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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.

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
Society
Spaces
Freedom
Internals
Free
Internal
Individual
External
Without
Solitude
Develop
Silence
Space

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Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
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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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In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.
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One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.
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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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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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Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
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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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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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However, if free choice means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.
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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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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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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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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 existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
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The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
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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.
Herbert Marcuse