there are times that the media go against his interest. The media doesn’t emphasize on the issues that Bernie Sanders stands for. There are times that news anchors will ask him questions in connections to what Hillary Clinton believes. What I find interesting is how the media plays a role in the presidential candidates. For example, many news outlets are often biased because they give more media attention to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. A lot of people get persuaded by what the media tells them and people base their decisions off that. I think that now I am more aware of where to read the news and now get my information on who I will be voting instead of playing into what the news outlets are telling me and giving their biased opinions.
Smart phones, tablets, and any variations of handheld electronics have basically taken over. These devices were made with the intent to help different aspects of human life easier but instead have slowly seeped in to make the person and the device inseparable. Electronics help us realize ourselves in the case of realizing our potential, with all the information and available at our fingertips it helps us to become more educated. Although, most people rather play games on their phone instead of improving themselves, myself included. However these devices also limit our abilities by making everything way too easy. Communication between people is one example. People socialize less in person and instead rather communicate through text messaging, email, or social media. I never realized this before but sometimes I feel more comfortable speaking through my phone instead of talking with people face to face. Like Marcuse said, our autonomy is erased by the identification with the apparatus.
Marcuse was very concerned with human fate with the progression in technology as many people are today. Marcuse uses the dimensional man to explain the loss society has with the birth of advanced technology in a capital state. He states that there are two different dimensions, civilization and culture, and with the toleration state the gap has closed. The closing of the gap has now disabled people to consider a world outside the social boundaries already created. He also believed that with an complete capitalist system people are less likely to rebel. I think it is interesting how heavily he includes technology in his theory. While technology has opened the world to communicate with each other it has created a separation in our current immediate communities. I see why he is concerned with society’s ability to organize for different causes. We have lost connection to our peers.
With my generation we are always looking to be entertained. The phrase “netflix and chill” is a common idea. People go work long hours then go home and want to shut off, which often means turing on a show or looking through some sort of social media. Before we had websites like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu that provide hours and hours of entertainment with a favorite show people must have been more likely to interact during their hours after work. Going out for a drink, spending time with friends and family, or anything else. We now relax through these fabricated images we see on screen and people start to live through these images. I don’t know how many times I have over heard a group of young girls trying to decide what character from ‘Sex In the City’ they are. Depending on what character a person feels they relate too, will often influence what they consume. Looking and feeling a part they have absorbed through an image on a screen. With technology we are always being fed these images on our phone, computers, TVs, adds on the street, and it affects peoples ability to think and act. Marcuse was interested in consumerism but consumerism now goes beyond material goods. People are focused on creating themselves to be a type and rarely asking themselves why they like curtain things. When you ask a person why they like a particular song often they will state how it makes them feel but they very rarely have though about the song long enough to realize what the artist is doing. They do not see that the song is another mass production of all the other songs being made with similar lyrics, beat structure, and happy major chords or sad minor cords if it is a break up song. We now like things because a type of person should like them. With technology we no longer have to think for ourselves and it has had a major affect on culture and politics. Society is a consuming machine.
Although many can characterize President Bush as an unintelligent man, he and his team were aware of what Marx calls, “false consciousness” and its existence in the United States. After the September 11th attacks, America was fragile and afraid. Terror had reached their homeland and caused many Americans to think and question if they were actually safe. However, instead of comforting its citizens, President Bush encouraged everyone to shop. His plan was to drown any doubt American citizens had and to eliminate their ability to question their safety. In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse includes Francois Perroux statement, “Duped by the nation and duped by the class, the suffering masses are everywhere involved in the harshness of conflict in which their only enemies are masters who knowingly use the mystifications of industry and power” (Marcuse 58). With the use of media, the “masters,” in this case President Bush and his American Capitalists supporters were able to distract people from the September 11th attacks and fool them into shopping to “better” the economy. To whom this worked for, President Bush appealed to their incapability to think for themselves. He encouraged them to buy their happiness with goods.
By exhorting Americans to go shopping after the attacks, President Bush was manipulating and deceiving Americans into believing it was necessary to obtain their “false needs.” Fortunately enough, we can detect how problematic President Bush’s statement was but the true problem lies in the people in society that cannot. Marcuse states, “No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning-products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression” (Marcuse 7). Marcuse convinces us that regardless of the individual’s reasons for buying his “false needs,” he is undoubtedly buying out his ability to think for himself and a slave to consumerism.
Short clip of President Bush urging people to shop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxk9PW83VCY
Unrelated to my response, but entertaining-
Animated Short Film based on One Dimensional Man – Drux Flux by Theodore Ushev:
https://www.nfb.ca/film/drux_flux_en
Our need to consume can be seen through posts on social media, especially by teenagers seeking approval. I find many social media accounts that fiend for attention through likes and comments sometimes resort to literally using money to buy followers so their numbers are high. But then I question, high follower count as opposed to whom? Who are you in competition with? Does this boost your ego: that you have 347k followers but none care for your well-being and more than half are fake accounts? I also find many people commenting “LB” (like a photo of mine and I’ll like yours back) or “First row” (like the first three photos on my Instagram feed and I’ll return the favor) on celebrity posts on Instagram. Its sole purpose is to gain more likes by trading likes with others with the same need for attention rather than actual socialization. It is an absurd and empty notion of double clicking a post.
This is an example of the mindless consumerism that people are compelled to participate in. People themselves are also becoming advertisements for companies that they wear. When consumers wear clothing that is stamped with a luxury logo, they become walking billboards, and the value of having these items spread across peers, creating a snowball effect of consumerism. It is hilarious when I see a teenager with a Gucci belt and Burberry shirts when they probably spent a whole month’s allowance and paychecks on each. And in doing so, they believe that they may be perceived better even though their Louis Vuitton wallets are empty and can’t afford a snack after school. Then they are compelled by this consumerism force to work harder for more money to buy more things rather than critically think and reflect. I note that I see younger people do this more often, as they are probably influenced as the society continues to become more one dimensional than previous generations and the advancements in technology that propelled these patterns further.
Marcuse’s ideas can also be seen through the constant releases of smartphones though each model varies minimally between each. And even if these alterations make the product less convenient for the consumer but create more profit for the capitalists, these products are still welcomed by consumers on the release date. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S6 was altered that it no longer has a removal battery or removal secure digital card; therefore consumers would be forced to shell out more money for external batteries or a model with higher memory capacity. But the inherent need and value for new, updated products in our consumerist society allows us to reason with ourselves, that we indeed need this new phone.
Looking at our present moment, what can be a better example than of hand held tabloids and smart phones we use every minute. As Marcuse states “using Lewis Mumford’s phrase, “matter-of-factness” to describe an attitude of empirical rationality that in the age of technology becomes a dominating force over man.” Just a decade ago we use to read in the paper print book, talk with each other face to face and go to a store to purchase goods. Now we including as young as toddlers are always zoomed on our hand held devices alienated from each other. Our family get together has become civil and peaceful than ever, with every other individual glued to his or her devices. When this new technology was made available for general public everyone thought this would make everyone’s life simpler. Although it has made life easier than ever, we don’t have to open our computer to check our mail and never have to worry about getting lost as long as we have our fully juiced devices on us. We have become slave of these devices. We are constantly checking it even when we don’t need to. We are constantly updating our devices to newer model even when we don’t need to. We are constantly worried about loosing it or breaking it. Our strong attachment with our hand held devices and unnecessary wants to purchase the most newest version makes total sense when I connect it to Marcuse’s quote “Through these social dominations of technology over the individual, man’s autonomy is erased—not by force, but rather by his identification with the apparatus, by a fetish of technique.”
One could argue that Donald Trump’s success in the presidential race lies in the fact that a large part of the American population have become so one dimensional that they no longer think critically nor understand their true needs because they are so focused on false needs. In a consumer society, individuals identify their lives in material goods, which keeps them in a constant mind-numbing cycle of consumerism. When an individual whose happiness and well-being is found in material goods, they don’t think critically of the social, political or cultural aspects of life. When faced with issues where one must think critically, these individuals become frustrated because they don’t understand them. Trump doesn’t ask people to think critically, in fact, he does the exact opposite. He speaks in simple terms and simple solutions. For the one dimensional man this must come as a relief, since they don’t have to think critically and can continue comfortably conforming. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks President Bush told everyone to go shopping, this way people would be focused on consuming instead of the issues that were occurring; if people aren’t thinking critically about the issues that are happening in our society, they won’t try to resist the powers that are causing them, because they won’t understand how to.
The celebrity culture of America is a perfect personification of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man. When Beyoncé’s “Formation” was released, not only the black community, but musical minds and of course the loyal “beehive” jumped on the bandwagon of praise being poured out before Beyoncé’s feet. Her surprise release garnered praise as being, “pro-black” and an incitement of political protest against those who are part of America’s inbred racist society. While the video showed images of pro-black movements, and the widely discussed provocative image of a submerged police car, the lyrics of the song have very little to do with pro-blackness and it makes me wonder, why? Why can’t the general public realize that the song has almost nothing to do with pro-black movements and more to do with promoting the Beyoncé and Jay-Z franchise?
What happened at the New Wil’ins?
Bitch I’m back, by popular demand
Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess
Paparazzi, catch my fly and my cocky fresh
I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)
I’m so possessive so I rock his Roc necklace
The beginning lines of “Formation” start with a reference that supposedly alludes to the mess that was the cleanup of Hurricane Katrina, however after the beginning line, it moves towards Beyoncé’s self-praise. The rest of the song has almost nothing to do with anything “black” except the few lines in which Beyoncé explains that she is proud of her, her husband and her daughter’s blackness and a couple of references to typically “black” tendencies, such as carrying hot sauce in their handbags and going to Red Lobster. The rest of the song however is dedicated to self-praise and a response to the most popular critiques of Beyoncé’s life; her daughters “unkempt” hair (according to media), Jay-Z’s nose and her supposed affiliation with the Illuminati.
So how has this song basically turned into the theme song of the Black Lives Matter Movement?
One-dimensional man does not know its true needs because its needs are not its own-they are administered, superimposed, and heteronomous; it is not able to resist domination, nor to act autonomously, for it identifies with public behavior and imitates and submits to the powers that be. Lacking the power of authentic self-activity, one-dimensional man submits to increasingly total domination. (Kellner, xxviii)
Rather than think for themselves and analyze the true meaning of a song in response to a very real movement against a very real suppression of black freedom, a large crowd of people have lost their individualism and reasoning to join a crowd of people who need the affirmation of the celebrity world to make their struggle real. In the meantime, they have failed to realize that this song praises a single person, and in fact does not affirm their struggle. In the days following the release of Formation, Beyonce performed at the Superbowl, showed up at a Warriors basketball game (which has more viewers on average than any other teams games) and announced an upcoming tour. These were all strategic moves by Beyoncé to maximize her own personal gains and the fact that it addresses such a hot topic only makes the song more popular, a song which talks more about Beyoncé and how much she “slays”, than fighting for the preservation of black lives. Rather than continuing the fight against excessive force against the black population, individuals are now focusing their efforts on defending Beyoncé’s actions and reputation.
Beyoncé lives in a different society than we do, regardless of the fact that she is a black woman. She can talk about rocking her Givenchy dress that the designers probably beg her to wear, while those on the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement probably could not walk into a Givenchy store without immediately being put under close supervision and suspicion. Those arguing the relevance of Formation to the Black Lives Matter Movement are prime examples of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man. They do not know their true needs because they are no longer aware of their true needs. They have been tricked into thinking it is to buy tickets to Beyoncé’s Formation tour at exorbitant prices because it has been superimposed that their lack of support shows an anti-black sentiment. They are not able to resist because the powers that rule over them do not allow for an individualistic mentality but they MUST conform in order for acceptance. In the meantime, the powers in control of public thought celebrate their continued success in light of continued ignorance and conformity, and the same celebrities continue to dominate the thoughts and wealth of this country.
Tamar,
Post going way back I know. I admire analysis. However, the difficult part is the advocating and developing the synthesis. What are the “true needs” of black people. As soon as you define people in a group, does it even make sense to speak of “true needs”?
Herbert Marcuse states, “The individuals must go on spending physical and mental energy in the struggle for existence, status, advantage. They must suffer service, and enjoy the apparatus which imposes on them this necessity…alienation is intensified as it comes transparently irrational”.
I will not pretend to completely understand Marcus’s theories on the Individual, but I believe this passage explains the sentiments felt by many in their everyday lives. Even if people cannot point to their cause of alienation, a common sense of anomie is present. This is can be witnessed in the hatred and bigotry people feel. These feelings of anger do not just develop overnight, but they are apparent during specific epochs. At the moment, our presidential election has shed light on groups of people who need a scapegoat for the fear they cannot otherwise rationally place. He goes on to say that “alienation is intensified as it becomes transparently irrational…alienation reaches the point at which even the consciousness of alienation is largely repressed: individuals identify themselves with…their image”. I wrote “Trump Syndrome?” next to this passage, questioning whether people wish to see themselves in the image of someone like Donald Trump. Although his rhetoric appeals to certain masses, his “policies” would not actually cater to them. It is the pressure to reach a certain status or advantage that convinces people that in promoting his ideology, they too can be representative of his image.
The Enemy that Marcuse speaks of, onto which the “aggressive energy can be released which cannot be channeled into the normal, daily struggle for existence”, are the demographics, the groups of people that Trump and those alike blame for the issues in our society. Immigrants for “taking over our jobs”, “thugs” for disrupting civil peace. An Enemy must be identified (even if wrongly doing so) in order to make peace and sense out of one’s own alienation.