Books: One-dimensional man: chapter nine

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     greater productivity without destruction. In other words, the higher historical
     truth would pertain to the system which offers the greater chance of
     pacification.
+
+### Negative Thinking
+
+    To the degree to which the established society is irrational, the analysis in
+    terms of historical rationality introduces into the concept the negative
+    element—critique, contradiction, and transcendence.
+
+    This element cannot be assimilated with the positive. It changes the concept in
+    its entirety, in its intent and validity. Thus, in the analysis of an economy,
+    capitalist or not, which operates as an “independent” power over and above the
+    individuals, the negative features (overproduction, unemployment, insecurity,
+    waste, repression) are not comprehended as long as they appear merely as more
+    or less inevitable by-products, as “the other side” of the story of growth and
+    progress.
+
+    True, a totalitarian administration may promote the efficient exploitation of
+    resources; the nuclear-military establishment may provide millions of jobs
+    through enormous purchasing power; toil and ulcers may be the by-product of the
+    acquisition of wealth and responsibility; deadly blunders and crimes on the
+    part of the leaders may be merely the way of life. One is willing to admit
+    economic and political madness—and one buys it. But this sort of knowledge of
+    “the other side” is part and parcel of the solidification of the state of
+    affairs, of the grand unification of opposites which counteracts qualitative
+    change, because it pertains to a thoroughly hopeless or thoroughly
+    preconditioned existence that has made its home in a world where even the
+    irrational is Reason.
+
+    The tolerance of positive thinking is enforced tolerance—enforced not by any
+    terroristic agency but by the overwhelming, anonymous power and efficiency of
+    the technological society. As such it permeates the general consciousness—and
+    the consciousness of the critic. The absorption of the negative by the positive
+    is validated in the daily experience, which obfuscates the distinction between
+    rational appearance and irrational reality.
+
+    [examples follow]
+
+    These examples may illustrate the happy marriage of the positive and the
+    negative—the objective ambiguity which adheres to the data of experience. It is
+    objective ambiguity because the shift in my sensations and reflections responds
+    to the manner in which the experienced facts are actually interrelated. But
+    this interrelation, if comprehended, shatters the harmonizing consciousness and
+    its false realism. Critical thought strives to define the irrational character
+    of the established rationality (which becomes increasingly obvious) and to
+    define the tendencies which cause this rationality to generate its own
+    transformation. “Its own” because, as historical totality, it has developed
+    forces and capabilities which themselves become projects beyond the established
+    totality. They are possibilities of the advancing technological rationality
+    and, as such, they involve the whole of society. The technological
+    transformation is at the same time political transformation, but the political
+    change would turn into qualitative social change only to the degree to which it
+    would alter the direction of technical progress—that is, develop a new
+    technology. For the established technology has become an instrument of
+    destructive politics.
+
+    Such qualitative change would be transition to a higher stage of civilization
+    if technics were designed and utilized for the pacification of the struggle for
+    existence. In order to indicate the disturbing implications of this statement,
+    I submit that such a new direction of technical progress would be the
+    catastrophe of the established direction, not merely the quantitative evolution
+    of the prevailing (scientific and technological) rationality but rather its
+    catastrophic transformation, the emergence of a new idea of Reason, theoretical
+    and practical.
+
+    The new idea of Reason is expressed in Whitehead’s proposition: “The function
+    of Reason is to promote the art of life.”1 In view of this end, Reason is the
+    “direction of the attack on the environment” which derives from the “threefold
+    urge: (1) to live, (2) to live well, (3) to live better.”2
+
+Then read the rest of the whole chapter 9. It's interesting enough that deserves
+to be quoted on its entirety. It talks about the completion of the
+Technological Project. Like this:
+
+    Civilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its
+    own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and
+    transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as
+    post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality
+    of pacification, organon of the “art of life.” The function of Reason then
+    converges with the function of Art.
+
+    The Greek notion of the affinity between art and technics may serve as a
+    preliminary illustration. The artist possesses the ideas which, as final
+    causes, guide the construction of certain things—just as the engineer possesses
+    the ideas which guide, as final causes, the construction of a machine. For
+    example, the idea of an abode for human beings determines the architect’s
+    construction of a house; the idea of wholesale nuclear explosion determines the
+    construction of the apparatus which is to serve this purpose. Emphasis on the
+    essential relation between art and technics points up the specific rationality
+    of art.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the contemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small
+    areas of advanced industrial society. Their prosperity covers up the Inferno
+    inside and outside their borders; it also spreads a repressive productivity and
+    “false needs.” It is repressive precisely to the degree to which it promotes
+    the satisfaction of needs which require continuing the rat race of catching up
+    with one’s peers and with planned obsolescence, enjoying freedom from using the
+    brain, working with and for the means of destruction. The obvious comforts
+    generated by this sort of productivity, and even more, the support which it
+    gives to a system of profitable domination, facilitate its importation in less
+    advanced areas of the world where the introduction of such a system still means
+    tremendous progress in technical and human terms.
+
+    However, the close interrelation between technical and political-manipulative
+    know-how, between profitable productivity and domination, lends to the conquest
+    of scarcity the weapons for containing liberation. To a great extent, it is the
+    sheer quantity of goods, services, work, and recreation in the overdeveloped
+    countries which effectuates this containment. Consequently, qualitative change
+    seems to presuppose a quantitative change in the advanced standard of living,
+    namely, reduction of overdevelopment.
+
+    The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial areas is not a
+    suitable model of development if the aim is pacification. In view of what this
+    standard has made of Man and Nature, the question must again be asked whether
+    it is worth the sacrifices and the victims made in its defense. The question
+    has ceased to be irresponsible since the “affluent society” has become a
+    society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation, and since
+    the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of
+    toil, and the promotion of frustration.
+
+    Under these circumstances, liberation from the affluent society does not mean
+    return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the
+    contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth
+    available for distribution, and the end of permanent mobilization would reduce
+    the social need for the denial of satisfactions that are the individual’s
+    own—denials which now find their compensation in the cult of fitness, strength,
+    and regularity.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The crime is that of a society in which the growing population aggravates the
+    struggle for existence in the face of its possible alleviation. The drive for
+    more “living space” operates not only in international aggressiveness but also
+    within the nation. Here, expansion has, in all forms of teamwork, community
+    life, and fun, invaded the inner space of privacy and practically eliminated
+    the possibility of that isolation in which the individual, thrown back on
+    himself alone, can think and question and find. This sort of privacy—the sole
+    condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to
+    freedom and independence of thought—has long since become the most expensive
+    commodity, available only to the very rich (who don’t use it). In this respect,
+    too, “culture” reveals its feudal origins and limitations. It can become
+    democratic only through the abolition of mass democracy, i.e., if society has
+    succeeded in restoring the prerogatives of privacy by granting them to all and
+    protecting them for each.
+
+    [...]
+
+    To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all
+    advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment
+    would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the
+    chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of
+    himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and
+    representatives, he would have to learn his ABC’s again. But the words and
+    sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his
+    aspirations and fears.
+
+    To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people
+    can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout,
+    and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being
+    deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of
+    reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The
+    non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve
+    what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve—the
+    disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since
+    become part of socially necessary labor—necessary in the sense that without it,
+    the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of
+    psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.