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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.

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
Needs
Organized
Operates
Way
Interests
Manipulation
Virtue
Industrial
Economic
Technical
Interest
Tends
Society
Technological
Vested
Political
Base
Coordination
Also
Contemporary
Totalitarian

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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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Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
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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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If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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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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There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
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The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
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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 existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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