Episode #114 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is a long one. I lost my voice while recording it. Now you know I record this after I record the episode. It’s on the Great Refusal, and I hope you love the show today.

So, I was talking to my ex-wife’s grandmother the other day, my ex-grandmother-in-law I guess that makes her, basically a blood relative of mine. She was a Depression baby, lived through World War II, came of age in the world post-World War II when most of the early Frankfurt School’s doing their work. She didn’t particularly follow politics that much, which she says was common among people of her generation. And, during the 1960s, she was a stay-at-home mother of four witnessing on television a much more politically involved generation, the student protests against the Vietnam War, the excesses of capitalism, the leader of which, who she’d often see on TV, was one Herbert Marcuse. So, when I was talking to her, I asked her, “What was it like back then? Like, was the feeling in the country one of revolution? Did it feel like the foundations of capitalism were being shook and questioned and the country’s on the verge of heading in a different direction?”

And she looked at me kind of confused and said, “No, not at all.” I mean, she saw the protests on TV all the time, but the way she was educated to think of it, the consensus among all the people she knew as well, is that these were just a bunch of spoiled kids that went off to university and were ungrateful for what their country was doing for them going into Vietnam and keeping them safe. Now, I get that this is just one person’s opinion. But it’s interesting to consider the vast difference between her subjectivity, average American, what she thought was going on around her, a subjectivity she had reinforced every day when she turned on the news, and the subjectivity of one of the student protestors or the subjectivity of Herbert Marcuse. How did they view what was going on differently? How does living the Great Refusal eventually get in contact with the subjectivity of my ex-grandmother-in-law?

You know, if you came to this episode on the Great Refusal with expectations of a handbook or, you know, seven actionable tips you can apply right now and start living the Great Refusal -- living the Great Refusal just didn’t end up being that straightforward to implement, for Marcuse. People called him the guru of the new left, the leader of these student protests that were going on. He always rejected these titles. And it wasn’t because he was being humble; it’s because he didn’t see himself as a leader with a plan that he was implementing called the Great Refusal. No, he quickly realized how much of a student to the process of liberation he was. He quickly realized how much he had to learn about how these movements that emerge, movements that seek to be catalysts for revolutionary change and liberation, almost always immediately fall victim to the counter-revolutionary forces of capitalism. The individuals that make up these movements -- certainly full of energy, living every day of their lives passionate about changing things. But what Marcuse realized was that they almost always end up devolving into the very thing they’re fighting against.

What Marcuse starts to realize is that the Great Refusal, in order to be done effectively, has to be an extremely individual, personalized journey that people embark on. Because if the Great Refusal is ultimately you being a personification of radical subjectivity, well, what subjectivity are you trying to radicalize? Your own subjectivity. And it takes a deep understanding of that subjectivity to be able to change it. See, because what happens so often is, people see the way the world is; they believe with every fiber of their being that something needs to change about it. And they get so caught up looking at things out there, external to them in the world that they want to change so badly, that they forget about looking inside of them and changing themselves first. You know, there’s this attitude people often have of, “Well, if I’m the one that’s trying to live the Great Refusal here, then obviously I’m not part of the problem. Look, I’m the one that has a moral intuition that people should be liberated. I’m the one that wants to fight every day to make sure people aren’t needlessly repressed. It’s other people out there that don’t believe this stuff that need to change, not me.”

Marcuse would say to this person, you’ve already fallen into a trap of perpetuating the way that things are. Marcuse would ask, do you think there’s any baggage you’re carrying around, having been born, raised, and conditioned to think of the world in the way that you do by a system as dominating as monopoly capitalism? Do you think it’s possible that conditioning has a strong effect on the way you feel liberation should occur? What sort of problems might that lead to down the line if you find yourself a member of one of these #movements? The answers to these questions became massively important to Marcuse throughout his later work. And understanding the answers to them, as we’ll see by the end of this episode, is the biggest step you can take towards actually living the Great Refusal.

Let’s talk about some of the problems that arise when you don’t consider the fact that maybe you’re part of the problem. Take, for instance, the one-sentence, catchy way of describing the Great Refusal to all your friends: the Great Refusal is a protest against that which is. Sounds great to say, but already I’m running into a problem there if I’m being honest with myself. Protest against that which is. Well, who am I to know the contents of “that which is?” Who am I to claim to know what’s going on in the world? What I mean is this. Picture somebody else, total stranger. They’ve been raised from birth in a totalitarian society, and they’ve been given their subjectivity almost exclusively from the propaganda machine that’s in place in that society. Would you question the way that they looked at the world?

Well, if we accept the premises laid out by Marcuse so far, I might not be very different from this person. Practically my entire worldview up until the moment I heard about this stuff has been given to me by TV shows, radio programs, newspapers, books, documentaries, from products, again, from products designed not necessarily to relay to you “that which is,” but an easy-to-consume story about “that which is” that gets people coming back to consume more of it. We all know somebody that this has happened to. It happens all the time. Think of everybody that you know. You ever known somebody that puts a little bit too much stock into one of these products, thinks they have the world entirely figured out? But, regardless of how confident they are, you, as an outsider, can clearly see they’re mistaken about some stuff. And why is that? Because they’ve essentially outsourced their understanding of the world to their nightly news station or some book they’ve read or whatever it is.

Well, this is an important question to ask about ourselves. How different am I from that person? How would I know if I was similar to them? You don’t know what you don’t know. So, if I’m not constantly assessing and reassessing my subjectivity, I very well could be the same kind of person, just wrong in different areas. The reason this is so important when it comes to the Great Refusal in particular is that it’s an extremely common way that people’s revolutionary potential is silenced despite the fact they’re working really hard every day to bring about positive change. The bottom line to Marcuse is, it doesn’t matter how hard you’re working towards changing the world. If the world you’re trying to change is a fantasy world that doesn’t actually exist that was given to you by a product, you’re not going to end up changing anything, and the culture industry mass produces these kinds of people all the time.

Take an extreme example that illustrates Marcuse’s point here. Let’s say you read an obscure book that made a case for something ridiculous. Let’s say you believe that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are actually the same person, and he’s genetically engineering a fleet of dinosaurs to take over the world. Now, let’s say for the sake of the example that that’s also not true. Here’s the thing. You can believe that that’s true every second of your life. You can surround yourself with only people that believe this stuff, create a safe space for yourself, you can work your entire life trying to expose the truth, creating works of art that show people an alternative picture of reality: Bill Clinton riding on a triceratops, laughing maniacally. You can do this 16 hours a day for the rest of your life thinking that you’re making a change. But, if the world you’re trying to change doesn’t actually exist, neither does the revolutionary potential of your effort.

Well, take a less extreme example that we can all relate to. Have you ever known somebody that gets a picture of what’s going on in the world from one of these products and thinks that some bad thing is happening out there at absurd rates, but in reality it’s just their news station blowing things out of proportion, sensationalizing it so they’ll tune in the next day? How about somebody that has blinders on? Something horrible’s going on around them every day, but some product has convinced them it’s not happening frequently enough to be worth considering. This is a super easy trap to fall into that the culture industry inadvertently produces. Because the worldview they present is often so distorted and oversimplified, unless someone is constantly assessing and reassessing their subjectivity, they can easily find themselves fighting against causes to problems in the world that are not actually the true causes to the problems, putting in tons of effort, appearing to be working towards positive change, only to be confused when things just seem to be getting worse.

What a huge responsibility we all have to consider. Now, Marcuse realized this, which is one reason why, when he’s talking about “that which is,” he’s not talking about the specific events of the day and whether they did or didn’t happen the way a particular news station says they did. He’s talking about something much more foundational about the United States that leads to all the stories that end up populating the news. Marcuse would say that, if you want to know the contents of that which is, take a step back, and in very general terms just take a look at what the culture of the United States is like -- no value judgments about it yet. Just take a step back and observe what American culture is.

Marcuse says that, when you do that, what you see is an extremely aggressive culture. What you see is a culture that seems to be strangely obsessed with control and domination over the material world, over other people around them. And you can see this aggressiveness sometimes all the way down to the most micro level of individuals. What’s common language for an American to use? “I’m going to conquer the business world. I’m going to drive my competitors out of business, take market share, get that promotion over all the other people, be the boss, have the control.” Hundreds of military bases, a global military presence, trillions of dollars spent to ensure we have control over every region of the world, control over the resources of the planet to fuel capitalism. “My life as an American, the stuff I have right now? Uh-uh, not good enough. I want more. I want a fancier car, a bigger house, more land, servers to make and serve my food for me, a maid to clean my house once a week. Just can’t quite afford it yet, but one day!”

Even down to the bread and circuses level. Football is America’s game, and it’s essentially just simulated warfare by people in uniforms. We’re going to take the biggest, strongest people we can find, and we’re going to fight and try to seize territory and land. “I’m going to take 10 yards of your land.” “Uh, well, I’m going to take back 25 yards of your land!” Simulating this territorial and resource-grabbing conflict that’s been performed all throughout history. The average American loves the experience of watching that while also being plastered with one ad after another, feeding you the next 10 products you need to buy that are going to define who you are as a person.

Keep in mind, Marcuse’s talking about this in the 1970s. And this wouldn’t be him wagging his finger at the United States. “Shame on you, America!” No, at this point in the conversation, he’d probably just want to get the average person immersed in it to take a step back and just notice what’s going on. How did things get this way? Where did all of this aggression come from? Now, a person could reply back to that and say, “Well, I know where you’re going with all this, Marcuse. You’re going to say all this aggression came from Enlightenment-style thinking, aren’t you? All this came from human beings using their ability to reason to come up with all the best ways to dominate and control nature to their benefit. The advanced capitalism of the United States is the type of economic system we end up with when we engage in that process. And the aggressive culture of domination and control down to the level of the individual, this is just the type of people that system produces by default. But here’s a question for you, Marcuse. Sure, you see this aggressive attitude present in the United States, but other cultures are aggressive too. And what if this isn’t a uniquely American thing? What if this is a human thing?”

This person might say, “Look, we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. I mean, you see them in the zoo? Yeah, that’s our cousin. We structure our societies in hierarchies of dominance. There’s an alpha, and everyone’s trying to claw their way to the top to be the alpha. And, if they’re not, they’re certainly doing what every other animal out there does, controlling nature around them to their benefit. You may call it Enlightenment-style thinking because you’re a member of the Frankfurt School and you’re critiquing the Age of Reason as a period in philosophy, but all that Enlightenment-style thinking is, when you get down to it, is an extension of a Darwinian biological mode of thinking that every animal uses to control things around them and survive. This is just what we are. Look back at the history of humankind and what do you see? Near constant war, aggression, domination, control. The fate of humanity is to be biologically wired this way. At least this culture allows us to dominate on the football field or dominate with the size of our house -- satisfies this urge so that we don’t have to dominate the world around us in other ways.”

Marcuse would disagree with this take on many different levels. And I just want to pause here and say that, after this episode ends, we’re going to be beginning a series that’s probably the most requested topic in the history of this show. That is this conversation about subjectivity that was going on during the 20th century, what many claim to be the death of existentialism as having any value, the rise of structuralism, post-structuralism, on to famous postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc. Most of the good arguments for capitalism come as a response to the conclusions of postmodernism. So we have to be able to understand the full scope of their work before we get there. This has been highly requested lately. And, the point is, it’s this type of claim that Marcuse’s responding to here that’s going to be one of the key areas that these other thinkers focus on in their work. The primary question being, when it comes to our subjectivity, how much of it is determined by our biology? How much of it is conditioned into us by the society we’re born into? Is it perhaps a combination of the two, neither of the two? We’ll talk about a wide range of theories.

For this particular one that claims aggression is just what we are and is some sort of biological imperative, I think Marcuse would start to respond by saying, well, when you say, “Look back at the history of humankind and you’ll see a history of war, aggression, domination, and control,” what you’re really looking at there is not the history of humankind but a history of acts of aggression committed almost entirely by men in positions of power. Now, this is not a man-hating, woman-praising point by Marcuse. He wouldn’t be interested in piling on and blaming men for all the problems throughout history. He’s making a deeper point about where biology ends and social conditioning begins.

Quick thought experiment. Let’s say you could go back in time, take these men that are in positions of power that carried out all this aggressive, controlling behavior throughout history and transplant into their head the level of aggression and controlling behavior of the average woman that was alive during their time. Would the history of the world look any different in terms of the number of acts of aggression carried out among neighboring countries? Now, if to you the history of the world would be even a little bit less aggressive, to what can we attribute that to? Can that be explained biologically? Biologically men are just far more aggressive than women are? Let’s say you believe that. Marcuse might ask, well, is it 100% biological or does conditioning play a factor? Because if it’s purely biological, why do we have the Vikings as a culture on one hand and large communities of Jainism as a culture on the other? Why is there so much variance there? Why is there so much variance in levels of aggression even just between individual personalities? Okay, so let’s say the society you’re born into partially determines how you behave. Well, how much? Is it 50/50? Is it 80% biology, 20% conditioning? 80/20 the other way? These may seem like pointless questions to be asking for answers to, but the reason they’re so important to Marcuse is because it’s so easy to call some way that people behave a biological imperative, something that’s just part of what it is to be a human being -- sorry we can’t get rid of it -- point to history as evidence for that being the case when, in reality, it’s just a behavior that’s been socially conditioned all throughout history.

Because what exactly are you saying there? “Oh, look back at history. We’re just slightly more intelligent chimpanzees. War is what we are. Guess I’ll live out my life until we inevitably blow ourselves up one day. It’s unavoidable.” Marcuse might say, okay, well, can we explore that a bit? Might there be another explanation that doesn’t involve impending doom? Why are there so many examples of non-aggressive cultures throughout history? And this is the point. Might we and the way we structure our society be contributing to creating the kinds of people that behave in this aggressive way? Maybe there’s something we can do about it. Marcuse would probably land right around someone like Simone de Beauvoir on this issue. She would say that there are certainly biological differences between the sexes, and those differences account for a certain level of variance in behavior. But the level to which that variance is affected by biology has been massively overexaggerated throughout history, that it’s just not true that women are these beings that just by nature love to find a husband and be obedient to him, cook him food, wash his clothes, have a say but ultimately yield to the man of the house that’s in control and makes the decisions. It’s just not true that men are these beings that, by nature, are just aggressive and love to fight and constantly work to increase how much power they have in the world. No, a lot of the reason this has been so common throughout history is that we’ve socially conditioned people to behave in these ways.

Marcuse would say -- and this is not him belittling the unique struggle that women have faced throughout history. It’s obviously worthy of many discussions on its own. But Marcuse would want to point out that it’s not like men have exactly had a cakewalk over the years. I mean, yeah, they’ve been able to work. They’ve been able to vote. If they get incredibly lucky, they at least have the potential to be one of the small handful of men that actually get to control the way the world works. But what does that privilege look like for the rest of the bell curve? Working in a field 16 hours a day to barely be able to provide for your wife and kids until your body shuts down at 35? What, working in a coal mine, dying of emphysema? Fighting constantly? Working in a factory? Brutalized in the military, forced to fight, used as cannon fodder for the whims of whatever aggressive leader was in power at the time? To Marcuse, we’ve submerged men all throughout history into a world where their choice is either to fight and be aggressive or die. Should we be surprised that men living in the United States in the year 1970 tend to be aggressive?

Take men out of it as a group altogether. If someone told you a culture was erected almost exclusively by people that had this social conditioning, would you be surprised if it was an aggressive culture? Hypothetical scenario. What if something big changed? What if from birth, all of a sudden, men didn’t have to enter into this aggressive realm where they’re conditioned to fight and try to get control? Would the behavior of men change? Would culture change? Well, how could you ever run an experiment to be able to test that? We need people working. Marcuse says, we’ve already run the experiment. We’ve had a control group the entire time, women who throughout history have not had to enter into this aggressive work and political realm. In other words, this socially conditioned, passive, submissive, self-effacing woman archetype that’s existed all throughout history is a perfect case study, to Marcuse, that shows an alternative version of what it is to be a human being that isn’t concerned with control and domination. It shows what a human being looks like when we change the social conditioning and make it so that they never have to enter into this aggressive system that’s in place.

Now, somebody might hear that and say, “Oh, great. So, we should all just be these passive, submissive people? What happens when another country that isn’t so passive and submissive marches into our borders? Do we just cower at their feet?” Marcuse would say, no, it’s not that we should never be aggressive. That’s the problem in our thinking. As a society, we’re producing one-dimensional people. For example -- and, again, Marcuse’s saying this in 1970 -- a common charge you might hear from somebody that’s lived through this time period would be, “You know what? There’s no such thing as a man’s man anymore. Whatever happened to that guy? Nowadays all these guys are so sensitive with their yoga classes, quinoa salads. What happened to the guy that’ll fight you in the parking lot if you look at him the wrong way, don’t take nothing from nobody, guy that’ll shotgun a beer for breakfast, go off on the broads every now and then. Whatever happened to that guy?” Marcuse would say that if you’ve noticed a decline in the number of men that behave in that way in the last 50 years between 1970 and 2018, he’d point to that as evidence of the fact that this can’t strictly be biological. The way we structure society must have some effect on how aggressive people end up being, which would correspond with the variance we see in cultures throughout history.

See, Marcuse, being someone who’s coming at this from a dialectical, historical perspective, would acknowledge that forcing men into this aggressive realm, conditioning men to be this aggressive, definitely has helped us throughout history. But, much like we talked about on the episodes on Eros and Civilization where it only hurts us as a society to not examine cultural norms and find out whether they’re still helping us or only contributing to needless repression, does this hyper-aggressiveness still help us? Or are we, as Marcuse thinks, unknowingly creating one-dimensional, weak people? That it only hurts us as a society to structure things in terms of one group being hyper-aggressive and another group being hyper-submissive. No, what we should be aiming for is creating well-rounded people, people that know when to be aggressive and when to be defensive, people that know when to speak up and make their opinions known to everyone and when not saying anything is the wisest move; people that know how to take themselves and the things they do in life very seriously while also knowing how to not take themselves so seriously.

The subtext of this is that if we continue this paradigm of forcing men into this hyper-aggressive realm where their choice is either to get aggressive and fight or die, how much is the structure of our society contributing to producing the next Hitler or Stalin? But it goes deeper than that. How much is the structure of our society contributing to producing the next power-trip boss that makes your life at work miserable or the next aggressive security guard or law enforcement officer that wants to ruin your life, the next president of the party that you disagree with implementing their controlling and dominating policies. Maybe we aren’t destined to just fight war after war until we destroy the planet. And, by the way, the coming series on subjectivity will challenge a lot of the ideas laid out on this episode.

Now, one thing you might take from this episode so far is that this is a problem that can and does exist only in the minds of men. But what Marcuse would probably want to point out is that, generally speaking, women in the year 2017 are far more aggressive than they were in the 1800s. Now, we often see this as a great thing. I mean, of course they’re more aggressive. You can’t get much less aggressive than being forced to be dependent on a man, not able to get a job, not able to vote. But Marcuse would say, the flipside to that is that they’re more aggressive, that as women become liberated from their own historical chains, become financially independent, become politically involved, we have to consider the reality of the world that women are being liberated into. It’s still the same aggressive realm centered around domination and control, but now, instead of just having one group immersed in it, we’re all immersed in it. Now the aggressive social conditioning is affecting all of us.

To Marcuse, this is the “that which is” that we should all be opposing. The Great Refusal is a protest against this paradigm of aggression, domination, and control that we’re all immersed in. We have all learned everything that we know -- about how to navigate existence, about how to solve problems in the world, about how to bring about revolution -- from within the confines of this aggressive, controlling culture. How much do you think being brought up in that sort of world has affected you, has affected the causes you support? How many of the ways you think liberation should be brought about and justice restored in the world have been given to you by that culture of domination and control? See, it’s people not considering the answers to these questions that Marcuse thinks is responsible for movements never really doing much to affect positive change in the world and ultimately devolving into the very forces of domination that they seek to oppose, continuing this culture of domination and control, continuing this dialectical process of liberation and domination, not ending it.

People ask for real-world examples of the great refusal. Well, Marcuse’s no longer with us, but I think he’d say they’re all around us, in part at least. I think he’d view the Occupy Wall Street movement as an example of the Great Refusal. I think he’d view the Arab Spring in many ways as an example of the Great Refusal. I think he’d see the movement for LGBTQ rights as an example. Black Lives Matter would be an example. But I think he’d want all of the individuals that make up these movements to avoid making the same mistakes he saw time and time again during the movements of his time. When you’ve lived every day of your life in a world where every problem that you face your solution to it comes from buying a product that solves that problem for you, be wary of just buying a Che Guevara hat, a bullhorn from RadioShack, and some revolutionary books, and just assuming that you’re changing the world. When you’ve lived every day of your life in a culture that normalizes domination and control, be wary of turning into the very forces of domination that you claim to despise, dominating and controlling people by censoring free speech. We have a particular language and way of speaking that we’ve approved that you’re going to use, or else you’re going to become our enemy. Sounds kind of familiar to events in history. Dominating and controlling people not based on the ideas in your head, nothing to do with the content of your character, simply by virtue of your gender and the color of your skin, your ideas on this subject are instantly invalid, not even worth considering. You are not of the approved bloodline to have thoughts on this issue. Sound at all familiar to history? Dominating and controlling people -- your ideas are so challenging to my ideas that you shouldn’t even be able to speak them out loud, and if you try to I’m going to filibuster your effort the entire time and squash any sort of opposing worldview before it even gets off the ground. Sound at all familiar to tactics used throughout history?

Marcuse says verbatim that if this shifting of class consciousness away from this culture of aggression is ever going to occur, it’s going to be carried out by a new kind of human being. Human beings that embody what he calls the “new sensibility.” And he’s using the word “sensibility” there purposefully. He’s referencing a concept from Marx’s early work called the emancipation of the senses. Most orthodox Marxists during the time of Marcuse think of this concept as sort of a throw-away point in Marx’s work. But Marcuse thinks it’s actually one of the most revolutionary ideas that Marx ever talks about. See, throughout the history of philosophy there’s been this sort of Kantian notion of how our senses operate, that they’re these passive receptors. They just sort of sit there. Raw phenomena come rushing into them. And then the senses collect all this data and deliver it to some governing body up in our heads called our mind or our reason or our understanding, depending on who you’re reading. And this governing body categorizes and makes sense of all this information and creates for us the crude map of reality that we see.

Marcuse would say that this is just another example of a biased mistake from the Enlightenment where we’re desperately trying to exalt reason onto this pedestal as the ultimate source of wisdom on how to categorize reality. What we actually see when we look at the senses, Marcuse says, is that the senses are kind of like muscles. What I mean is this: you can practice visual acuity and get better at it. Say you play a video game that requires you to use your eyes to discern really fine details. When you play that game eight hours a day, your eyes get better at visually discerning fine details. What follows from that is that, when you’re away from the video game, you are seeing the world visually in a different way than somebody else that doesn’t practice those skills eight hours a day. Another example, say you were an audio engineer or a musician, and you spend a considerable amount of time every day listening for fine details in audio. When you’re not working on music, you hear the world in a different way than other people that don’t work on that skill as often as you do.

The implications of this, if you’re Marcuse, is that although we don’t really think about it, a lot of the way that our senses perceive the world has been socially conditioned into us just based on the tendencies of the culture we happen to be born into. They’ve done tons of studies on this. Like, if you’re an American and somebody blindfolded you and asked you to smell a common smell and tell them what you’re smelling, because of how visual our culture is, you are going to be far less capable of doing that than someone from, say, Turkey or Bangladesh. Now, you can go to culinary school and develop that nose-brain communication ability. But if you didn’t, just based on the culture that you happen to be born into, you are smelling the world in a different way than people from other cultures. We’ll go into more about this social conditioning of our senses in this next series on subjectivity.

But Marcuse would want to make the point of just how much being brought up in a culture of domination and control has affected the way you look at the world even down to the sensory level, that in many ways your senses have been controlled and enslaved since birth. He gives several examples of this. A macro-level one that we can all relate to is the constant pursuit of the average worker and consumer to chase the next pleasing sensory experience through buying some product. Life as a worker and consumer for the average American is a constant back and forth between, on one hand, unpleasing sensory experience while performing alienated labor and then, on the other hand, buying products and services, chasing a pleasing sensory experience to make them feel better, constantly trapped in this self-perpetuating loop of being rundown from your work then buying products that make you feel better. Bad sensory experience at work; good sensory experience from buying products. We need to emancipate our senses from this trap.

To live the Great Refusal, to be the new kind of human being that embodies the new sensibility Marcuse talks about, is not only a personal commitment to not participate in the aggressive, control-oriented way the world is. It’s also emancipating your senses from this trap and not participating in the game of affluent society. Not never buying anything -- obviously you have to survive -- but not being the kind of person that looks at who you are as a person in relation to stuff you own and consume. The American dream shouldn’t be just your own personalized version of two cars, a house, and a white picket fence; to buy a new car every three years as a reflection of your status in society; to define who you are as a person by things like, “Oh, well, I’m really into gadgets, so I stand in line and I buy a new phone every year right when they come out. That’s just who I am;” to buy a bunch of clothes or an extensive shoe collection that’s a big part of who you are; to spend tons of money on makeup and accessories because, “I’m the kind of person that’s cute. I’m the kind of person that keeps up with the standards the beauty industry lays out for me;” to not retreat into your man cave, drink away your feelings of alienation and watch football every Sunday, taking a close mental note of the products the TV tells you are going to solve that feeling of alienation you’re trying to escape.

To embody this new sensibility is not to allow products and the work you have to do to get more of those products to define who you are as a person. It’s to take a close examination of not only the products you want but why exactly it is you want them. This process should be, to Marcuse, a “reevaluation of people within their own nature, their own drives, instincts, senses, etc.” This process is “a refusal of the sense-certainty and the manufactured needs to which we have become accustomed.” This is a commitment to not constantly chase the next product and to actually do the things the ads promise us the products are going to bring us: spending more time with family, building close human relationships, creating things rather than consuming things together. This is a complete refusal to support in any way wanton acts of aggression towards people, even when technology distances you from them to make it easier to carry out.

What he’s talking about there is a new thing that started to happen that he claims in 1970 is starting to occur in the United States more and more, something he calls “technological aggression.” The idea is that technology often makes participating in an aggressive, dominating society much easier to do because it distances people from the act of aggression. An extreme example of what he’s talking about would be something like drone strikes. How much easier is it to sell to people that we’re going to go over and bomb a group of people with a considerable amount of civilian causalities if you don’t have to send your sons and daughters over to fight the war? How much easier is carrying out acts of aggression when it’s as simple as the push of a button, where you don’t have to look the people in the eye that you’re doing it to because of some sort of technology?

Now, the extreme example is drone strikes, but this applies to many aspects of society. Take the internet, for example. How easy it for somebody to post a comment and contribute to this culture of aggression? See somebody they disagree with, make some snarky, condescending comment. “Sorry to ruin your little party of bigotry and hatred here.” In other words, aggressively coming at them, asserting their intellectual dominance over them, controlling the person in whatever way they can, but not really opening up anyone’s mind to anything. How much easier is it to participate in that activity when you don’t have to look the person in the eye you’re saying that to, see how much you’re polarizing people, see how much you’re distancing people from each other? How much easier is it to sit around and use products like Facebook, products like your iPhone to appease these aggressive instincts and create the cheap illusion of you protesting “that which is,” when in reality you are as complicit in the forces of domination as someone who never opens a book in their life.

See, it’s so much easier just to do that, to mistake movement with progress. How do you convince people to make more of a sacrifice than hitting a little retweet icon as the extent to which they’re going to protest “that which is?” How do you convince people to analyze their life at this deep and honest of a level and potentially uproot the only existence they’ve ever known? Marcuse seemed optimistic about the possibility late in life. Who knows what will happen in the future?

You know, I’ve really enjoyed talking about the Frankfurt School. And I’ve been getting an email lately that’s kind of worrisome: that these critiques by the Frankfurt School are so poignant, so spot-on accurate that it seems impossible to imagine a world where this is not an absolute death nail in the coffin of capitalism; that somehow this is the end of the road when it comes to ever considering capitalism again. Well, I’m here to tell you, that’s not the case. And I hope that’s exciting for someone out there to hear. It’s a foreshadowing to the interesting conversations that are yet to come on this show. I mean, if the Frankfurt School’s the radical left, you don’t even have to go that far to the right to find somebody that would be a proponent of capitalism.

Just a quick hypothetical. You could have somebody that agrees with every critique the Frankfurt School’s made about capitalism who still holds a position like, you know, “Nothing the Frankfurt School has said in this entire series is a proof of concept for Marxism, neo-Marxism, or any sort of alternative system that they’ve offered to replace capitalism. These have just been really great critiques of what capitalism has become in the West. But what capitalism also is is an extremely efficient way of bringing about technological progress. Like Marcuse himself points out in Eros and Civilization, technology is often an instrument for liberation, the same as art, the same as a gradual shifting of class consciousness. Remember, it’s technological breakthroughs like birth control that even allow for the possibility of us reassessing cultural norms and carrying out the sexual liberation movement. It’s technology like machines and computers that place us in the unprecedented situation where people don’t necessarily need to work 40 hours a week to be able to maintain society. Once again, technology making liberation possible.”

They could say, “Marcuse’s absolutely right. We do live in an advanced version of monopoly capitalism, one where the situation is dire. We don’t have many strong tools to pull ourselves out of it. This is going to be a long, gradual shifting of class consciousness. Well, for all the Frankfurt School has said and proven so far, they have no idea whether capitalism may be the most direct route out of the problems that capitalism has produced. A shifting of class consciousness -- how long’s that going to take to go over globally? 100 years? 200 years? Can we even estimate something like that? Well, how many years are we away from capitalism fundamentally shifting what it is to be a human being to the point where this Darwinian mode of consciousness -- this existence of scarcity and controlling other people around you to your benefit -- how many years until what it is to be a human being is so far removed from that way of thinking about things that they look at our existence the same way we may look at a chimpanzee’s existence?” This person might say, “Look, technology is inexorably heading in the direction of transhumanism: cybernetic augmentation, genetic modification. CRISPR is a thing in today’s world. Like, that exists right now. Statistically speaking, what it even is to be you in our modern world is the combination of your abilities and the abilities of your phone. I mean, the fact phones are still outside of our bodies just seems kind of like a technicality at this point.”

In other words, what this person could argue is that they agree with the Frankfurt School on an economic level but disagree with them on an ethical level, that any support of any policy slowing the rate of technological development is unethical because it increases the distance in time between where we are now and where we’re going, increasing the amount of alienated labor that needs to be performed by the workers and consumers heroically bringing about this new world, falling on their sword for the good of the species. They should be proud of themselves. This person could argue that maybe Nietzsche was right all along: man is something to be surpassed. The chimpanzee to man, man shall be that to the overman. That for hundreds of years we’ve been trying to use this tremendously flawed, feeble, narrow capacity to reason to harness control over nature and come up with some system that perfectly governs the way human beings are. What if we were never going to succeed at that task? What if our job all along should have been to facilitate the next stage of our evolution, transforming into the next version of what it is to be a human being, and capitalism gets us there the quickest? Anyway, a little longer than I expected on that hypothetical, but the point is, there are a lot more angles to this discussion and a lot more exciting ideas to come.

I seem to have lost my voice doing this episode today. But I just wanted to say before we get out of here, Happy Holidays, wherever you are in the world. I hope, wherever you are, you appreciate your family. Always good to do that while they’re still around. Thank you for another year of being able to do this show. Seriously, you know, people say this show keeps getting better. Look, here’s the thing. I’m not some 60-year-old professor that’s been giving these talks my whole life. I just turned 29 years old. I just want to assure everyone, I’m going to keep grinding, keep improving making these episodes for you. I’m excited to see what kind of content I’m capable of producing 5 years from now, 10 years from now. Regardless, thank you to everyone that supports the show on Patreon and goes through the Amazon banner. Thank you to the people that are along on this journey with me. Here’s to another year of this.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.