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Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Herbert Marcuse

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Herbert Marcuse
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 19
Died: 1979
Died: July 29
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Berlin
Germany
Primaries
Historical
Slave
Election
Masters
Free
Doe
Abolish
Slaves

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The people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
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This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.
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Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
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The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
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Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
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The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes separation of good from evil it establishes unquestionable
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Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
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The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
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The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
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Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
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Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
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