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In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations are, at hea

In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations are, at heart, totalitarian. Totalitarianism, he argues, need not manifest as dystopian wastelands with labor camps, dictatorship, secret police, and all those other Orwellian characteristics: “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.” Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a “clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core. [0] http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-dimensional-society.html http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-dimen...

r00fus 7y ago
So I really struggle with the concept of subtle economic coercion (ie, the basis of western society) being described as "totalitarian". It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  Note that subtle != mild. If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are about it. Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Are you just using "totalitarian" as a synonym for "really bad" here, or do you have something more precise in mind?
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      "You are required to be totally compliant with what (leaders of) society demand, on pain of really bad stuff." Or: a system where [people, as distinct from bureaucracy, hostile memeplexes, corporations, etc] have virtually no authority and [bureaucracy et/vel al] wields absolute control of every aspect of the country, socially, financially and politically.
      - freeone3000 7y ago
        What is the power of a person, separate from a group? When there are three hundred million people, how much individual power can there be? Or should there be? The accumulation of power in structures is inevitable. Moreover, the fact that this is even an open debate suggests that calling the current state of affairs totalitarianism is a bit exaggerated. There are multiple groups currently vying for control of every aspect of life, with no single group having complete control, and people throw in with the one they feel closest to. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't match totalitarianism.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    All of these things still happen to LGBT people in western society.
    - mattcaldwell 7y ago
      It saddens me that this was downvoted, because it's entirely true. It doesn't just apply to LGBT people, though. There are all kinds of minority groups that are treated as second-class citizens in modern Western (and Eastern) cultures.
  - toyg 7y ago
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  I don't struggle with that concept much; literature and popular usage conditions us to certain meanings and associations of words - when I read Marcuse's book I was actually almost as surprised as you seem to be, though Marcuse goes to pains not to trivialize the situation in those places we would describe as "totalitarian" by the kind of standard outlined in 1984 or by the example of Nazi Germany. Marcuse's point stems from the concept of totality, it's like looking at totalitarianism from the other way round - to me that was extremely refreshing. Similarly, I think we've made strides in thinking about what oppression means - what allows us to say that those non-"1st-world" places are oppressive but ours are not? Is it a matter of quantity or quality? The language here is not merely hyperbolic (though this feature does remarkably well in being provocative, which is the point of activism - Marcuse was a lifelong activist), it's substantive. When you appeal to the the "basis of Western society" in your comment, it reads more like normalization - how could such a thing be totalitarian, after all, it's the basis of Western society. That's actually the point I'm making, this basis conditions us to see only the worst examples as totalitarian/oppressive/"bad". The unspoken point seems to be that because it is the basis then we can't describe it as totalitarian. To me, that's not a logical conclusion. >Marcuse’s engagement with the issue of totalitarianism relies on the understanding of the transformation of reason and for him this transformation is exemplified by the emergence of positivism as the dominant means of making sense of the world. He argues that the totalitarian character of advanced industrial society and its concomitant ‘totalitarian rationality’ (Marcuse 2001 [1961]: 52, 55) have specific, potentially devastating, consequences for the members of that society. Most important here are what Marcuse conceptualizes as ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘psycho-logical neutrality’, and ‘repressive desublimation’.[0] >In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.” [0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230250857_6 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230250857_6
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
- doesnt_know 7y ago
  Pretty ballsy to proclaim western society and economic coercion as not "legitimate oppression".
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    The USSR. East Germany. Syria. The Sudan. Pretty sure you haven't lived in any of them. If you've ever been in real oppression, you wouldn't say that western society is legitimate oppression.
    - doesnt_know 7y ago
      If you look around and see poverty and oppression in your own culture/country and your answer is "you should be grateful you're not in [worse country]", then you are part of the problem.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      Its not a competition between who is the most oppressive. Just because its worse somewhere else dosen't make those concerns invalid.
    - drugme 7y ago
      Right-wing seem to like playing this card -- "If you haven't lived in [whatever country we feel to be fundamentally opposed to 'Western' values at the moment] then you have nothing to say on the matter" -- yet I have many, many close contacts from those countries (including quite a few who have had serious run-ins with the authorities in those places), and I can't imagine of them saying that Western societies do not have "legitimate oppression". If anything what keeps coming up is that it seems strange to them that we think we're all that different from those countries (as if we're on a higher plane, basically).
      - drugme 7y ago
        Right-wing => Right-wingers
  - reallydude 7y ago
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  These words don’t need to be attached to a state. most private services, even ostensibly serving as public forums, are de facto authoritarian—the authorities just want us to like them. States with monopoly of violence have no such constraints, but we still must live by the dictates of powerful people (often with interests deeply contrary to our own) we have no access to.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Western society can be extraordinarily oppressive. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-...

r00fus 7y ago

So I really struggle with the concept of subtle economic coercion (ie, the basis of western society) being described as "totalitarian". It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.

a1369209993 7y ago
Note that subtle != mild. If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are about it. Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Are you just using "totalitarian" as a synonym for "really bad" here, or do you have something more precise in mind?
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    "You are required to be totally compliant with what (leaders of) society demand, on pain of really bad stuff." Or: a system where [people, as distinct from bureaucracy, hostile memeplexes, corporations, etc] have virtually no authority and [bureaucracy et/vel al] wields absolute control of every aspect of the country, socially, financially and politically.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      What is the power of a person, separate from a group? When there are three hundred million people, how much individual power can there be? Or should there be? The accumulation of power in structures is inevitable. Moreover, the fact that this is even an open debate suggests that calling the current state of affairs totalitarianism is a bit exaggerated. There are multiple groups currently vying for control of every aspect of life, with no single group having complete control, and people throw in with the one they feel closest to. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't match totalitarianism.
- danharaj 7y ago
  All of these things still happen to LGBT people in western society.
  - mattcaldwell 7y ago
    It saddens me that this was downvoted, because it's entirely true. It doesn't just apply to LGBT people, though. There are all kinds of minority groups that are treated as second-class citizens in modern Western (and Eastern) cultures.
- toyg 7y ago
claudiawerner 7y ago
I don't struggle with that concept much; literature and popular usage conditions us to certain meanings and associations of words - when I read Marcuse's book I was actually almost as surprised as you seem to be, though Marcuse goes to pains not to trivialize the situation in those places we would describe as "totalitarian" by the kind of standard outlined in 1984 or by the example of Nazi Germany. Marcuse's point stems from the concept of totality, it's like looking at totalitarianism from the other way round - to me that was extremely refreshing. Similarly, I think we've made strides in thinking about what oppression means - what allows us to say that those non-"1st-world" places are oppressive but ours are not? Is it a matter of quantity or quality? The language here is not merely hyperbolic (though this feature does remarkably well in being provocative, which is the point of activism - Marcuse was a lifelong activist), it's substantive. When you appeal to the the "basis of Western society" in your comment, it reads more like normalization - how could such a thing be totalitarian, after all, it's the basis of Western society. That's actually the point I'm making, this basis conditions us to see only the worst examples as totalitarian/oppressive/"bad". The unspoken point seems to be that because it is the basis then we can't describe it as totalitarian. To me, that's not a logical conclusion. >Marcuse’s engagement with the issue of totalitarianism relies on the understanding of the transformation of reason and for him this transformation is exemplified by the emergence of positivism as the dominant means of making sense of the world. He argues that the totalitarian character of advanced industrial society and its concomitant ‘totalitarian rationality’ (Marcuse 2001 [1961]: 52, 55) have specific, potentially devastating, consequences for the members of that society. Most important here are what Marcuse conceptualizes as ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘psycho-logical neutrality’, and ‘repressive desublimation’.[0] >In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.” [0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230250857_6 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230250857_6
- chrisweekly 7y ago
doesnt_know 7y ago
Pretty ballsy to proclaim western society and economic coercion as not "legitimate oppression".
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  The USSR. East Germany. Syria. The Sudan. Pretty sure you haven't lived in any of them. If you've ever been in real oppression, you wouldn't say that western society is legitimate oppression.
  - doesnt_know 7y ago
    If you look around and see poverty and oppression in your own culture/country and your answer is "you should be grateful you're not in [worse country]", then you are part of the problem.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Its not a competition between who is the most oppressive. Just because its worse somewhere else dosen't make those concerns invalid.
  - drugme 7y ago
    Right-wing seem to like playing this card -- "If you haven't lived in [whatever country we feel to be fundamentally opposed to 'Western' values at the moment] then you have nothing to say on the matter" -- yet I have many, many close contacts from those countries (including quite a few who have had serious run-ins with the authorities in those places), and I can't imagine of them saying that Western societies do not have "legitimate oppression". If anything what keeps coming up is that it seems strange to them that we think we're all that different from those countries (as if we're on a higher plane, basically).
    - drugme 7y ago
      Right-wing => Right-wingers
- reallydude 7y ago
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
These words don’t need to be attached to a state. most private services, even ostensibly serving as public forums, are de facto authoritarian—the authorities just want us to like them. States with monopoly of violence have no such constraints, but we still must live by the dictates of powerful people (often with interests deeply contrary to our own) we have no access to.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Western society can be extraordinarily oppressive. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-...