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The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.

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
Ways
Immune
Culture
Discourse
Political
Commercial
Many
Protest
Way
Opposites
Make
Communication
Characterizes
Expression
Unification
Style
Refusal

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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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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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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 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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Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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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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Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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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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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 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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Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
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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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The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.
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Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
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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 liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
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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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