one-dimensional-man.md

From the beginning, any critical theory of society is thus confronted with the
problem of historical objectivity, a problem which arises at the two points
where the analysis implies value judgments:

1. the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to
be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is
the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical)
rejects theory itself;

2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the
amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these
possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of
these judgments, and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The
established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of
intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the
optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a
minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is
the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various
possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources,
which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?

[...]

The “possibilities” must be within the reach of the respective society; they
must be definable goals of practice. By the same token, the abstraction from
the established institutions must be expressive of an actual tendency—that is,
their transformation must be the real need of the underlying population. Social
theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the
established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to
the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by
historical practice. The theoretical concepts terminate with social change.

But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation
which seems to deprive it of its very basis. Technical progress, extended to a
whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of
power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat
or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from
toil and domination. Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing
social change—qualitative change which would establish essentially different
institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human
existence.

[...]

As a technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political
universe, the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical
project—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as
the mere stuff of domination.

As the project unfolds, it shapes the entire universe of discourse and action,
intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture,
politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or
repulses all alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system
stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of
domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality.
Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates that it has reached the stage
at which “the free society” can no longer be adequately defined in the
traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties, not
because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too
significant to be confined within the traditional forms. New modes of
realization are needed, corresponding to the new capabilities of society.

Such new modes can be indicated only in negative terms because they would
amount to the negation of the prevailing modes. Thus economic freedom would
mean freedom from the economy—from being controlled by economic forces and
relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a
living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from
politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual
freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass
communication and indoctrination, abolition of “public opinion” together with
its makers. The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of
their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their
realization. The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation
is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete
forms of the struggle for existence.

The intensity, the satisfaction and even the character of human needs, beyond
the biological level, have always been preconditioned. Whether or not the
possibility of doing or leaving, enjoying or destroying, possessing or
rejecting something is seized as a need depends on whether or not it can be
seen as desirable and necessary for the prevailing societal institutions and
interests. In this sense, human needs are historical needs and, to the extent
to which the society demands the repressive development of the individual, his
needs themselves and their claim for satisfaction are subject to overriding
critical standards.
We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced
industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its
productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to
turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which
this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind
and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable.

[...]

But in the contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the
very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to
such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction
impossible.

No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the
social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual
protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go
along” appears neurotic and impotent.

[...]

But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the
individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls
exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively
spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the
“inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension
distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an
individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public
opinion and behavior.3 The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it
designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.”

Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological
reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and
industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The
manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical
reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate
identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the
society as a whole.
Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which 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. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of
its quantitative extension.

The trend may be related to a development in scientific method: operationalism
in the physical, behaviorism in the social sciences. The common feature is a
total empiricism in the treatment of concepts; their meaning is restricted to
the representation of particular operations and behavior. The operational point
of view is well illustrated by P. W. Bridgman’s analysis of the concept of
length:5

    We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any
    and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find
    the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The
    concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is
    measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing
    more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we
    mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is
    synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society
at large:6

    To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere
    restriction of the sense in which we understand ‘concept,’ but means a
    far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer
    permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot
    give an adequate account in terms of operations.

Bridgman’s prediction has come true. The new mode of thought is today the
predominant tendency in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other fields.
Many of the most seriously troublesome concepts are being “eliminated” by
showing that no adequate account of them in terms of operations or behavior can
be given.

[...]

Outside the academic establishment, the “far-reaching change in all our habits
of thought” is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those
exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel
those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a
one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the
spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the
contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try
God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of
protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no
longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism,
its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of
its healthy diet.

[...]

Such limitation of thought is certainly not new. Ascending modern rationalism,
in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between
extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one
hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and
functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes’ ego cogitans was to leave the
“great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always
to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in
justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and
in preventing subversion.
The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior;
consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or
meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence,
not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and
behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes
the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and
aspirations.

“Progress” is not a neutral term; it moves toward specific ends, and these ends
are defined by the possibilities of ameliorating the human condition. Advanced
industrial society is approaching the stage where continued progress would
demand the radical subversion of the prevailing direction and organization of
progress. This stage would be reached when material production (including the
necessary services) becomes automated to the extent that all vital needs can be
satisfied while necessary labor time is reduced to marginal time. From this
point on, technical progress would transcend the realm of necessity, where it
served as the instrument of domination and exploitation which thereby limited
its rationality; technology would become subject to the free play of faculties
in the struggle for the pacification of nature and of society.

Such a state is envisioned in Marx’s notion of the “abolition of labor.” The
term “pacification of existence” seems better suited to designate the
historical alternative of a world which—through an international conflict which
transforms and suspends the contradictions within the established
societies—advances on the brink of a global war. “Pacification of existence”
means the development of man’s struggle with man and with nature, under
conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer
organized by vested interests in domination and scarcity—an organization which
perpetuates the destructive forms of this struggle.

Today’s fight against this historical alternative finds a firm mass basis in
the underlying population, and finds its ideology in the rigid orientation of
thought and behavior to the given universe of facts. Validated by the
accomplishments of science and technology, justified by its growing
productivity, the status quo defies all transcendence. Faced with the
possibility of pacification on the grounds of its technical and intellectual
achievements, the mature industrial society closes itself against this
alternative. Operationalism, in theory and practice, becomes the theory and
practice of containment. Underneath its obvious dynamics, this society is a
thoroughly static system of life: self-propelling in its oppressive
productivity and in its beneficial coordination. Containment of technical
progress goes hand in hand with its growth in the established direction. In
spite of the political fetters imposed by the status quo, the more technology
appears capable of creating the conditions for pacification, the more are the
minds and bodies of man organized against this alternative.

The most advanced areas of industrial society exhibit throughout these two
features: a trend toward consummation of technological rationality, and
intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions.
Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization: the irrational element
in its rationality. It is the token of its achievements. The industrial society
which makes technology and science its own is organized for the
ever-more-effective domination of man and nature, for the ever-more-effective
utilization of its resources. It becomes irrational when the success of these
efforts opens new dimensions of human realization. Organization for peace is
different from organization for war; the institutions which served the struggle
for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence. Life as an end is
qualitatively different from life as a means.

[...]

Qualitative change also involves a change in the technical basis on which this
society rests—one which sustains the economic and political institutions
through which the “second nature” of man as an aggressive object of
administration is stabilized.

[...]

To be sure, labor must precede the reduction of labor, and industrialization
must precede the development of human needs and satisfactions. But as all
freedom depends on the conquest of alien necessity, the realization of freedom
depends on the techniques of this conquest. The highest productivity of labor
can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient
industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs.

When this point is reached, domination—in the guise of affluence and
liberty—extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all
authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality
reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better
domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature,
mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of
this universe.