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Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

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
Preaching
Principle
Principles
Violence
Reproduces
Institutionalized
Existing

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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 way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one project of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.
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This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.
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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 tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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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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Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
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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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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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The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
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In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.
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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.
Herbert Marcuse
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This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
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Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
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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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The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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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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Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
Herbert Marcuse