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This is one of the most delightfully overblown quotes of all time. But Herbert Marcuse went one better: he compared amusement parks to concentration camps.
by dash2 6y ago
This is one of the most delightfully overblown quotes of all time. But Herbert Marcuse went one better: he compared amusement parks to concentration camps.
- paganel 6y agoI still have actual regular nightmares from my school-years, even though I've just reached 40 years of age. They started when I was 20-something, and they will probably never go away. What is more interesting is that during my school years I never looked at school as an institution as being repressive or "prison-like", looks like my unconscious/subconscious/whatever there is there inside was very good at repressing that obvious fact.
- dash2 6y agoI hated school too. But what caused your nightmares? For me, it was my peers, not oppressive teachers. Most modern high school movies seem to suggest the same thing. So perhaps we should fix the quote. Schools are like prisons - where the prisoners have taken over the institution.
- claudiawerner 6y agoI don't think Marcuse should be taken lightly on this point. As a Jew during the second world war and an immigrant to the US, he worked with Adorno and others who regularly (and correctly, in my opinion) viewed the Holocaust as humanity's greatest horror and a turning point of modernity.
- dash2 6y agoMarcuse wasn't a Jew, actually. But yeah, I don't really find the analysis convincing. I mean... amusement parks have towers, and queues, and walls round the outside, like concentration camps? And they're... organized and administered? Somehow this isn't quite getting past the laugh test. (Isaiah Berlin was absolutely outraged by the Marcuse quote, incidentally.) Update: Marcuse was a Jew, actually. My bad. I'd misremembered this from Martin Jay's book.